Address at the 20th-Anniversary Annual Meeting of the China Association of Chinese Medicine
(October 30, 1999)
Esteemed leaders, esteemed specialists, esteemed guests, esteemed comrades:
I am very glad to take part in this meeting. A meeting like this would have been unimaginable fifty years ago. In those days we called ourselves the generation in which all is finished — meaning the medicine and pharmacy of Chinese medicine would die out in our generation. After fifty years of struggle, and especially after the founding of the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chinese medicine has at last truly stepped up to the starting line. The past twenty-plus years have been a stretch of fine prospects. But as senior TCM practitioners who have given a lifetime to this work, we remain deeply uneasy about some present tendencies, and we dare not be blindly optimistic. What troubles us? The dilution of Chinese medicine within its own "development." Why dilution? On the clinical side and on the theoretical side alike, there is a tendency to weight the West heavy and the Chinese center light. If this is not reformed, Chinese medicine will become foam-Chinese medicine — pretty to look at, useless in practice. In the ward, Western medicine is in charge of treatment; in theory, Western-medical doctrines are used to reshape Chinese medicine. If we can no longer use Chinese medicine to solve the hard problems and the common, prevalent, and widely existing diseases of clinical medicine — what value remains in our existence?
I hold that the present middle-aged and younger TCM generation is, compared with the practitioners of fifty years ago, much better off in cultural cultivation and in working conditions. The question is whether the direction is set right. With the wrong direction, every effort runs to waste; what is developed is not Chinese medicine, or is only a part of Western medicine. Is that not tragic? This is not "guild" thinking — fighting only for the interests of TCM practitioners. The key point is this: what we hold in our hands is the jewel of Chinese culture, an achievement built up across millennia by countless patients' lives and the heart's-blood of countless sages. If it should die in our hands, would that not be a crime? Would we still dare to call ourselves children of Yan and Huang?
The present state of Chinese medicine in the world might be summed up: humankind cannot do without Chinese medicine. The world's richest, scientifically most powerful country — the United States — has 35 states and the District of Columbia where acupuncture is approved. Each year over one million patients receive acupuncture, with treatment-visits reaching ten million. The acupuncture practitioners now number over ten thousand, plus about three thousand Western MDs who also practice acupuncture. The schools that teach acupuncture and Chinese medicine as a main subject number 55. The Australian government has spent one to two hundred thousand dollars on study to decide whether to grant TCM professional status — and is, by report, near to recognizing TCM physicians' qualifications. Canada shows the same trend. All this proves: humankind cannot do without Chinese medicine. If we throw it away, not only will our descendants curse us — the people of the world will curse us.
Is Chinese medicine backward? On the contrary. Chinese medicine holds many things that are ahead of their time — and because they are ahead of their time, the modern eye says Chinese medicine is unscientific. For example, Western medicine has known the spleen has immune function for only some forty years. Already in the Han, Zhang Zhongjing said: "When the spleen flourishes through the four seasons, evil cannot strike." Is spleen flourishing — evil cannot strike not a statement that the spleen has immune function? More than 1,700 years ahead of the West. Again: Western medicine has known that besides respiration the lung has non-respiratory functions — that it produces prostaglandins, vasoconstrictors and vasodilators, and so on — for only a few decades. The Neijing has known the non-respiratory functions of the lung for over two thousand years, and the clinical results are conspicuous — equal to and more than the Western theory. Why do some insist on using Western theory to call this and that in Chinese medicine unscientific? Had we, forty years ago, said "the spleen, in flourishing, lets no evil in," "the lung has non-respiratory function," would we not have been denounced as unscientific? In the end, how does one judge what is science? We agree with what Deng Xiaoping promoted: practice is the sole criterion of truth.
The fate of Chinese medicine is tightly bound to the fate of the country and the nation. From 1840 onward, Chinese medicine has endured more than a hundred years of suppression and ruin — and that has come to an end. As with our country today, the time has come to climb upward. When our successors take the wheel properly and, by the inner law of Chinese medicine, combine it with new science and technology (including the latest from Western medicine) and walk our own road in earnest, the Chinese medicine and pharmacy of the 21st century will, once again, shine across the world. This is sure.
I have said my piece. Thank you all.