"No Smoking" for the Nation

In a gray zone between recreational consumption and drug addiction, cigarette smoking was never officially outlawed, but sporadically condemned in anti-cigarette campaigns launched by social organizations and the government in modern China. Why and how did these campaigns occur in China when no definite evidence could prove that cigarette smoking impairs health? This dissertation investigates the rhetoric, practices, and contexts of three major anti-cigarette campaigns in modern China from 1910 to 1935. Chapter One examines how EdwardThwing, an American missionary, transplanted the American anti-cigarette campaign to the Chinese context and initiated a similar campaign in Tianjin in 1910. Chapter Two explores the anti-cigarette campaign led by Wu Tingfang, a retired Qing official, and the Shanghai social elite in the active public arena in Shanghai on the eve of the Revolution in 1911. Chapters Three and Four scrutinize the anti-cigarette campaign as a part of the New Life Movement launched by Chiang Kai-shek in 1934-1935. Chapter Three examines how the central New Fife Movement designed and implemented the anti-cigarette agenda, which faced resistance within the government because cigarettes were a major source of tax income. With a local perspective, Chapter Four shows how the provincial and county governments in Zhejiang combined the central anti-cigarette agenda with the local initiative to save the rural economy and campaigned actively at the county level.