ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Rural Health, Self-Reliance, and Its Limit: The History of Acupuncture as “Socialist Medicine” in Tanzania 1960s–1980s

• In Event: Science, Knowledge, and Technology in Modern China: Vernacularization and Global Diffusion

English Abstract

This paper examines the history of acupuncture within China’s medical aid teams in Tanzania from the 1960s to the 1980s, arguing that it formed a critical yet largely overlooked dimension of China’s project to promote “socialist medicine” in the Global South. While the barefoot doctor system has long been recognised as emblematic of Maoist health ideology, acupuncture - mobilised as a low-cost, non-elitist, and easily deployable technology - played an equally significant role in advancing China’s vision of rural health and collective self-reliance abroad. Drawing on extensive archival materials from China and Tanzania, as well as recent fieldwork conducted in Tanzania, the paper traces how Chinese acupuncturists were dispatched as part of rotating medical teams and how their work was received, adapted, and contested in African clinical settings from the 1960s to 1980s. It argues that acupuncture served simultaneously as a therapeutic practice, a pedagogical tool aimed at training local health workers, and a symbolic projection of China’s revolutionary healthcare during the Cold War. Yet the ambition to build self-reliant medical capacity through traditional medicine ultimately encountered structural limits, including personnel shortages, language barriers, and insufficient and inconsistent political and administrative support. By situating Tanzania as a focal case within broader Sino-African socialist connections, the paper offers new insights into the ideological, diplomatic, and epistemological stakes of China’s medical internationalism and reassesses acupuncture’s place within the transnational history of socialist health.

Author

• Liang Wan, University of Vienna