ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the initial contact of the CCP with Chinese medicine during the desperate times of guerrilla warfare in the Civil War. It was the period when Chinese medicine came to be embraced into the Communist Revolution and this chapter describes the ensuing promotion of Chinese medicine, not so much at the hands of traditional doctors, but at the hands of Western medical doctors. Mao called for the ‘co-operation of Chinese and Western medical doctors’ ( !") in Yan’an in 1944, but was not explicit as to how such a co-operation might be achieved. His slogan was interpreted as a general ‘scientification of Chinese medicine and popularization of Western medicine’ ( !"#$%&"). In order to remove the feudalist and superstitious elements of Chinese medicine, some physicians attempted a rigorous transformation of the medicine according to the foremost precepts of the Communist Revolution, i.e. those of ‘new’, ‘scientific’ and ‘unified’. Acupuncture came to represent this ‘new’ medicine largely because of its practical value during wartime. This chapter is based on the work of dedicated Party member Zhu Lian, who at the time was deputy director to the Yan’an China Medical University. She published in 1951 a major work called The New Acupuncture ( !), which embodied the political, social and economic circumstances of revolutionary China. The ‘new acupuncture’ was an unusual amalgam of Chinese medical techniques and politically correct scientific theories. A study of it demonstrates how the scope for intellectual freedom was significantly narrowed by Communist Party political guidelines, to the extent that medical efficiency was subordinated to Party criteria. This chapter will situate the ‘new acupuncture’ in the environment which created it and examine its unique medical theory.
