The public health game is a tough one to play. How do you achieve educating and transforming the public’s behavior for the common good without coming off as a bully or dour spoil-sport? The stakes are impossible: The indifferent audience, the management of the reproachful “tsk-tsk, you should know better” tone, and there’s only so many ways to proselytize a message of “getting one’s act together.” And where’s the cash for such endeavors?
“Eradicate pests and diseases and build happiness for ten thousand generations.” A poster from September 1960 by the Red Cross and the Health Propaganda Office of the Health Department of Fujian Province. Note the industrial skyline, the healthy crop of vegetables in the center of the poster and the four pests at the bottom. Source: US National Library of Medicine
But in the 1940s, the governing officials in the People’s Republic of China bulldozed their way through ...
