Medicine, The Modern State And The Media,

The construction and deconstruction of the discourse about disease and medicine is important political view in modern China.And media are important field where the process take place.This paper is under the theory frame of political economy of communications. Starting with reports from People's Daily on rural medical care system, the paper analyses the role of mass media in different historical phases. It also covers the deep-seated factors of changes in urban-rural relationship and social transformation in China under different discourse modes of mass media in different periods of time.Reports from People's Daily on rural medical cares from 1949 to 1967 were mainly those about medical teams going to countryside. As symbols of authority validity, representing the modern power of science and enlightenment, medical teams covered every corner of vast rural areas in China. Reports on such medical teams could be seen as a kind of construction of a united multinational country. However in 1965, medical teams going to countryside was no longer salvation to rural areas. No longer as tools of state will, medical teams themselves became the object to be reconstructed. To recuperate the enlarging urban-rural gap, medical resources were moved from cities to countryside while mass media mobilized social ideology.From 1968 to 1978, when mass media propagandized for generalizing cooperative medical systems in the whole country, "barefoot doctors" became media heroes. Reports about "barefoot doctors" on People's Daily constructed mythes which essence are politicization of medicine.But there are other factions that deserve us pay attentions to: the actual economic motivation as the makeshift of history;traditional rural society's resistance to modern medical space,etc.By way of calling on thousands of "Barefoot doctors" to be subjects of ideology,media provided manpower resource to cooperative medical systems.That's to say,media are chains which would not be absent in the process of the cooperative medical system's building.Rural cooperative medical system was disorganized from 1979 to 1989. Mass media was in an "aphasia" condition on such great event related to the health of multi-million peasants. Reports on People's Daily were mainly about urban medical cares. Those reports showed that roles of mass media had been complicated and positions of mass media had changed from countryside to cities under the background of changes in urban-rural relationship.