Chapter Five: Farewell to the God of Plague

Abstract

In the light of biopolitical production, socialist China's medical practice was marked by a heavy reliance on the creativity of the masses and a rejection of the technical bureaucracy. The anti-epidemic campaign exemplified a popular and grassroots medicine for the people and by the people. In films Withered Trees Meet Spring and Spring Sprouts, the political mobilization of the peasantry, the raising of political consciousness, and mass participation in the prevention of diseases project a vision of healthcare for the people. The biomedical movement targeted an increasingly privileged health program skewed in favor of elites and urbanites and divorced from the wellbeing of ordinary people. The medicine of the “barefoot doctor” entails the ecological understanding of the human body in sync with nature and is rooted in affective labor in healing the rifts between humans and nature.