By Lucas Jiang, Class of 2026

Editor’s Note: History Fellowship is a course in which students conduct independent, college-level historical research on a topic of their choice with close faculty mentorship. This paper was selected as one of the seven strongest from this year’s course.

On July 1, 1958, Mao Zedong celebrated the eradication of schistosomiasis, a lethal waterborne parasite, in Yujiang county with his famous poem “Farewell to the God of Plague.” 

So many green streams and blue hills, but to what avail?
This tiny creature left even Hua Tuo powerless!
Hundreds of villages choked with weeds, men waste away;
Thousands of homes deserted, ghosts chanted mournfully. …

The spring wind blows amid profuse willow wands,
Six hundred million in this land all equal Yao and Shun.
Crimson rain swirls in waves under our will,
Green mountains turn to bridges at our wish…

We ask the God of Plague: “Where are you bound?”
Paper barges aflame and candle-light illuminate the sky.

Mao boasts that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was greater than Hua Tuo, the legendary doctor of the Three Kingdoms period, and commends the Chinese people’s hard work by comparing them to the mythical emperors Yao and Shun. At the time, Mao had the right to make such claims.

As a lethal parasite that infected over 10.6 million people and put another 100 million at risk in the Yangtze River region, schistosomiasis had long been a threat to Chinese public health. Peasants during the Ming and Qing dynasties called the disease “God of Plague” and constructed temples to ward off its evil spirits. Centuries later, Mao launched a Patriotic Health Campaign (PHC) against the parasite, effectively controlling the disease for the first time in Chinese history. The campaign did not invent a new medicine or vaccine, but instead mobilized tens of millions of people along the Yangtze River to eradicate snails, the intermediate host of schistosomiasis. Party officials, paramedics, peasants, and factory workers joined together to spray insecticide, drain snail-infested marshlands, and provide health literacy education. Despite China’s feeble healthcare system and impoverished economy, these early efforts significantly curbed the spread of schistosomiasis and led to its elimination as a public health threat by 2019. International scholars have widely praised the campaign as a model to follow for other areas affected by schistosomiasis, from the Philippines to the Mediterranean. Indeed, the CCP united the Chinese people to accomplish what generations of emperors, doctors, and folk deities could not: waving goodbye to the “God of Plague.” Throughout the 1950s, Mao launched numerous other PHCs similar to the schistosomiasis campaign that improved sanitation and drastically reduced infectious diseases such as smallpox, malaria, and cholera.

Click here to continue reading: Between Medicine and Ideology: The Promises and Perils of China’s Patriotic Health Campaigns under Mao Zedong