ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Good Medicine, Bad Medicine, Weird Medicine: Fighting Shaman Healing with Cooperation between Western and Chinese Medicine

• In Event: On the Fringe? Constructing and Contesting Boundaries of “Science” in Modern China

English Abstract

How did traditional Chinese medicine gain the support of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Why wasn’t the old medical system rendered obsolete or labeled “superstitious” like Daoist alchemy or traditional geomancy in contemporary China? This presentation argues that the CCP’s cooperative policy regarding Chinese and Western medicine (also occasionally referred to as old and new medicine) to some extent successfully “rescued” Chinese medicine by placing it in opposition toshaman healing, while giving it political legitimacy for a united war front. The CCP proposed the project of “scientizing Chinese medicine, Sinicizing Western medicine” as a way to forge cooperation between Chinese and Western medicine. Centered around Mao Zedong’s call for “cooperation between Chinese and Western medicine,” the CCP’s new medical policy had an important political agenda: eliminating shamanism and supporting its broader anti-superstition campaign in the rural North and Northwest revolutionary bases during the War of Resistance against Japan in the 1940s.Health work through the cooperation between the two medical systems and the political campaign of anti-superstition co-constituted each other in the Communist revolutionary agenda of building a united front for war effort in the 1940s. The cooperation importantly made it possible for the CCP to decide what medical practices were legitimate and illegitimate. Through offering alternative pharmaceutical products, medical care, and public health services, the CCP competed against religious and “superstitious” organizations to vie for legitimacy in governing the unfamiliar lands of rural northern China, adopting parts of traditional Chinese medicine to forge an alliance with Western medicine.

Author

• Yaming You, Duke University