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Dr. Lin Qiaozhi (1901-1981) was a key mediator between the People’s Republic of China and foreign countries, helping to transmit ideas about public health, disease, and medicine. Lin was an obstetrician/gynecologist and researcher raised in treaty port Xiamen and educated in Western schools and universities. As a political appointee under the Chinese Communist Party, she had to navigate the shifting position of science in the new society. When China leaned toward the Soviet Union, she advocated the Soviet Pavlovian method of “painless childbirth.” When it was politically necessary to go down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, photographers accompanied her to capture rural health care activities on camera. In China, Lin was the national spokesperson for Western biomedicine and the public face of the modern female professional. Her persona fulfilled traditional duties of care and compassion by bringing medicine to the masses.
Lin was also the face of a new China for the outside world. She was a friend to journalist Edgar Snow and physician Norman Bethune. She often met with foreigners when they visited China on official missions in the 1970s. Traveling around the world on medical delegations, Lin represented the acclaimed Chinese public health care system and further showed that China’s women were educated and emancipated under the new communist order. Using Chinese archival and popular sources as well as personal interviews, this paper shows that Lin Qiaozhi negotiated the turbulent boundaries of Chinese and foreign medicine and science.