The cultural dilemma in the process of uniting Chinese and Western medicine from 1940 to 1950

摘要

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.