Diet for war: military nutrition in Republican China

ABSTRACT China’s earliest modern nutritional studies were undertaken in Republican era during the second decade of the twentieth century. They aimed to improve workers’ health, reaching their peak in the 1930s. In the 1940s the demand to apply nutritional knowledge to aid military personnel arose during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when American medical aid poured into the remote southwest Chinese border. Later, the Civil War (1946–1949) prolonged the demand for proper military nutrition. This article discusses how biomedical nutritional studies were promoted in Republican China for military demands both as a tool to improve soldiers’ bodies and as a symbol of the American alliance. Actions concerning military nutrition in the Republican era were built on a certain complexity due to convoluted military and diplomatic reasons. Moreover, both reasons were intertwined with a controversy about the appropriateness of the Western nutritional diet for the Chinese body.