BUILDING THE NATION THROUGH WOMEN'S HEALTH: MODERN ...

Health Administration offered a grant-in-aid “with the stipulation that graduates from this course
were obliged to return to their own schools for at least two years.” 245 Between 1932 and 1936,
40 students graduated from this course. Furthermore, the maternal and child health division of
the Central Field Health Station offered a teachers’ course for midwives. Sixteen students from
14 different institutions participated in 1936. After their one-year term, they would all return to
their home institutions “as future leaders and teachers in these communities.” 246 The maternal
and child health-Central Field Health Station had big plans: to train 100,000 maternity and child
health workers (one for every 4,000 persons), 1,000 maternal and child health supervisors, 400
maternal and child health medical officers, and 10 maternal and child health medical organizers.
They also wanted to establish teaching and demonstration centers in Nanjing, Shanghai, and
Beiping, as well as numerous rural and provincial centers. 247
Dingxian is perhaps the most famous experimental county in China. Its Mass Education
Movement was established in 1929 by James Yen and funded by individual philanthropists and
the Rockefeller Foundation’s China Medical Board and Peking Union Medical College.
Dingxian is in Hebei province, 60 miles from the nearest medical school and modern hospital in
Baoding, which is 100 miles southwest of Beijing. Like Jiangningxian, its health system was
also based on the xian model. At its peak, between 1929 and 1937, it had a 50-bed hospital and
an administrative office in the xian center, 15 subcenter health stations, and local health workers
in 150 villages. Its subcenter stations were staffed by a physician and a nurse, usually graduates
from the medical school in Baoding who completed extra public health training at the xian-level
hospital. Eventually each village within the subcenters was to have voluntary “village health
245 Ibid.
246 Ibid.
247 Ibid.
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