The Political Fire Within Traditional Chinese Medicine

The Political Fire within Traditional Chinese Medicine

Initially, it seems irrational and counterintuitive to combine two seemingly polar opposite subjects, such as medical science and politics. However, it appears traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has magically bridged the two. In fact, the entity that TCM is today wouldn’t exist without the strong political influences from China’s political evolution, especially from the 20th century. From the time the first Protestant missionaries arrived in early 19th century to the rise of the Mao Zedong’s communist party, almost every major historical event in China have played a role in explaining the current contents of TCM. Therefore it is not only necessary, but imperative to understand the political developments in China’s history in order to fully grasp the concept of TCM today. All of TCM’s triumphs and failures throughout the years all stem from a backbone of Chinese politics, to the extent that TCM cannot be in any way understood without it.

        The hybridization of TCM and biomedicine had political forces at play as far back as the late 19th century. Although the arrival of the Protestant missionaries brought western medicine, the Chinese missionary society only grew as a result of a lack of political leadership that increased the amount of people in poverty. Many of the missionaries noticed that the “great majority of their patients were too poor to afford treatment from Chinese physicians.”^[1] With the availability of TCM doctors limited to the wealthy, the large amount of the poor turned to the missionaries not because they believed western medicine as “superior”, but because they had nowhere else to go.^[2] As the missionary presence grew, in order to assimilate into TCM and the Chinese people, Benjamin Hobson wrote the first Chinese textbooks on western medicine.^[3] The interesting aspect was that he did not simply translate western textbooks, but tried to change the language in order to accommodate the Chinese people. He “could not afford to lose his intended audience with unnecessary neologisms.”^[4] Although not a direct result of governmental politics, the way TCM mixed with biomedicine had basic political influences from the very beginning.

        A more direct and governmental political role that influenced the hybridization of TCM and biomedicine was the Chinese defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. For the first time in Chinese history, the government was humbled by its own defeat. Japan’s importation of western sciences and technology that resulted in their success “broached the outer defenses of Chinese cultural chauvinism.”^[5] Finally, as China began to increase their interactions with Japan, western biomedicine began to mix with TCM directly and it became possible for “graduates of western-style educational institutions to gain official posts in the Chinese state bureaucracy.”^[6] Said differently, the real momentum for the hybridization of TCM and biomedicine came as a result of political forces after the defeat of the War of 1895. The other side of this hybridization then, is the distinct way in which biomedicine integrated itself into TCM. There was a constant struggle, which touches back to the age old issue of the value of the traditional aspect of TCM. Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature and one of the biggest political figures of the time, pushed for the destruction of old Chinese medicine for “every day that old medicine is not abolished, the people’s ideas will not change, the cause of modern medicine will not be able to progress, and sanitary measures will not be able to advance.”^[7] Clearly even the struggles the hybridization of TCM went through had big political figures on both sides who argued not only for medicine itself, but also argued with the future of their society in mind.