PhD candidate in the Department of History at Duke University
Yaming You is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the history department at Duke and member of the 2025–26 von der Heyden Global Fellows cohort. Her scholarly work focuses on multiple areas, including: the history of medicine, pharmaceuticals, and public health; environmental history; and the Communist Revolution in 20th-century China. Her dissertation project is titled “The Syringe Body: A Biography of Injection in Modern China.”
You’s focus on history of medicine and pharmacy rethinks historical attempts to provide equitable healthcare and pharmaceutical access to impoverished regions in communist China from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Panel 3| Science, Industry, and the Logics of Reform
GOOD MEDICINE, BAD MEDICINE, WEIRD MEDICINE: THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY’S WARTIME MEDICAL POLICIES IN THE 1940s
Abstract
This paper looks at the development of medical policies centered around Mao Zedong’s call for “cooperation between Chinese and Western medicine” in the Communist revolutionary bases during the War of Resistance against Japan in the 1940s. The CCP proposed the project of “scientizing Chinese medicine, Sinicizing Western medicine” as a way to forge cooperation between Chinese and Western medicine.
This paper argues that the CCP’s cooperative policy regarding Chinese and Western medicine (also occasionally referred to as old and new medicine) had an important political agenda: eliminating shamanism or witchcraft and supporting the CCP’s broader anti-superstitious campaign.
Health work and anti-superstition co-constituted one another in the Communist revolutionary agenda of building a united front in the 1940s. The cooperation between Chinese and Western medicine made possible for the CCP to decide what medical practices were legitimate, while eliminating what it considered to be illegitimate forms of “shamanism and superstition.”
Through offering alternative pharmaceutical products, medical care, and public health services, the CCP competed with religious/superstitious organizations to vie for legitimacy in governing the unfamiliar rural northern China.
