Harvard East Asian Series, TRADITIONAL MEDICINE IN MODERN CHINA The East Asian Research Center at Harvard University administers projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Korea, Japan, and adjacent areas. Brought to you by | Shenzhen University Authenticated Download Date | 11/28/17 1:12 AM Brought to you by | Shenzhen University Authenticated Download Date | 11/28/17 1:12 AM TRADITIONAL MEDICINE IN MODERN CHINA Science, Nationalism, and the Tensions of Cultural Change RALPH C. CROIZIER Harvard University Press CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 1968 Brought to you by | Shenzhen University Authenticated Download Date | 11/28/17 1:12 AM © Copyright 1968 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Preparation of this volume was aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation Library of CongTess Catalog Card Number 68-17624 Printed in the United States of America The characters on the title page are translated as "Chinese medicine." Brought to you by | Shenzhen University Authenticated Download Date | 11/28/17 1:12 AM To my parents, Charles J. and Doris M. Croizier, who showed the love and wisdom to let their impractical son steer by his own star Brought to you by | Shenzhen University Authenticated Download Date | 11/28/17 1:12 AM Brought to you by | Shenzhen University Authenticated Download Date | 11/28/17 1:12 AM FOREWORD Franz Schurmann, in his masterly Ideology and Organiza- tion in Communist China, dwells on a "contradiction" which the Communists dwell on lovingly themselves: the contradic- tion (sometimes), the tense relationship always, between "red" and "expert." There is never a mention of medicine, no reference to the "Great Leap" annexation of Chinese medi- cine (red, being "people's") as a body of stern lessons to the "experts." Mr. Croizier deals, in deep historical context, with the medical experts. They are the practicers of modern medi- cine, and as devotees of a universal science they (and their advocates) had been cultural revolutionaries of unimpeach- able standing. Why should they be suspect in revolutionary China? The same Chinese history that made medicine a germ of revolution gave it, unshakably, beneath the bland title of "modern," the blunt label of "Western Medicine." When the Communists came to police it, then, and to force it into association with the native medical tradition, were they re- verting to an old xenophobia, anti-expert because anti- Western ? Were they reverting to a Confucian cultural bias, anti-expert because anti-professional ? Vll Brought to you by | Shenzhen University Authenticated Download Date | 11/28/17 1:13 AM Foreword Mr. Croizier, while treating comprehensively several shades of thought about "Chinese essence," writes history as process; he has no need of essence to relate the present to the past. He makes the elusive but vital distinction between cul- tural nationalism and traditionalism, that universal Con- fucian expression of cultural self-esteem. He demonstrates convincingly that "the West" is not a constant in Chinese history, even if hostility to the West—some kind of hostility —seems a once and future thing. The cultural West (with its science, including medicine) facing Confucian China is not the warm war political West facing Communist China. Sci- ence, however policed, is a Communist value, a Confucian dereliction. It is not just that "scientific socialists" could hardly conde- scend to science like humanist literati. Marxists trade on the prestige of science, and they know quite well what was never true for Confucian China, that in everyone's modern world, in "bourgeois" countries and anti-bourgeois alike, science has prestige. And when the Chinese Communists put scientists down (medical experts among them), the Communists are acknowledging that prestige, not impugning it; its very uni- versality, its seeming transcendence of ideology, is a threat to the masters of ideology. Medical science, all science, must be mastered by the ideologues, or their own occupation would be gone. In effect, the questionable reputation of the Chinese medical tradition gives the Communists a pretext for en- hancing it; the very need for enhancement, for state decree of its scientific standing, makes the medical corps, reconstituted thus, more naturally subservient to its protectors. For all the common "generalism" of the Communist cadre and the Confucian official, the latter never held what the former has to hold as an article of faith: that one of the reasons for demeaning expertise is the need to erase the dis- viii Brought to you by | Shenzhen University Authenticated Download Date | 11/28/17 1:13 AM Foreword tinction—a crucial Confucian distinction—between mental and physical labor. Just as the Confucianist, with his amateur ideal, had displaced the aristocracy, and then had taken on an aristocratic aura (with license to condescend to the techni- cal professional), so the professional in the modern world, having broken the amateur ideal, has the status pride of the aristocrat today. Therefore, the Party must trim him down, to vindicate its own version of autocratic rule. This confirms the process of change toward a new world of pervasive specialization; it is no witness at all to the eternity of a Confucian-amateur essence. Communist China's revival of pride in Chinese medicine, then, is appreciation of a heritage from a sub-Confucian cul- ture, which lends it a "people's" identity. And it is "people's," too, as a pill for cosmopolitans to swallow. For the latter are the experts, associated in universal science with professional colleagues on the other side of national and ideological walls. Still, the medical issue in modern China has its own nu- ances; it is more than a microcosm of the issue of science in general, the issue of tradition in general. Mr. Croizier starts just about all the possible hares, and catches them. He is ex- traordinarily subtle in following all the avenues of argument, and relating the logic to the psychology, the psychology to the history. He gives a brilliant demonstration of a tenet of intellectual history, that there are two nouns to consider: thought and thinking. Men's thinking is determined partly —indispensably, but only partly—by the intellectual per- suasiveness of a given body of thought. And it is determined partly by an emotional preference (deriving from historical context) that the persuasion be congenial. There is the pur- pose of reaching truth, and there is compulsion a tergo to move in a certain direction—both a pull and a push, and not always on the same line. Men want satisfying conclusions, but ix Brought to you by | Shenzhen University Authenticated Download Date | 11/28/17 1:13 AM Foreword satisfaction is ambiguous. One may satisfy the logic of argu- ment. One may satisfy oneself. The "tensions" of Mr. Croizier's title, perhaps never so well disclosed as in this his- tory of medicine in modern China, lie in the effort to force coincidence of intellect and will. Joseph R. Levenson χ Brought to you by | Shenzhen University Authenticated Download Date | 11/28/17 1:13 AM