The Interplay of Knowledge, Affect, and Politics in the Lost Memory of Epidemic Meningitis in China

This paper explores how the interplay of public remembrance and state-managed knowledge shapes China's collective memory of epidemics, using the largely forgotten 1966 meningococcal meningitis outbreak—a deadly consequence of mass mobilization and interprovincial “Great Networking” on the eve of the Cultural Revolution—as a focal case. Drawing on archival materials, provincial gazetteers, social media discourse during COVID-19, and semi-structured interviews, we trace how censorship and public silence fostered a complex, nonlinear pattern of forgetting. While official media minimized the actual crisis, the 1982 introduction of the serogroup A polysaccharide vaccine (MPV-A) was repeatedly framed as a technocratic triumph, embedding epidemic memory in bodies and privileging rationalized public health knowledge over affective remembrance. This depoliticization shifted collective memory toward a scientific framework increasingly detached from lived experience. The COVID-19 pandemic briefly reopened archives and public debate, surfacing grassroots critiques of past incompetence and revealing how politically driven forgetting continually recalibrates the balance between knowledge and remembrance. Together, these dynamics foreshadow a similar trajectory for COVID-19 memory in China—a pattern already echoed in responses to the 2025 Chikungunya outbreak—as society remains caught in a prolonged process of memory formation that wavers between affective remembrance and depoliticized knowledge.