Word: greates
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...great-grandfather, Dr. Wu Lien-teh, was sitting down to dinner in Tianjin, a port city near Beijing, when he received a telegram. It was Dec. 19, 1910, and China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs had alerted him to an outbreak of deadly pneumonic plague near the Russian border. A Cambridge-educated vice director of the Imperial Army Medical College, Wu, then just 31, was to report immediately to Beijing before heading to Harbin in China's remote northeast...
...corpses abandoned by roadsides and open fields." He introduced the practices of wearing face masks, cremating infected corpses and observing strict quarantine - methods used today to fight pandemics such as SARS and swine flu and even a small outbreak of pneumonic plague in Qinghai province in July. My great-grandfather implemented these measures despite -22?F (-30?C) temperatures, decrepit facilities, traditional preferences for land burials and - what he found most worrisome - the fatalism of local residents. His initiatives worked. Within four months, the outbreak was stamped out, but not before it took 60,000 lives. Read "How to Prepare...
...invasion of China, Wu returned to his native Malaysia and, since then, most of that side of my family has scattered to Singapore, Australia and the U.S., where I was born and raised. Yet last month, almost a full century later, I found myself making the same journey my great-grandfather made that winter. After flying to Beijing from my current home in Hong Kong, I headed to Harbin to attend the opening of the Wu Lien-teh Memorial Hospital and the 60th anniversary of another hospital affiliated with Harbin Medical University, one of several medical institutions founded...
...People's Republic was founded 60 years ago as with Wu's vital work. Over the decades China has lurched from serial revolutions to social experiments to, now, the wildly successful pursuit of wealth. In the process, hundreds of millions of lives have been both upended and uplifted. My great-grandfather and his family were buffeted by some of those forces too (though with nowhere near the terrible consequences experienced by countless other Chinese). While his achievements have long been recognized by epidemiologists worldwide, they were largely forgotten in China after the communists took over. In the aftermath of "liberation...
...today. As China modernizes at speed, its icons are resembling those of other developed nations: athletes, pop stars, entrepreneurs. To some extent, that represents a normalization of Chinese society. But it also exposes, worry some of the country's leaders, a growing obsession with frivolity and materialism. Enter my great-grandfather - a nonpolitical, service-oriented figure with no history whatsoever with the Party and whose life's work transcends any ideology. "In today's society, people's outlook and values have big problems; people are focused on their individual interests and, frankly, on making money," said Gu Yingqi, China...