The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China

Socialist Medicine and the New Man

C. Lynteris

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137293831
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Assuming power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party was soon faced with a crucial problem: how to construct the socialist 'New Man'? Using Foucault's theory of 'technologies of the self', Lynteris examines the conflict between self-cultivation and the abolition of the self in the biopolitically neuralgic field of 'socialist medicine'.

1

The Sublimation of Skill

Abstract: At achieving power in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party had no choice but to assimilate the pre-revolutionary, Nationalist, medical apparatus into the new state structure; this created a rift in the Party’s ideological hegemony. The Patriotic Hygiene Campaign, Mao’s episodic public health response to the alleged biological warfare attack waged against China by the US in the context of the Korean War functioned was a means of challenging the significance of medical expertise and promoting the model of ‘people’s war’, or mass mobilisation, as the correct way of constructing socialism in China. It was to this challenge of medical authority that the first re-interpretation of Bethune’s ‘spirit of selflessness’ was performed on part of the head of the medical establishment. Fu Lien-chang subverted the memorial’s radical semantic content by means of an exegesis that placed emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge and skill as a prerequisite of the selfless offering of one’s services to the masses. This technocrat formula of sublimation dictated that in order to sacrifice yourself for the masses, you first had to become someone worthy of being sacrificed.

Lynteris, Christos. The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137293831

We want to build a new national culture, but what kind of culture should it be?

(Mao Zedong, 1940, The New Democracy¹)

The conclusion of the Chinese civil war, with the thwarting of Nationalist forces across the Chinese mainland and the institution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the firm control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, was an event unlike any other in the history of socialist revolutions. Contrary to the Russian October, when the Bolsheviks took power through a swift coup that allowed them to consolidate their position in the dust of an already successful anti-monarchist revolution, the Chinese October was the result of more than 20 years of civil strife, urban uprisings and guerrilla warfare. As a result, the men and women who found themselves in control of the vast Chinese territories in October 1949 had been already running various forms of mini-states, actually much larger than most European countries at the time, such as the Jiangxi Soviet Republic or the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia Border Region. Through these experiments with socialist state-formation, different modes of governmentality and biopolitical management had emerged and contended, leading to the predominance of the so-called mass line, which dictated a dialectical relation between the Party and the subjects inhabiting the areas under its control:

All right leadership stems necessarily from the masses and is directed to them. That means: take ideas from the masses (scattered, non-systematic) and concentrate them (turn them through study to concrete and systematic ones), then go to the masses and spread these ideas and explain them until the masses embrace them like their own, upkeep them, and transform them to action, thus examining their validity in practice. Then again gather the ideas from the masses and again return them so that they improve. And so on and so forth in an endless spiral, where ideas become ever more valid, ever more vital, and ever richer. This is the Marxist–Leninist theory of knowledge, our methodology.²

Yet, as the Communist Party assumed control of mainland China as a whole, an old and sombre problem raised its head to face the unripe conquerors. As Levenson has argued, since ancient times ruling China as a state (guo) and being the sovereign of China as a civilisation (tianxia) were clearly distinct notions and realities.³ The successful negotiation of these two coordinates of governmentality, the consolidation of a fecund relation between guo, as administrative control, and tianxia, as political hegemony, was a top priority for every new dynasty, including the Communist one. In order not only to reign but also to rule the Communists had to conquer China not just militarily but politically too.

In this quest for hegemony one persistent obstacle consisted in the remnants of the ancien regime, which, following the Republican revolution of 1911 the Nationalists had either failed to eradicate, or were simply all too willing to recuperate under their increasingly militaristic raison d’état. This essentially parochial enemy was no other than the landlords and the culture of superstition, decadence and servility they embodied and reproduced in daily social practice and interaction with their dependents. The Land Reform Campaigns, launched by the Communist Party both before and immediately after Liberation, hit hard on the productive basis of this enemy,⁴ through the mass mobilisation of dispossessed peasants who were encouraged to vent their anger and shuo kou or ‘speak bitterness’⁵ against their local tyrants.

Besides liquidating landlords ‘as a class’, these campaigns also had the function of socialising poor peasants into socialist values and discipline, through enclosing and ritualising their grievances in forms productive for Party hegemony. Fierce they were, yet in a much more profound way these campaigns were actually conductive to the containment of grassroots social violence within the bounds of a Party-sanctioned behavioural and semantic norm. The work of these accusatory rituals⁶ was to transform self-organised, autonomous social violence into political violence. This signified the substitution of concrete local and particular forms of violence with a uniform, transcendental and essentially abstract form of violence, a violence irrespective of local causes and conditions, reflecting supposedly universal macro-historical processes identified in a reified image of the class struggle, which had little in common with the dynamic form originally conceived by Marx. As a result, this transformation of social violence into political violence rendered the interpretation of each and every violent act dependent on the symbolic sanction of the Party as the sole authority on the laws of the ‘historical process’ as defined by the class struggle.

This enclosure thus created a new master-signifier to which the duties and bonds of filial piety, traditionally reserved for the patriarchal head of the family, could be transferred. In this sense, we can say that these mass campaigns were, in Lacanian terms, technologies of hysterisation of class hatred, i.e. technologies aimed at enclosing genuine grassroots rebelliousness into an anticipation of the Other/Party’s desire for power,⁷ into a mechanism for the achievement of a new form of filial bondage and at the same time of a new form of the fetishised state.

At the same time, however, the achievement of political hegemony over China faced a much more pertinent enemy: a wide scientific stratum that had failed or simply not opted to follow the fleeing Nationalist armies and remained at its post, forming the spinal cord of the state. These urbanite specialists might have been deprived of their properties, yet they possessed something far more valuable and at the same time dangerous for the new regime: expertise.⁸

If this intelligentsia was vital for the continuity of the state, it was also a terrible threat to the Party’s tianxia. How could the Communist Party hope to rule ‘all under heaven’ when its core scientific apparatus was composed of alien elements with an essentially bourgeois outlook? What was needed was to train party-minded experts, in order to replace the old guard, and to break its cultural hegemony over scientific research and knowledge. Yet this was inevitably a long-term process that in the meanwhile left the party-state exposed to a potential scientific fifth column in its ranks. This being an enemy who could not be liquidated without the state collapsing with it, but who could not be tolerated without the Party endangering its governmental discontinuity with the old regime, it posed a unique problem for state-socialism.

Uneasy consolidation in medicine

If one is to go back to the autumn of 1949 or even the winter of 1950 and read specialist journals such as the flagship of the Chinese Medical Association (CMA), the Chinese Medical Journal (CMJ), he or she would be hard pressed to perceive a revolution had occurred. For the first three years of the People’s Republic of China, only hesitant editorials bore witness to the fact that something essential had changed. Everything else continued as normal: doctors ran their private clinics and pharmacies whilst researchers worked in their labs and presented their studies in much the same spirit as in pre-revolutionary times. Here is an example of the essentially defensive, and reluctantly pro-revolutionary discourse adopted by the first editorial of the CMJ after Liberation:

The Chinese Medical Journal has a brilliant history of over thirty years. It has contributed much not only to the development and promotion of medical education in China, but also to the raising and maintenance of a high standard in the principles and practice of medicine among Chinese medical workers. Indeed the Journal has played a vital role in disseminating knowledge of the medical sciences besides being a real stimulus to the medical profession in the pursuit of clinical and experimental researches ... Science can grow only when it is rooted firmly among the people. Only when working among the people and for the people can science grow and flourish. The previous Chinese political system would not allow science to develop among the people. The political system of New China, on the other hand, is aimed at promoting science among the people and to assist and foster our scientists to become scientific workers of the people and for the people.⁹

This was hardly a satisfactory kowtow to Party power on part of the medical techno–scientific elite, which felt safe enough in the knowing that the Communists had no choice but to fully incorporate the pre-existing Nationalist apparatus of both applied and theoretical medicine, with the exception of a handful of ‘famous physicians who had had close relationships with the “imperialists” ’.¹⁰ In fact, the Party’s reliance on what effectively was a small army of politically and culturally alien scientists was not a surprise but something long anticipated through the tactical decriminalisation of intellectuals as ‘national bourgeois elements’ during the civil war (esp. 1945–1949). Thus after Liberation, China’s medical establishment remained under the control of medical experts, most of who had been serving loyally under the Nationalists.¹¹ This toleration of Guomindang elements at the head of the medical establishment of the young People’s Republic reflected the vital necessity of medical experts for the new regime struggling to construct a comprehensive biopolitical apparatus that could render China’s vast population scientifically intelligible and politically manageable.

Such experts were desperately lacking within the Par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Transcription
• Introduction
• 1  The Sublimation of Skill
• 2  Self-Cultivation: Confucian Roots
• 3  Red or Expert?
• 4  Abolishing the Self as Private Property
• Conclusion
• Index