Professional Code or Legal Sanctions: Pharmacy in China

Abstract

This paper examines how norms are introduced and implemented in the production and trade of medicines in China, with some reference to similar cases in Australia. The aim is to analyse the role of the State in the supervision of the pharmaceutical industry in China. The professional responsibility of the apothecary whose wares can cure or destroy a patient has always been self-evident in any cultural environment. The question to be raised here is not so much what these responsibilities are in China but who defines them and how they are defined. The starting point for analysis is a set of materials concerned with the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. The materials consist of The People's Republic of China's Full Account of Administrative Practices in Regard to Pharmaceuticals (Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Yaopin Guanli Shiyong Quanshu), published in 1997, and similar administrative guidelines from the 1980s and 1990s. In China there are no guidelines for the pharmaceutical industry equivalent to those in Australia, which originate from within the industry.1 The origin and style of the Chinese materials will shape much of the following discussion. In China, administrative rules or laws must be seen as the main creator and guarantor of norms prevailing in the production and trade of pharmaceuticals. Thus, unlike Australia where the validity of a pharmacists' professional code reduces the need for legal sanctions, in China the definition of professional standards and the control over their implementation are exclusively a matter for legal sanctions. This feature of Chinese pharmaceutical practice results from the dominant role of the Chinese state; its strict monopoly in regard to social organisation and a certain institutional weakness that results from this are factors that necessarily curtail the self-determination of professional groups. So in this respect, despite the special issues involved in the production and sale of pharmaceuticals, pharmacists do not differ much in regard to their professional sovereignty or, rather, the lack of it from other professions. Consequently, in order to identify the Chinese understanding and formulation of professional ethics for pharmacists, we first need to look at the issue of the status of the pharmaceutical profession in China.