Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China

Abstract

Academic scholarship on Chinese medicine is well known for its excellent work on the medical theory, ancient and modern history, contemporary practice, education, politics, reinvention and transformations of medicine in China (e.g. Farquhar 1994; Goldschmidt 2008; Lei 2014; Scheid 2002; Taylor 2005; Unschuld 1985; Zhan 2009). Yet virtually none of this work explores the large and powerful industry that Chinese medicine has become over the past three decades, even while serious scholarship on the much smaller Ayurveda, Sowa Rigpa, Japanese and Korean herbal medicine industries has opened important new perspectives on contemporary Asian medicines (e.g. Coderey and Pordié 2020; Kloos and Blaikie 2022; Pordié and Hardon 2015). Breaking completely new ground within the field of Chinese medicine studies, Liz Chee’s outstanding bookMao’s Bestiary finally puts an end to this unsatisfactory situation. It provides nothing less than the first in-depth study of the transformation of Chinese medicine(s) into a modern pharmaceutical industry, which alone makes this book a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in Chinese medicine. The elegance of Mao’s Bestiary, however, lies in how Chee accomplishes this feat, and the different audiences she manages to bring together in doing so. First and foremost, Chee analytically connects her account of Chinese medicine to recent scholarship on Asian medical industries elsewhere, which constitutes an exception in an otherwise relatively self-contained field of study. Indeed, the concepts of reformulation regimes (Pordié and Gaudillière 2014), pharmaceuticalization (Kloos 2017), and Asian industrial medicines (Pordié and Hardon 2015) fundamentally inform this book, while also opening Chinese medicine for comparison across different Asian medical contexts. Second, the study’s main focus on animal-based