Barefoot/China

• In Event: Sans Emergence: Aesthetics of Immersion, Technology-Mediated Corporealities, and Weaponized Landscapes

Abstract

The Chinese barefoot doctors program has recently resurged as a major inspiration for the primary healthcare revolution concerning development disparity and the aging society--or what is now understood as (America’s) global “healthcare crisis.” This paper considers the ways in which the post-Cold War discursive formations of “barefoot doctors” mediate the Anglophone liberal epistemologies of “socialist revolution” in medical modernity within/against the geopolitical imagination of “the rise of China.” Recent scholarship has called for “reorienting global imaginaries in American Studies” through a transpacific lens to understand the complexity of “the Chinese Factor” (Cho and Wang). Also considering the dynamic political economy of Anglophone and Sinophone epistemological exchange, this paper looks at English-language academic publications and reports about Chinese barefoot doctors against the historical backdrop of “the Rise of China.” The goal of the paper is to reflect upon the Cold War “area of studies” and post-Cold War Sinophone reorientation of “Chinese” studies in a global English context. I explore where and how the anti-communist sentiments are sedimented within modern “critiques” and “crisis” vis-à-vis a liberal language that attempts to delink the “socialist” communitarian idea of healthcare from the reproduction of barefoot doctors. While the Anglophone Cold War narrative re-inscribes a utopian humanity long attached to the modern idea of medicine, the Sinophone reorientation incorporates the health model into a capitalist mode of development that detaches Chinese medicine from its revolutionary politics. Both of the historical reproductions, though in two seemingly different orientations, reorient barefoot China as “illiberal” and “corrupt” in neoliberal time (Parry), in which the socialist revolutionary medicine is deemed failed because of what is assumed to be an inherent red/barefoot Chineseness. Both therefore lend a critical liberal language of healthcare revolution without socialism, communism and China as part of the ongoing Cold War residuals.

Author

• Chien-Ting Lin, National Central University