Children in Vision: Mobilisation in International Health and Trachoma Control in Postwar Taiwan (1952–1960s)

Vollständiger Abstract

Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit?

Abstract While postwar international health campaigns sought to apply standardised biomedical solutions to disease control, Taiwan’s experience in the 1950s and 1960s unfolded in a historically and geopolitically distinct context that shaped how these approaches were implemented and lived. Rather than recovering children’s agency in a liberal sense, this article traces how children’s participation, structured, disciplined, and routinised, produced historical effects within a developmentalist logic shaped by authoritarian violence, ableist anxieties, and layered imperial power across Japan, China, and the United States. Beyond being passive recipients of care, children became epidemiological subjects, school health participants, household caregivers, and financial contributors. Through schools, health stations, and families, their daily routines formed the infrastructure through which international health was made legible and effective. Children were shaped through the everyday workings of Nationalist political visions, but so too was Taiwan itself, positioned between imperial inheritance and Cold War internationalism.