Advancing Chinese-Western Cooperation with a Scientific Attitude — An Open Letter to Chen Keji
Dear Mr. Chen Keji:
The book I published this year, On the Revival of Chinese Medicine, may not yet have reached you. On the occasion of your coming to Hong Kong Baptist University to receive your honorary doctorate, please accept a copy and offer your corrections. Together I send the two articles I wrote this year: A Plain Discussion of Chinese-Western Cooperation and A Plain Discussion of Chinese-Western Cooperation Continued. I also send two articles by Mr. Chen Shikui that "criticize" me — for comparison.
Your time in Hong Kong is tight. To not delay you, and to give you space for full and calm thought on the questions I raise, I put the following in writing, leaving deeper discussion for another time.
1. On slogans and on truth-seeking
There have been too many slogans on "Chinese-Western integration" — old slogans, new slogans, big slogans, small slogans, one after another. As if to advance "Chinese-Western integration" one need only rely on slogans. In your article "Unity and Cooperation, Coexistence and Co-Construction" in the China Chinese Medicine News on October 14, 2004, and in your remarks at the "Nanjing International TCM Forum and Second World TCM Congress" of October 20, 2004, the slogans you offered include — "to look at the present and grasp the future, to preserve vigorous life-force, is our present strategic need"; "Chinese-Western integration has no endpoint; TCM modernization never lowers the curtain; it must advance and refine with the times"; "in inheritance, innovation, harmony, fusion, development, preserve TCM's own thousand-form character"; "work together for TCM modernization"; "innovate plurally, achieve newness"; "complement to win together"; "lift the times' light boat, encourage innovation and self-surpass"; "practice hard, raise efficacy, benefit humanity"; "the more fully fused with traditional TCM theory, the more truly mature beauty and contribution to humankind"; "more tolerance, fewer reproaches; more help, fewer labels"; "TCM modernization and Chinese-Western integration brook no delay"; "may TCM's footprints reach the globe; may TCM's plum and peach blossom across the world"; "wash away every torment, helplessness, doubt, suspicion; inherit fine tradition, build advanced culture"; "achieve TCM modernization, advance Chinese-Western integration, allow TCM's upright entry into the mainstream of world medicine, build a strong China, advance with passion"; "developing TCM, advancing integration, achieving modernization is the bold unique scenery move"; "keep the green of Chinese medical culture"; "create new compounds, go to the world"; "modern innovation model"; "unique high-method model"; "joint-use interaction model"; "not closed, not exclusive, harmony with difference, inherit and develop, jointly contribute to prosper Chinese national medical culture"…
These are nothing but slogans — and there are this many in a 2,500-word piece.
I do not wholly oppose slogans; slogans are often a way for senior administrators to summon everyone to do something. But specialists, on scientific questions, have neither duty nor need to manufacture slogans. Chinese-Western integration itself began as a summons or slogan from senior administrators. The specialist's task is, on the basis of full research and scientific argument, to solve how to do it. In today's China — after reform and opening — Chinese people are no longer at the stage of not knowing what to do today without a slogan from above. Especially in the age of respect science, science and technology are the first productive force, establish a scientific outlook on development, one should know that the science's own development is first an inner-traditional historical evolution. The age of pushing TCM and integration by slogans is gone. The most pressing problem is the confusion and free interpretation around "integration" — which demands honest reflection. The most urgent responsibility is, in a truth-seeking scientific attitude, to give "integration" a precise and standard definition that accords with the scientific principles of TCM and Western medicine. Once the field understands and accepts that definition, how to do it will follow. As member of the CAS and President of the Chinese Society for Integration of Traditional and Western Medicine, your responsibility is great. Rather than urge with slogans, give the concept a scientific definition.
2. On two and one
"Chinese medicine and Western medicine are two wholly different medical-science systems," or is there only one — Western? This is the first question in any definition of "integration." For nearly a hundred years, people have treated Chinese medicine as a corpse to be dissected — using Western reductionist methods to extract whatever could be used. Or they have arbitrarily declared TCM to be experiential medicine, denying the scientific principle of its foundational theory and its clinical-guidance role. A China TCM News article on October 11, 2004 declared: "Whether English, American, German, Italian, or Chinese, Japanese, French, Indian, there is only one mainstream medicine"; "TCM westernization" is "inevitable" and "perfectly normal"; to stress TCM's distinctiveness and strength is "Western-phobia," "search for the old," "wrap yourself up" — so "if you still want to be mainstream medicine, that path is closed" (Lü Weibo). These are in fact mainstream views within the integration community. Under them, the Constitution's provision to develop modern medicine and our country's traditional medicine could be discarded; the new-period health work principle of Chinese and Western equally weighted could be discarded. More awkwardly, the integration community's own ground has been dug out from under it. If the world's developed countries' and China's "mainstream medicine" are all Western, then using Western reductionist methods to draw what is useful from experiential Chinese medicine into Western medicine is enough, isn't it? Integration begins from one and ends in one. So-called Chinese-Western integrated medicine — where does it grow? If integration's end-state is to transform TCM experience into the Western system, TCM's reason for existence is gone. How then to explain the 2001 Spring Festival friendship-meeting line that "Chinese-Western integration is the important path of inheriting and developing TCM"?
You perhaps know that I have worked in TCM science-studies and soft-science for more than twenty years. From my December 1993 Science & Technology Review article "Some Thoughts on TCM Modernization," my thought and research have been broadly fixed or near maturity. Then I questioned the conceptual confusion of "integration" on many sides. In 1995 I published "Research on the Definition of Chinese-Western Integration" and "On the Definition of Chinese Medicine." Alongside defining "integration" and "Chinese medicine," I also studied the definition of Western biomedicine. As I said in Continued: I do not say my definitions are unerring; I would warmly hope for academic critique and scientific testing. But I can without shame say that, drawing from East-West history, culture, metaphysics, philosophy, science — and at the scientific, technical, and experiential levels of TCM and Western medicine — the thinking is right. When these three definitions are understood and acknowledged by the field, they will fill several blanks in Chinese medical dictionaries. I am careful in what I say, but on fill blanks I am not exaggerating.
When Cang Jie made characters, each character carried a definite meaning. In the development and spread of culture and science, every new concept needs a definition to constrain its content. Because research is rational thought, and concepts are thought's cells. If a concept appears and is not defined for long, thought based on it can only be summed up in one word: confused. "Chinese-Western integration" was raised nearly 50 years ago — its definition is still under "discussion" (Chen Shikui). And some hold that there is no need to ask "what 'Chinese-Western integration' is" (Shen Ziyin) — no need to argue "how to define it" (China TCM News, September 24, 2004). The one putting forward this view is a CAS member; I do not know how his "rational thought" actually proceeds in research. The deeper awkwardness: without a definition, he is still serving as discipline leader and as CAS-member of Chinese-Western integration. The history of science will speak.
3. Cooperation and integration
Once we recognize at the scientific level that TCM and Western medicine are two different systems, the relation between them is then cooperation at the technical and experiential level. To merge them into one at the scientific level — looking at East-West history, culture, metaphysics, philosophy, history of science — has no foreseeable possibility. Thomas Kuhn's incommensurability principle bears this out. My 2000 article "On the Incommensurability of TCM and Western Medicine," published in the Science & Technology Review, argued from three sides: research object, research method, conceptual (categorical) system. Plain Discussion of Chinese-Western Cooperation (Natural Therapeutics, Taipei, 2004 No. 2) carried this further from Aristotle's form-and-matter principle. Chen Shikui's "Also on Chinese-Western Integration — Refuting Several Errors of Li Zhizhong" gives a "definition" of "Chinese-Western integration" and "integrated medicine" that one could really laugh at. First, he lacks the general sense of discipline-classification and definition. Second, he plainly lacks logical sense yet wants to play with logical vocabulary — the more he describes, the darker it gets. Third, and crucially, he has not really done a serious deep comparison of TCM and Western medicine in the three dimensions. What he sees is always the structural-substantive person, not the informational-state person; what he affirms is always reductionist method, blind to systems method; what he acknowledges is always the Western knowledge-system described by concrete concepts, blind to TCM described by analogical concepts. He stands wholly with the views, methods, standards of Western biomedicine, neglecting that the paradigms of TCM and Western medicine differ — so he cannot grasp that TCM and Western medicine are incommensurable and not translatable.
In science-studies and soft-science research I hold this: to know a discipline's today, one must first know its yesterday; to know its future, even more its day-before-yesterday. Otherwise one is shallow or lost. Everyone knows the Huangdi Neijing lays the scientific (theoretical) foundation of Chinese medicine. But on what foundations was the Neijing itself built? Without knowing the pre-Neijing literature, history, philosophy, one cannot understand deeply what the Neijing lays down. Spring-and-Autumn to Qin-Han was the first peak in all human culture and science — not the primitive start of culture or civilization. The deep deposits of that first peak cannot be dismissed by a few words like "search-the-old" and "backward." If Mr. Chen Shikui were not dissecting Chinese medicine as a corpse from Western standpoints, he would withdraw the "definition" he gave in "Also on Chinese-Western Integration."
4. Exchange and discussion
We are both long-time scholars. We know academic democracy, academic freedom, let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools contend. Whether on Chinese medicine or on integration, we need to face academic discussion of different views with the heart of harmony with difference. Old "big-character poster," "denunciation" tactics — using language as violence to disrupt academic discussion — have long become historical wreckage. To disrupt academic discussion with such methods is to walk into history's wrong side.
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