China Medical Board (CMB) and the Changes in the Korean Medical Research Support System: Focusing on the Case of Matching Fund Establishment

Foreign aid has had critical impact on the development of Korean medicine since liberation in 1945. In particular, U.S. aid to Korean medical education, represented by the Minnesota Project, is often marked as a major turning point from Japanese-style to American-style medical education in Korea. However, there has been limited analysis of research, which has been a key function of medical schools and their affiliated hospitals. This paper examines the establishment of a system of medical research support in South Korea in the 1970s, focusing on the case of the China Medical Board (CMB). It explores how donor agencies transferred responsibility and authority to Korean counterparts through policy called matching-fund, and how this exit strategy affected the funding and utilization of medical research in Korea. As a backdrop to this policy shift, this study also examine the geopolitical context of U.S. aid policy shifts in the 1970s to show how aid was not only introduced but also exited in shaping the Korean medical research system. The case of the China Medical Board shows how a private aid organization formulated and implemented an exit strategy in the macro geopolitical context of the Nixon Doctrine and changes in U.S. foreign aid policy, and in the process shaped the Korean medical research funding system and its own efforts to secure funding. Rather than a binary narrative of aid versus post-aid, examining the accumulation and manifestation of Korean actors’ own experiences in foreign donor-driven decision-making provides an opportunity to look more critically at the process of shaping the contemporary Korean medical research funding system.