Letters-TCM and Chinese geopolitics project

The Geopolitics of Infectious Disease Control: the Pandemic Flu Threat, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and U.S.-China Rivalry

An emergent rivalry between the U.S. and China over global hegemony has become a strong characteristic of current geopolitics. The emergence of the short-lived SARS and now flu in China in this backdrop has provided a new terrain—public health—over which this battle is being waged. The proposed project aims to elucidate the geopolitics of infectious disease control by focusing on how Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a cluster of medical practices tightly associated with Chinese identity (by both Chinese and U.S. peoples), is discursively constructed with respect to H5N1 influenza control in humans. I will examine 1) how discourse on TCM treatments of H5N1 influenza in humans plays a role in the Chinese nationalist project and 2) how TCM practices to prevent the spread of H5N1 influenza in humans are portrayed by the U.S. biomedical community.

This project’s salience lies in its focus on infectious disease control as a site of nation-making and geopolitical battles between nations. As a key aspect of the rivalry between the U.S. and emerging superpower China, this contestation over scientific and medical discourse in relation to H5N1, touted as a serious global threat of pandemic proportions, has crucial implications for all citizens—in China, the U.S. and globally. Ethnic Chinese are impacted most directly by the U.S.-China geopolitics of infectious disease control—be they in China or in the Chinese diaspora. Furthermore, women, who bear the brunt of infectious disease epidemics and their control measures—as caretakers and healthcare workers, are also particularly impacted. By expanding on the strictly U.S. scope of my dissertation project, the proposed research will make an important contribution to transnational feminist studies of race and gender operating in the context of macro-processes of nationalism and global politics.

The proposed research elaborates upon a central theme in my dissertation project—the role that the Orientalist spectre of a diseased China plays in the U.S. imperial project and in generating anti-Chinese sentiment—by considering disease control within a global framework, and by embarking on a Chinese-centered exploration of what disease control means to projects of Chinese nationalism in the backdrop of U.S.-China rivalry. For many countries around the world, and the powerful U.S. in particular, H5N1 is viewed as not only an imminent security threat emanating from China, but one traceable to a notion of China as repressive and underdeveloped. In this geopolitical context, TCM, viewed as a uniquely Chinese solution to controlling infectious diseases such as H5N1 influenza, has become central to the articulation of China’s nationalist discourse in presenting itself as a responsible emerging superpower—a leader rather than a pariah of global public health.

The proposed project initiates this timely study of the role of TCM in the geopolitics of H5N1 influenza discourse by drawing on three bodies of scholarship. First, it extends the medical anthropology literature on TCM practice in relation to biomedical hegemony in the context of changing Chinese cultural practices. Second, it is part of postcolonial studies of science and medicine, which emphasize the ways in which unequal power relations between nations and within them frame scientific knowledge production and medical practice. Most importantly, this project is situated within the theoretical framework of transnational feminist studies, which is concerned with social hierarchies ordered by factors such as gender, race, class, and sexuality in an increasingly transnational globe.

I will utilize the same textual analysis methodologies of my dissertation, focusing on both U.S.-based and Chinese scientific and medical sources—science and medical journals, public health publications and Internet Web sites—to research the role that TCM plays in discourses of H5N1 influenza control. Supplementing this archival research will be interviews of TCM practitioners about their own view of TCM’s role in H5N1 influenza control and their perception of any changing attitudes towards TCM expressed by patients, the biomedical establishment, and public and government opinion. (In addition to ethnographic experience in China as well as fluent Chinese language skills, I have basic familiarity with TCM from college coursework as a pre-med student.)

As a Women’s Studies scholar—one situated more specifically within the subfield of transnational feminist studies, I bring to this study an interdisciplinary methodological approach oriented towards attention to social injustice on multiple levels from the local, national, to transnational levels. More specifically, I come to this project with the training and experience of service, teaching, and research aiming to both understand and address the social inequalities facing women and people of color. In my dissertation project, as well as in prior research, I have focused on how the realms of science and medicine affect women and people of color in terms of access and benefit. In my teaching at both UCLA and City College of San Francisco, I have focused on pedagogical practices and curriculum design that draw out student diversity and center knowledge relevant to women and people of color. For example, in the course I designed and taught titled “Feminist Studies of Science and Technology”, I focused on gender, race, sexuality, class and imperialism in relation to science and technology. I also co-founded the student group “Women in the World” which put on feminist plays and other cultural programs to reach a wider UCLA audience. Moreover, I have participated in employment and community service outside of academia that has specifically focused on studying social barriers to women and people of color. I have worked at a non-profit organization that researched employment discrimination by testing the barriers of gender and race in hiring decisions, and at Caltech to research the institutional mechanisms causing young girls to lose interest in science. I have volunteered as a rape crisis counselor, a self-defense instructor for women, and an advocate for Chinese immigrant women in the garment industry.

To summarize, my proposed research on the role of TCM efforts to control H5N1 influenza as a focal point of Chinese nationalism and U.S.-China rivalry is a transnational feminist study of global governance whose significance lies in its attention to international hierarchy just as much as to social hierarchy.