Fever Dreams: Infectious Disease, Epidemic Events, and the Making of Hong Kong

There is no surfeit of infectious disease or of epidemic events in Hong Kong’s history. Accounts of local outbreaks of malaria, tuberculosis, influenza, cholera, and typhus pepper colonial government archives and newspaper reports. Deadly outbreaks of malaria dubbed the ‘Hongkong fever’ nearly put an end to this colonial project within its first few years of existence and to survive, its administrators borrowed strategies from Britain’s other tropical colonies, implementing afforestation projects and legislating spatial segregation from the local Chinese population. As entrepôt trade grew and Britain’s anchor to the China trade was integrated into imperial networks, local epidemics in ‘insalubrious’ Hong Kong spread through those same networks and so became pandemics. Such was the case when bubonic plague broke out at the end of the nineteenth century, carried through Hong Kong’s port system. In the twentieth century, Hong Kong faced chronic trouble with infectious disease, notably chronically high rates of tuberculosis, and was associated with three global pandemics: H2N2 or the ‘Asian flu’ in 1957, H3N2 or the ‘Hong Kong flu’ in 1968, and then a novel virus, SARS, in 2003. There are many reasons for Hong Kong’s implication in these pandemics, a constellation of the territory’s geographical, climatological, political and social traits. This confluence of factors is particular to Hong Kong and its risks intensified after the 1997 reunification with the People’s Republic of China. This dissertation narrates Hong Kong’s history through five epidemic events, revealing the medical stakes of the city’s hyperconnectivity as a global hub. At the same time, the project shows that this challenging disease history has molded local society, culture, and identity. Where epidemic events make Hong Kong’s global connections all too evident, collective memory of losses and surviving epidemics is integral to Hong Kong life and history. Its lives of its people, heunggangyahn, are shaped by the chronic presence of infectious disease and their survival of crises—medical, economic, and political—helps shape this distinct, local identity.Ph.D.2018-07-08 00:00:0