Negotiating Chinese medical value and authority in the (Bio)polis

Abstract

This chapter illustrates how fluidity, permeability, and complex power relations characterize both the governance of Singapore’s post-colonial sociopolitical milieu and the practice of Chinese medicine therein. Like the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Singapore evaluated Chinese medicine against biomedicine in the course of 20th-century social and economic development; unlike the PRC, biomedicine was selected as the sole authority for medical services and standards in this Southeast Asian city-state. At the confluence of charitable and commercial work, Chinese medicine thus emerges in somewhat strained relation to Singapore’s biopolitical processes. Situating the practice, use, and regulation of Chinese medicine within contemporary processes of nation-building, governmentality, and biopower, the chapter considers various convergences and divergences of techno-scientific and Chinese medical discourses, the harmonization of “traditional medicine” regulatory frameworks, and the dominance of biomedical standards. It thereby explores several ways in which the 20th- and 21st-century transformation and circulation of Chinese medicine has been modulated in accordance with dynamic sets of interests.