Pre-imperial Chinese thought elaborated an ethnic-geographic vision, that of the "barbarians" of the four directions (siyi). More than an ethnic reality, this classification served to order the world beyond the Middle Kingdom. These distinctions became blurred when nomadic populations settled in Chinese areas. This period became known as the Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians (304-439). Although commercial and cultural exchanges became even more frequent in the cosmopolitan Tang dynasty (618-907), Chinese historiography continued the practice of classifying the outside world in chapters on "barbarians" at the end of the dynastic annals. This paper aims to analyze the perception of foreign lands found in medieval Chinese sources. Using the Taiping guangji (a late medieval compilation of texts from the 2nd to the 10th century AD), this study first questions the use of the term "barbarian" to translate a wide range of Chinese terms that don't have an intrinsically pejorative meaning. Then the focus will be on the Manyi chapters. The title uses the characters for "barbarians" from the south (Man) and east (Yi), but also describes lands north and west of the Central Plains. Although inspired by similar sections in the historical annals, these chapters also construct the literary image of foreign lands and foreign people. This paper considers not only how much was known about the outside world in medieval China, but also how this knowledge was transmitted through literary texts.

This thesis examines the Patriotic Health Campaign in the People’s Republic of China from 1952 to the early 1960s, a national campaign that aimed to improve disease governance against the perceived threat of American germ warfare and produce a healthy, productive workforce for postwar reconstruction. An extension of 20th-century productivist medicine, the campaign was a product of the desire of the emerging communist power for independence and international recognition at the intersection of the Cold War and the Korean War. I propose ‘sanitary nationalism’ as an analytical tool to study this campaign, arguing that nationalistic ideologies such as anti-imperialism, state identity, and political citizenship were channelled by mass mobilization to strengthen national health governance. Visual, print, and audiovisual cultures serve as a window to sociopolitical forces that shape the government’s priorities and strategies in public health. Drawing on posters, newspaper articles, and films produced or sanctioned by authorities, I will dissect the visual, rhetorical, and metaphorical tactics of the Chinese multimedia propaganda apparatus for mass mobilization. To this end, I developed three schemas for sanitary nationalism: 1) broad-based mobilization, especially that of women and mothers, ethnic minorities, and religious communities; 2) behavioural and ecological transformation, which was catalysed by the institutionalization of sanitary excellence; and 3) body politics, implicating body-as-state and germ-as-enemy metaphors. My findings suggest that the militarization of daily sanitation, coupled with the biomedicalization of public health languages and tools, penetrated all three thematic areas. Additionally, a sanitary nationalist reading of the campaign revealed its critical role in sociopolitical mobilization at a critical moment of China’s changing relations with the outside world and remoulded the relationship between the body, the environment, and the administration. Bridging the existing gaps between Chinese histories of media, biopolitics, and public health, this thesis illuminates the enduring legacy of the Patriotic Health Campaign in state intervention in people’s lives in the name of health.

The annexation of the Crimean peninsula in March 2014 and the start of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, demonstrated that the historical consciousness of Russians was consistent with these actions. After 2014, however, their epistemology showed completely new elements, which stem neither from the repertoire of the Soviet era nor from the repertoire of the tsarist era. It is an explicit end-time expectation that de-secularizes Russia, i.e. removes it from the political discourse. Instead, new narratives are created that make use of the theological imagination - e.g. by conceptualizing Russia as "holy" and the West as "diabolical." Moreover, nuclear war is increasingly semanticized in terms of salvation history, i.e. with reference to the apocalyptic. In this political-theological coordinate system, "Russkiy Mir" appears as a point of reference compatible with recent Russian historical consciousness, but which is no longer comprehensible with the usual cognitive tools of political theory or contemporary history. This historical-epistemological bifurcation point could be operationalized as an indicator of a possible turning point in Russia's recent history, which ultimately has the potential of a global history, since Russia's self(re)invention as a de-secularized world power and as a guardian of Orthodoxy aims at the oikumene in toto.