About

Emily Baum is a professor of modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in the social and cultural history of twentieth-century China and the history of medicine. Her research interests focus on themes such as illness, deviance, alternative medicine, and popular beliefs and superstitions. At UC Irvine, she directs the Long US-China Institute and the graduate emphasis in medical humanities, and she serves as vice-chair of the university-wide Graduate Council. Beyond her university roles, Baum is an advisor for the Luce-American Council of Learned Societies Program in China Studies, a board member of the Esherick-Ye Foundation, and serves on the editorial boards of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and History of Psychiatry. She is also part of the eighth cohort of the Public Intellectuals Program with the National Committee on US-China Relations. In 2025-26, she will chair the Welch Medal Committee for the American Association for the History of Medicine. Outside of academia, Baum is a running enthusiast, marathoner, Boston qualifier, and an RRCA-certified running coach who enjoys working with masters runners of all levels.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Law
• Library science
• Theology
• Gerontology
• Gender studies
• Art history
• Pathology
• Ethnology

Selected publications

• Validation of the Mandarin Chinese Version of the Detachment, Internalizing, and Somatoform Spectra of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology Self-Report (HiTOP-SR)

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-03-09

  preprintOpen access

  The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is a dimensional approach to understanding mental health, addressing limitations of categorical systems such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD). This study aimed to validate a Mandarin version of the HiTOP Self-Report (HiTOP-SR), with a focus on the Internalizing, Detachment, and Somatoform spectra among a Chinese population. A translation and back-translation process was followed by collaborative item refinement from a team of bilingual and monolingual scholars to ensure both linguistic equivalence and cultural relevance. The final 213-item scale was administered to 1,999 undergraduate students across four Chinese universities, with follow-up assessments conducted five weeks later. The Mandarin HiTOP-SR demonstrated strong psychometric properties, including high internal consistency (α > .70 for 45 scales/subscales), good test-retest reliability (r > .70 for 32 scales/subscales), adequate model fit for 45 scales/subscales, and acceptable discriminant validity (only 13 pairs showed a latent correlation of > .90). Convergent validity was supported by strong correlations with corresponding DSM-5-TR symptom domains. These findings confirm the structural and conceptual alignment of the Mandarin HiTOP-SR with the HiTOP framework. This culturally informed adaptation advances the development of evidence-based, dimensional assessment tools in Chinese contexts and contributes to the global applicability of transdiagnostic models of psychopathology.

  Publisher

• Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911–2011 by Rachel S. Core (review)

  Twentieth-Century China · 2025-04-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Long before Covid-19 had become a global pandemic, tuberculosis was the infectious disease that posed the most immediate threat to industrialized nations worldwide.Before 1956, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in Shanghai.Yet, a mere quarter century after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had risen to power, rates of infection had fallen so significantly that tuberculosis had dropped to the tenth most frequent cause of death in the city.In Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911-2011, Rachel S. Core seeks to understand how this shift occurred in such a short period of time and why the incidence of tuberculosis once again increased only a few decades after the CCP appeared to have gotten the disease under control.To answer this question, Core highlights the importance of the work unit ( danwei), a CCP innovation that not only tied individuals to their place of work but also served as a delivery mechanism for crucial social services, such as health insurance, public health education, and antibiotic provision.The creation of the work unit in the 1950s and its subsequent dismantling in the 1990s, Core argues, coincided with the decline and later reemergence of tuberculosis.Tuberculosis Control therefore sets out to delineate "the critical role the work-unit system played in making medical advances available" to the people inhabiting one of China's largest and most industrialized cities (3).In laying out this argument, Core also contributes to a broader contention in the sociology of global public health: that structural and socioeconomic factors, including divisions between those with and without access to health care, are crucial to understanding the spread of infectious disease.Proceeding chronologically, Tuberculosis Control first examines how tuberculosis was managed in the first half of the twentieth century, prior to the CCP's implementation of the work-unit system.Focusing on the public health mandates of the Shanghai Municipal Council-the governing body of Shanghai's International Settlement-Core argues that the treaty-port government consistently prioritized economic development over tuberculosis control.Since tuberculosis tends to be most widespread in industrializing regions with unsanitary and poor working conditions, stopping the spread of the disease would have entailed curbing industrialization, a concession that the council was not willing to make.When the Guomindang rose to power in 1928, its efforts to control tuberculosis were more intensive than those of the council but not altogether successful.Although the Guomindang implemented a series of public health and vaccination campaigns, many of these were aimed at the middle classes rather than the workers who tended to experience the highest rates of infection.The heart of the book examines how the work unit shaped health outcomes in and around Shanghai.Characterizing the work unit as a "total institution" (81), a concept borrowed from the sociologist Erving Goffman to describe a place of work and residence in which individuals lead controlled and regimented lives, Core argues that these organizational structures not only increased access to health care but also socialized their members to adopt more sanitary practices.Part of this socialization process involved coercion and surveillance.Neighbors and coworkers were encouraged to monitor one another's behavior and report possible cases of infection to municipal health authorities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Needle Diplomacy. Acupuncture and Scientific Exchange in Cold War China and the United States

  Brepols Publishers eBooks · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In the early 1970s, while China was emerging from the height of the Cultural Revolution, a surprising technology helped pave the way for the future rapprochement between China and the United States: the acupuncture needle. As an ostensibly apolitical practice, acupuncture came to serve as a scientific lubricant that eased the Cold War tensions between the two countries, providing an entryway into Sino-American people-to-people exchanges and future intellectual collaboration. At the same time, acupuncture represented an alternative imagining of a new world order, one in which scientific knowledge could just as easily flow from East to West as it did the reverse. By showcasing China’s ability to break new ground in the realm of medicine and surgery, acupuncture became a form of soft power that highlighted the innovative capacity of Chinese communism and the revolutionary potential of Mao Zedong Thought. Through the captivating achievements of new needling technologies, the Chinese government was able to not just extol the effectiveness of Maoism on a global scale, but to also — albeit briefly — direct the terms of its diplomatic engagements with the capitalist West.

  PublisherDOI

• How Qi Became Energy

  2025-02-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Qi has long been a thorny concept, presenting both translational and conceptual difficulties for scholars working within and beyond Asia. In English today, qi is most often translated as ‘vital energy’, but this was not always the case. This chapter focuses on one moment in the conceptual transformation of qi into energy. In the 1970s, a group of parapsychologists in the United States and Russia began to use Kirlian photography to document so-called ‘energy flows’ within organic matter, an undertaking that coincided with the rising global interest in acupuncture. This unlikely convergence of phenomena reinforced the correlation between energy and qi, a definition that has become the normative interpretation of qi today.

  PublisherDOI

• How Qi Became Energy

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2025-02-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1 How Qi Became Energy

  Amsterdam University Press eBooks · 2025-02-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• :<i>A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science</i>

  Isis · 2024-02-26

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy

  East Asian Science Technology and Society An International Journal · 2023-04-03 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Maoism and mental illness: psychiatric institutionalization during the Chinese Cultural Revolution

  History of Psychiatry · 2022-08-18 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article offers a preliminary analysis of psychiatric treatment during the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the basis of interviews and rare case records obtained from 'F Hospital' in southern China. In contrast to the prevailing view of psychiatry during this time, which highlights either rampant patient abuse or revolutionary ideology, we show that psychiatric treatment at this facility was not radically altered by the politics of the Maoist period. Instead, treatments were informed by a predominantly biomedical understanding of mental illness, one that derived from the prior training of the facility's lead physicians. Although political education was nominally incorporated into patient rehabilitation and outpatient care, it was not a constitutive element of inpatient treatment during the acute phase of illness.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989</i>, by Jeremy Brown. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xix+266 pp. US$79.99 (cloth), US$29.99 (paper), US$18.49 (e-book).

  The China Journal · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Muhamad Ali

  6 shared

• Heather Hindman

  The University of Texas at Austin

  5 shared

• Vinayak Chaturvedi

  4 shared

• Marc Kanda

  University of California, Irvine

  4 shared

• Paola Zamperini

  Northwestern University

  4 shared

• Rian Thum

  University of Manchester

  4 shared

• Rina Verma

  University of Cincinnati

  4 shared

• Hilde De Weerdt

  KU Leuven

  4 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Georgetown University

  2006

• M.A.

  Columbia University

  2007

• Other

  Johns Hopkins University - Nanjing Center Campus

  2008

• Ph.D.

  University of California, San Diego

  2013