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Changing Medical Models in China: Organizational Options or Obstacles?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

AnElissa Lucas
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Extract

No nation begins anew – with or without a political revolution – without building upon and carrying forward selective aspects of an inherited past. Nor for that matter, is any national policy implemented without reference to past experience and accumulated resources. Despite claims of revolutionary transformation and self-sufficiency, no nation has developed a modern medical system either overnight or in isolation.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 83 , September 1980 , pp. 461 - 489
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1980

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References

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60. e.g. “Gang's fallacy on barefoot doctors criticized,” Guangming Daily in FBIS-PRC (19 December 1977), E 11, which equates the public health workers who served as doctors and peasants during the Great Leap Forward as the “embryonic form of the barefoot doctor.”

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62. FBIS-PRC (28 June 1976), E 1.

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64. Cf. e.g. ibid. with “Achievements in health work,” NCNA, Beijing in SCMP: 1619: 7 (24 September 1957).

65. FBIS-PRC (28 June 1976), E 1; FBIS-PRC (8 September 1978), E 17.

66. e.g. FBIS-PRC (8 September 1978), E 17; Sidel and Sidel (1973), pp. 88–94. See note 3 for distinctions made by this author between medical personnel “types.” The Dazhai commune, which was lauded during the Cultural Revolution as a model commune, has been implicated in recent criticisms of its former leader, Chen Yonggui.

67. FBIS-PRC (27 June 1977), E 6.

68. e.g. note 11, 1978 policy quote above.

69. Other analyses of Chinese policy shifts have focused more on changes in policy means than the long term continuities in policy goals emphasized in this study. E.g. Lampton, David M., The Politics of Medicine in China: The Policy Process, 1949–1977 (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Special Studies on China and East China, 1977)Google Scholar who analyses PRC health policy in terms of two conflicting Party lines, central coalition politics and bureaucratic interest group politics. For a critique and defence of Amitai Etzioni's cyclic theory of “normative,” “remunerative,” and “coercive,” means to Chinese policy implementation, see Andrew J. Nathan, “Policy Oscillations in the People's Republic of China: A Critique,” and Edwin A. Winckler, “Policy Oscillations in the People's Republic of China: A Reply,” C.Q., No. 68 (1976), pp. 720–50.