Medical workers take coronavirus patients to their isolation wards at the newly built Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province. Photo: Xinhua Medical workers take coronavirus patients to their isolation wards at the newly built Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province. Photo: Xinhua
Medical workers take coronavirus patients to their isolation wards at the newly built Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province. Photo: Xinhua
Rana Mitter
Opinion

Opinion

On Reflection by Rana Mitter

Coronavirus: why hygiene fears strike at the heart of modern China

  • China’s hygiene fixation is rooted in trying to combat Western and Japanese colonialists. Even wartime bombs wouldn’t stop the struggle against sewage
  • Decades on, the coronavirus is exposing a problem with China’s modernising: a lack of transparency that is becoming increasingly unhealthy

Rana Mitter
Rana Mitter

Updated: 8:21am, 9 Feb, 2020

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Medical workers take coronavirus patients to their isolation wards at the newly built Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province. Photo: Xinhua Medical workers take coronavirus patients to their isolation wards at the newly built Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province. Photo: Xinhua
Medical workers take coronavirus patients to their isolation wards at the newly built Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province. Photo: Xinhua
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Rana Mitter

Rana Mitter

Rana Mitter is Director of the University China Centre at the University of Oxford and author of A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World and China’s War with Japan, 1937-45: The Struggle for Survival