The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China. By Emily Baum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 304 pp. ISBN: 9780226580616 (cloth)

• Published in: The Journal of Asian Studies 2020-08, Vol.79 (3), p.740-743
• Main Author: Ma, Zhiying
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Asian studies; Chinese languages; Deviance; Exceptions; Meaning; Medicine; Mental disorders; Modernity; Paternalism; Patients; Physiology; Psychiatry; Rehabilitation; Society; Terminology; Traditional Chinese medicine; Welfare
• ISSN: 0021-9118; 1752-0401
• DOI: 10.1017/S0021911820001291

[...]these transformations were never complete or unidirectional, because people constantly pulled psychiatric concepts into the framework of Chinese medicine, used existing languages to translate new medical terminologies, mixed different kinds of treatment practices, and read the mentally ill patient in holistic—rather than biologically reductionist—terms. [...]people in Beijing repurposed psychiatric ideas for their own agendas and remade meanings of scientific and institutional modernity. 1 Baum's work shows us how the asylum/hospital—and the government that sponsored it—was legitimized in the name of care, control, or rehabilitation, whether the institution was set as the default space for such practices or as supplementary (to the home, in particular), and whether patients were seen as exceptions to the normal population because of their deviance or as part of it because of the universal human physiology. Yet decades of marketization and welfare rollback mean that the actual responsibility for enacting this biomedically and institutionally mediated paternalism has largely gone to patients’ families.3 Baum's work thus provides an invaluable template to analyze the contemporary situation, and the historical comparison it offers pushes us to further problematize how “long-held notions of state paternalism” (p. 73) are actually invoked and reinvented across time.