The politics of epidemics in Chinese history not only involves competing interpretations about the meanings of disease, but also includes dynamic tensions between socio-political factors and the participants involved in emergency responses. This article examines three cases-the plague epidemic of 1949, the cholera epidemic of 1961-1965, and the meningitis epidemic of 1966-1967-to reveal the entangling political, technological, and epidemiological factors involved in ending epidemics in the People's Republic of China, while also illustrating the difficulty of charting the end of an (...) epidemic when data on disease prevalence and disease control are collected, reported, framed, and archived by political authorities. (shrink)