A Health Care Odyssey: Chinese Medical Missions in North Africa, 1963 to 2013

My project examines how Chinese medical professionals traveling to North Africa from 1963 onward produced and transferred medical and social knowledge between the two places. Based on oral interviews and archival sources located in China, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, I will explore how the medical missionaries by working abroad created professional legitimacy and social autonomy in a highly politicized Chinese society. Engaging with studies of postcolonial global medicine, Sino-African relations, and socialist revolutions, my work not only complicates the conventional description of the Mao era as one of 'self-imposed isolation' but also introduces the role of global medical encounters in local reconstructions of alternative modernity in China and Africa.