Zhang Xiaotong: Where Is the Hope of Chinese Medicine? (4) — The Breakout of Chinese Herbs
Where Is the Hope of Chinese Medicine? (4) — The Breakout of Chinese Herbs
During the SARS outbreak, I not only experienced Chang'an Avenue at its straightest, flattest, widest, and most silent; I also witnessed the near-miraculous power of Chinese herbs.
SARS — Chinese medicine and herbs came into their own
Pingxintang's medicine served not only the needs of the higher-ups — it met the prevention-and-treatment needs of quarantined schools, of the cleaners at Xiaotangshan, of migrant workers nearby who could not stop work and could not go home. Even Li Ka-shing sent someone by charter flight to pick up our medicine. The staff worked day and night on the front line. Between the speculative price-spike in herbal materials and the pro-bono distribution, we lost more than a hundred thousand yuan; and still we felt at ease. To let Chinese medicine serve the people, serve society — this was the shared wish.
None of what we did needed any supervisor, no monitor. It came from responsibility.
Experience proved that Chinese herbs have neither Tamiflu's price tag nor steroid treatment's harms, no ventilators needed, no fear. If we had summarized the experience then, and used the moment to loosen the ropes binding Chinese herbs, our medicines would now be striding wide, creating a sensation both at home and abroad.
The stalemate around Chinese herbs remains
And yet, fifteen years later, Chinese herbs are still not out the gate. On the international market, Chinese herbs still hold only 2–3 percent of share; even inside China there is no flowering of a hundred schools — they are off in a corner, waiting quietly to die.
"Sunk ships pass thousand sails in their wake, sick trees see ten thousand springs ahead" — we are fond of applying such lines to others' decline, but nobody wants to be the sunk ship or the sick tree. When your hands and feet are tightly bound and all you can do is watch others fly past, there is no word harsh enough for the taste.
From Shennong tasting the hundred herbs, Chinese medicine has grown through practice. "Why should the canal be so clear? — there is a living source feeding it." The strength of Chinese herbs comes from thousands of years of practice by hundreds of millions of people, and from the systematic reasoning distilled from that practice. Even then, to bring a single variety to maturity, you tested it on yourself, on your family, on close friends: "medicine not three generations — do not take the physic," the old saying runs. That describes the process.
Over Pingxintang's twenty-plus years, more than a dozen of our senior specialists have passed away. Each took with them a hundred-plus good formulas that they had accumulated over decades. A small Pingxintang alone — how many such losses must there be nationwide?
A strange scene: to treat illness is to break the law; to save a life is to be guilty of a crime
This pattern of development, ripened over thousands of years, has been broken by force. Chinese herbs have been stuffed wholesale into the approval procedure borrowed from Western medicine, strangling their vitality. The fine medicines that save people are treated like counterfeits. "Multi-agency joint enforcement" — a full display of the majesty of the law.
Ni Haiqing from Jinhua, Zhejiang, despite the pleas of more than a hundred recovered patients, went to prison. Regardless of motive or outcome, so long as you do not have approval, you break the law. To treat is crime; to save is offense. Where has the fairness of law gone? Where is the law's protection of the people? Worse still, the newly-amended Drug Law, Article 106, openly encourages informing — a revival of the ghosts of Wu Zetian and Lai Junchen.
What does "management" mean?
For years we have prized the finding, the solving, the guarding against of contradictions, and overlooked the most basic question:
Are you standing opposite the managed, gesturing imperiously at them — or standing on the same side as the managed?
Why can we not work together with the managed to solve problems — and in that way form a resonance of harmony?
In these people, why do we not see the shadow of "serve the people," not smell the scent of trust-in-the-masses, not catch sight of the image of a Communist?
As the fish in the water knows the water best, so the managed feel it most and speak of it most fairly.
In recent years foreign pharmaceutical companies have begun setting up factories in China to develop Chinese medicine. They inherit our traditional formulas; they pay handsomely for the old apothecaries we have let go; they redevelop our traditional techniques. And strangely, the policy leeway granted to them is far greater than what we grant our own.
Tu Youyou received the Nobel for artemisinin. The field argued a while about whether this was TCM's achievement or a deviation from TCM's path. I say: we need not weight foreign judgments so heavily. A pack of TCM laymen whose level is lower than a TCM enthusiast like myself — what is their judgment worth? If you still think they mean well, have a look at the Masonic plans from a hundred years ago and it'll be clear enough.
The shackling of policy
The National TCM Conference convened in October 2019 — the largest of its kind, correcting many of TCM's past deviations in one stroke. It took until December 26, 2020 — fourteen months later — for the National Medical Products Administration to respond with a promise to open up a little for Chinese herbs. To this day, implementing detail has not been seen. I do not know whether execution this slow qualifies as inaction, but I do admire the seriousness with which they study and internalize the spirit of the Party's instructions — fourteen months! Perhaps by now they can recite it backward.
I do not believe in lament and tears; I believe only in toughness and struggle. Chinese medicine needs the spirit of fortitude, authentic transmission, a looser policy, folk talents, and the help of post-modern science. As long as the seed is there, hope is there; as long as the seed is there, it can one day take deep root, split the boulder above it, and show the world the bearing of Chinese medicine and Chinese herbs.
(End of essay)
Postscript
This is an essay begun the year before last (May 2018) and finished today — interrupted for two and a half years, at last laid down in the tail of the gengzi year (February 2021). Though the situation has changed, the basic issues remain as before; so I am publishing it anyway. Such is the postscript.
— Zhang Xiaotong