| This ethnographic study of traditional Chinese medicine is concerned with several aspects of changes taking place in and around clinics of traditional Chinese medicine as well as the responses and hidden tactics of Chinese medical doctors to these changes between 1976 and 1995. The whole study is divided into five chapters. Chapter One briefly reviews Chinese health care system and traditional Chinese medicine during Mao's time. Chapter Two presents some major changes in the health care system and medicine in post-Mao China, including decentralization of the public health care system, development of multiple health care providers, increased competition among these providers, and shopping for health care by the patients. Together, these two chapters provided a historical and sociocultural context for my study of post-Mao Chinese medicine in Chapter Three, Four, and Five. In these three chapters, I demonstrate how contemporary Chinese medical doctors responded to changes in post-Mao health care and the modernization movement by appropriating biomedical terminology and technology, developing an automated tongue examination system, and standardizing Chinese medicinal herbal recipes in their daily medical practices. Each topic represents a different aspect of Chinese medicine medical practice. Also, I explored some of the hidden tactics of these institutional reactions. I argued that while the Chinese doctors were modernizing their medical practice and contributing to the national modernization drive, they were also redefining the epistemological and practical differences between Chinese medicine and Western biomedicine and creating new opportunities for Chinese medical doctors to perform their syndrome differentiation and therapy determination. In this way, this study demonstrates how contemporary Chinese medical doctors apprehend the post-Mao "modernization" movement and how they resisted or accommodated their practices to new situations. It also shows that the continuity of the traditional medical system is a dynamic and continuous process, which is inseparable from the social, political and economic development, taking place in China today. This study is based upon my participation, observation, and interviews with medical and non-medical people both in Xiangfen County of Shanxi Province and in Beijing, the People's Republic of China. |
