Volume 2 Issue 4 - August 2007

by Volker Scheid

 The educational reforms set in motion by Ding Gan-ren, the founder of the Shanghai Technical College of Chinese Medicine, and others during the early years of the Chinese Republic changed Chinese medicine in two important ways. They began the institutionalization of learning that continued under the People’s Republic after 1949, and they gradually moved elite Chinese medicine in the direction of a distinctive profession rather than an occupational group. In this sense the recent developments of Chinese medicine under Maoism, Dengism, and Jiang Zemin’s reign are just different tracks of a more comprehensive movement towards modernity.