The Chinese Pharmaceutical Revolution: Pharmaceutical Crisis and the Scientization of Chinese Drugs, 1919-1936

Abstract

This paper explores the new attempts to reform the Chinese pharmaceutical practice by applying mechanical and chemical intervention in republican China. Since 1910s, major deficiencies of Chinese drugs had been identified in terms of the absence of scientific research and the incompetence in the market competition with imported western drugs. An urgent situation of “Chinese pharmaceutical crisis” was proposed by contemporaries and different initiatives and actions were undertook by different groups of people. This paper examines two mainstream approaches in republican period to renovate the Chinese pharmaceutical practices. The first was proposed by West and Japanese trained pharmacologists who keenly stressed the necessity to undertake rigorous scientific study of the traditional Chinese materia medica, which would finally lead to a universal standard for drug research and production making fully use of nationally produced material. The other was a more controversial yet pragmatic approach favored by industrialists to seek the possibility to reform the Chinese drug manufacture by imitating the modern technology applied by western drugs. Both of the two attempts called their own practice as “Chinese Pharmaceutical Revolution”, which further demonstrates the contested and tentative nature of republican pharmaceutical renovations. The transformation of Chinese pharmaceutical practices was not a coherent idea or practice in republican China, and throughout the process, the historical actors contested over the practice of reforming Chinese drugs, mobilized the public opinion, and created new visions of “Chinese pharmaceutical revolution”. Political instability, social changes, market forces, and nationalism were deeply embedded in the process, and the result of the “revolution” reached a compromise, though volatile and controversial, between the two systems of medicine, and between the scientific dream and the social reality, which continues to shape the pharmaceutical practices in contemporary China.