Vietnamese Patriotic Hygiene Movement
The Việt Minh witnessed how effective the patriotic hygiene movement was in motivating Chinese peasants to participate in hygiene projects (Rogaski). The Việt Minh sought to reproduce the patriotic hygiene movement’s successes in Northern Vietnam. Thus they included a representation of the PRC's patriotic hygiene movement and its effects in the pamphlet they produced about biological warfare. You can compare these imagines to the PRC's own.
Changing peasant mentalities, Việt Minh planners believed, would lead to transformations in hygiene practices and improvements in health. Thus, they hoped to simultaneously mobilize peasants for battle against the French, to spread knowledge about germ (vi trùng) theory, and to eliminate practices that were deemed "unscientific" (phản khoa học) and "unhygienic" (phản vệ sinh) (Malarney).
In this way, the Việt Minh pamphlet suggests that biological warfare encouraged Vietnamese medical doctors on the Committee to Prevent Germs to view germs as part of both their broader natural and social environments. Biomedical knowledge and laboratory research were both important to counter biological warfare but so too was the social knowledge related to mass movements and motivating peasants. As the waning farmer enthusiasm for reporting suspected French use of biological weapons shows, misunderstanding the social environment was just as dangerous as misunderstanding the natural environment for the Việt Minh.
Finally, this pamphlet as suggests the importance of individuals in preventing biological invasions during the Cold War. Even though the Việt Minh and the subsequent Democratic Republic of Vietnam projected the image of a strong state, they were still reliant on the cooperation and efforts of the people to carry out state-led projects. The confident state-centric view projected in this pamphlet is at odds with the individual voices of concern and worry recorded in reports and letters held in state archives.
