Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021. x, 276 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$26.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1404-1.
Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China by Liz P. Y. Chee provides a valuable history of the role that the state played in popularizing and institutionalizing the use of animal bodies in Chinese medicine under Mao Zedong (1893–1976) during the early 1950s, the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and then later during the 1980s and 1990s under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997). Chee argues that the ubiquitous use of faunal drugs in Chinese medicine that we see today is a recent development dating to the twentieth century—one that has its origins in the various policies instituted by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that mandated the study of animal bodies for the production of animal-based Chinese medicine.
Chee’s research provides many important contributions to understanding the relatively recent history of the presence of animal-based drugs in Chinese medicine. I will focus on three of these contributions. To begin, Chee clearly explains how the slogan “Abandon Yi (Chinese medicine), Retain Yao (Chinese drugs),” common before the revolution, but still used in the early 1950s, led to the creation of factories and factory-based laboratories for researching, finding, and making new drugs derived from indigenous sources (29–32). While the focus in these factories was on plant-based medicines, Chee notes that the state’s involvement during this time provided the administrative and ideological scaffolding necessary for the manufacture of new faunal medicines during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. In doing so, she clearly demonstrates how bureaucratic agendas were in part responsible for the explosion of faunal medicines and therapies regularly used in Chinese medicine at this time.
After mining an extensive number and variety of sources, in chapter 2 Chee puts together a detailed picture of how the Soviet Union influenced Chinese drug-making policies related to faunal medicalization. As she rightly points out, little work has been done on this important connection; instead much of the research on medicine in China in the twentieth century focused on the ways that Republican China borrowed from the biomedical knowledge of Europe, the United States, and Japan (53). However, Chee argues that much of the knowledge about the treatment of disease and drug production in the 1950s came from the Soviet Union, which employed a medical science informed by indigenous and folk medicine practices—an approach that validated Chinese research on “traditional” Chinese medicine (55–56). It was Soviet medical science, then, that encouraged faunal medicalization and thus significantly contributed to Chinese interest in medicalizing animal bodies and creating drugs from animal tissue.
Finally, Chee is, if not the first, one of the only researchers to investigate in detail the effects of Deng’s reform policies on the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. Throughout her book, she specifies how the bodies of certain animals were raised and used for medicinal purposes and in some cases processed for export. She brilliantly traces a through line from the raising of deer on farms along the Soviet border in the early 1950s to the farming of musk deer, seahorses, and beetles during the Great Leap Forward, the use of chicken blood as a form of tissue therapy in the Cultural Revolution, and the establishment of bear farming for the collection of bear bile during the Deng era. She indicates that though the manufacture and export of animal bodies in the form of medicines and powders was justified for the economic benefits it brought to the state during all of these periods, it was not until Deng’s reforms that faunal medicines would be openly associated with the economy: “Under Deng, the production of animal-based medicines would be discursively and practically relocated in the realm of the economy, signaled by the use of the term ‘economic animals’ (jingji dongwu) to include even more species with supposed medicinal value” (138). She uses as her archetypal example for this period the presence of large-scale bear bile farming operations, noting that the popularity and, therefore, lucrative nature of bear bile farming derived, on the one hand, from the descriptions of bear bile formulas and their therapeutic efficacy found in classical medical texts and, on the other hand, from new and often foreign research on its health benefits (154–156).
Indeed, beyond the three mentioned here, Chee’s work makes many other important contributions to the history of Chinese medicine during the Mao and Deng eras, not the least of which is her discussion of the ways chicken blood was utilized as a common therapy for a large variety of health conditions during the Cultural Revolution (112–121). Chee employs a wide range of sources in her study including classical medical texts and materials from the Republican era, Chinese research articles from the 1950s to the 1990s describing the use of animal medicinals for healing certain diseases and the ways to properly manufacture pharmaceuticals, handbooks that discuss the most effective methods for farming certain species, newspaper articles, and written documents that articulate government policies and laws which support and encourage research on animal bodies for drug production. The breadth of these sources alone commends this very thorough and fascinating study. I strongly recommend Mao’s Bestiary to Sinologists, medical historians, animal studies scholars, and Chinese medicine practitioners interested in the history of the use of animal bodies in medical contexts. However, this book is very accessible to the non-specialist and thus would be of relevance to anyone who has a general interest in twentieth-century Chinese history and Chinese medicine.
Scott Hurley
Luther College, Decorah