Abstract
This article examines the medical policy discourse of the Communist Party of China (CPC) between 1940 and 1950 that witnessed the preliminary achievement of the policy of cooperation between Chinese and Western medicine and the eventual definitive policy of uniting Chinese and Western medicine. The CPC’s promotion is commonly considered the key to the unusual success of traditional Chinese medicine in modern China. However, rather than taking the success of traditional Chinese medicine as deliberately planned political strategies and overstating the agency of the CPC, this study borrows the sociological notion of habitus and combines it with a critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework. From this perspective, the discourse of medical policy is taken as a continuing and recontextualized attitude and collective memory concerning the tension between the traditional and the modern, the Chinese and the Western.
Highlights
It is hard to find a modern country similar to China in which traditional medicine still plays such a crucial role in the national health system
“Western” or “scientific”? This section investigates the meaning of the word “science” and its use in the data, and explores the way it constructs the cultural ideology behind medical policy discourse
It is found that Chinese traditional medicine was taken as the remnant of deep-rooted feudalism, and Western medicine was constructed as a symbol of imperialism
Summary
It is hard to find a modern country similar to China in which traditional medicine still plays such a crucial role in the national health system. Compared with local studies of the CPC’s medical policies such as uniting Chinese and Western medicine (e.g., Fan 2014), Taylor goes further by investigating the ideological factors beneath the social practices.
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