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How did medical discourses of bodily difference enter into the workings of colonial regimes? The Shanghai International Settlement, at the heart of Western semi-colonialism and Western medical networks in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, provides a rich observatory from which to explore this question. An exceptional corpus on the municipal management of traffic accidents between 1911 and 1918 allows us to track down the practical consequences of the racial theories used by some doctors at the time to explain these accidents.