Facing Three Great Problems Squarely — to Achieve the Revival of Chinese Medicine
The Modern Education News reports of August 10, September 21, September 28, and October 19, 2001 — "Save Chinese Medicine" — laid bare the dead-end of traditional TCM scholarship. Articles of this kind have been appearing for over twenty years; they no longer draw reader attention, let alone interest. Through twenty-plus years of slogans, propaganda, and meetings about reviving Chinese medicine, Chinese medicine has gradually grown cold.
This malignant turn has long been underway, accelerated and sharpened by the Cultural Revolution. To shout a needle and a handful of grass, that's Chinese medicine was to demote it to a craft needing no knowledge. People remembered only the form a needle and a handful of grass and threw away the real substance of Chinese medicine.
Over twenty-plus years many causes have been sought for the revival of Chinese medicine; many prescriptions for rescue have been written. None succeeded. The reason is simple: the real knot has not been found. Everything stays empty. And even when the real cause is found, without a child as in The Emperor's New Clothes — no one will speak, no one dares speak, no one is allowed to speak. There is a child, but he is not allowed to speak. You open your mouth and they cover it; you open it again and they cover your nose to suffocate you.
The real cause is clear to me. I see three.
First — Chinese-medicine practitioners do not know Chinese medicine
Without knowing the true, how can one tell the false? False TCM swells like a rolling snowball; true TCM shrinks like a snowman in the sun, soon to vanish.
The main thing is: Chinese-medicine practitioners themselves do not know Chinese medicine — how then can they carry out the duty of Chinese medicine?
False TCM keeps spreading overseas. The more enthusiastically foreigners promote Chinese medicine, the faster the true Chinese medicine is destroyed. See the August 1, 2000 Reference News p. 4, "More and More American Hospitals Practice TCM Therapy": what they study is false TCM, what they use is false TCM. The April 5, 2001 Reference News p. 7, "Chinese Herbal Medicine Gathers Force in the US," reports all false Chinese herbs. The media meanwhile celebrate Chinese medicine's "going to the world." I at once wrote Chinese Medicine in the Eyes of Foreigners to correct the errors and halt the negative damage. I sent it broadly to the Guangming Daily, Wenhui Daily, and many medical journals — to this day not a single character has been set in type.
People do not know Chinese medicine, find a false TCM doctor, are harmed — and the blame is on real TCM.
Second — avoiding-illness, evading-physician
The Zengyun says: to cover up a fault is yi (taboo). The Gongyang Zhuan: taboo for the honored, taboo for the kin, taboo for the worthy. The Zuo Zhuan: to taboo the country's ill is propriety. Yan and Huang are a ritual people, so taboo is one of their virtues — but avoiding-illness, evading-physician can kill. Mozi was clear-headed: catastrophe cannot be tabooed (Mozi · Against Fatalism).
Today the TCM field is mute on the dark side of TCM's enterprise development. Long enough, the piled feathers sink the boat (Stratagems of the Warring States, Wei) — that will be Chinese medicine's end.
Why this taboo? For senior administrators, not tabooing exposes mistakes — achievements destroyed at a stroke. For TCM practitioners, not tabooing may offend "those above" and break the rice bowl. For the false TCM, not tabooing is even less bearable — they would have no foothold. The taboo amounts to drinking poison to stop thirst (Hou Han Shu).
I once wrote a piece Restore My Original True Face — utterly frank. On the mainland no one dared print it; Hong Kong's Asia Medical magazine (2001 No. 1) ran the full text on eleven pages.
Third — change leadership style
A poor leadership style, though present in a very small number, is hugely harmful. The matters are many and long; let me borrow a press clipping.
Two thought-provoking news items
Workers' Daily, August 31, Zhao Gang's article: two recent news items make one think.
First, in Xinjiang County of Shanxi there is a Xinjiang Textile Ltd. that has been profitable for the 50 years since founding. Asked how it has continued to do well while the whole textile sector is depressed, the leadership's answer was telling: "Our enterprise lies in a remote place; superiors and leaders rarely come." Second, in Dehui, Jilin Province, there is a hamlet named Yang Balang. The villagers hung a great bell at the village entrance; whenever they spotted cadres and law-enforcement personnel approaching, the bell was rung. Hearing it, the hundred-plus households would swarm the entrance and bar the way. Since 1995, scarcely any township cadre has set foot in Yang Balang.
Reading these, I feel a kind of black humor. For leaders and superior organs to go deep into the grassroots has been a fine tradition of the Party, beloved by the people. How has it become, in some places, a public hazard, raising bell-warnings like Japanese invaders entering the village? The scholar Cao Jinqing described it: today's Chinese peasants endure three harms: natural disaster, the harm of some local government, and market price fluctuation — and "of these three the peasants are most helpless against and most hate the harm of local government." Why? Local government — the official close to the people — is the base of administration. If the official is worthy, the people benefit first; if unworthy, the people suffer first. So these two news items present a test paper.
In the past fifty years (including ages 60 to 90 before retirement, when I worked at the front of clinic, teaching, and writing), I did a fair amount of work documented in writing. Like writing an article: the leader gave only the topic; the content, frame, style, line of thought, brushwork, rhetoric — I worked out myself. The result was usually good. By contrast, work done under a mother-in-law's pointing finger came out dry and rigid, with no shine. That is my deep, personal experience.
I am not advocating anarchy — only pointing to a management ill.
These three great problems in the TCM field — if not resolved through and through, however well the work is done, will still be disturbed and broken by them. They are the termites of TCM's revival cause. As with many buildings — bronze-poured, iron-cast, reinforced concrete — once the white ants breed, they bring it down.