TCM Will Rise Again—but the TCM That Rises Will Be an Innovated TCM

Today the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party closed. Though I do not care about politics, deep down I truly hope our China can become stronger. I believe that only when our country grows strong will Chinese civilization stand tall once more among the nations of the world, and the true value of our national treasure, TCM, be more deeply recognized by people everywhere.

Lu Xun once said: "TCM is nothing but a deliberate or unwitting fraud." For many years, because of Lu Xun's enormous influence, this saying became the most prominent banner that anti-TCM people could hold aloft; I myself was once deeply influenced by Lu Xun's attitude.

Now I gradually understand that what Lu Xun's words reflected were the humiliations our Chinese nation suffered in modern history—the pain that pierced the bones of every descendant of Huaxia, and the deep national inferiority that came from the heart.

At bottom, it was because we were not strong enough that we lacked confidence in our own culture and traditional medicine.

In 2017 I had to go to the United States for business; I attended the visa interview at the US Embassy three times in a row and was rejected each time. After each rejection, standing at the embassy gate, I thought: if our China were just a little stronger, we Chinese would have no trouble getting visas anywhere, because no one would suspect us of wanting to immigrate illegally to enjoy their affluent life.

Just in the last couple of days, a friend from my hometown has been writing articles on the history of the war of resistance in our county. Reading the historical materials he has collected, I felt a voice deep inside calling out that I should do something to make my motherland stronger.

During the War of Resistance against Japan, our county was a major battlefield in the defense of Wuhan, and fierce fighting took place there. More than 20,000 troops under Bai Chongxi fought bitterly in several of our county's towns; over 17,000 fell, and they wiped out nearly 10,000 Japanese. Truly, every inch of land was bought with an inch of blood.

When I was a child, the elders back home told us this history. According to elderly people who lived through it, the officers and soldiers of Bai Chongxi's unit fought extraordinarily hard to protect the integrity of the nation's territory.

On a hilltop near our village, a company of soldiers charged to the front line. When the cooks from the rear carried the food up, all they saw was corpses covering the ground; not a single soldier had survived.

When I was in primary school, my teacher once took us to visit a battlefield near our village where Bai Chongxi's men had fought. Even then we could still pick up many bullet casings on the hill. As a child I did not deeply feel the shame of such history; but now, reading these words, I feel the pain from the bottom of my heart.

War is unavoidable, yet of the four great ancient civilizations, only our Chinese civilization, though repeatedly baptized in war, still survives today.

Although our past isolation and arrogance once left Chinese civilization lagging behind the world, viewed against the broad sweep of history, our Chinese nation, despite repeated falls and beatings, has each time been reborn through blood. Chinese civilization has revived again and again, drawing the essence of foreign cultures to strengthen itself anew.

From antiquity to the present, TCM has been bound closely to the fate of Chinese civilization. When Chinese civilization flourishes, TCM flourishes; when Chinese civilization declines, TCM declines with it.

Chinese civilization has great inclusiveness and has always absorbed the strengths of foreign cultures to perfect itself. Our TCM is not a medicine created wholly by the Chinese ancestors; it has continually drawn the essence of outstanding medical knowledge from abroad.

As early as the Tang dynasty, frankincense (ruxiang) and myrrh (moyao) from Africa entered China and became part of Chinese materia medica. Safflower (honghua) and datura (manluo) also came to China from abroad, and we learned much from Arabic and Indian medicine.

There is a view in anthropology that civilization, like water, flows from higher to lower ground. Only when one civilization is comprehensively stronger than others can it permeate them.

Over our five-thousand-year-plus civilization, Chinese civilization once influenced many neighboring countries. For instance, during the High Tang, the Japanese and Korean missions to Tang (kentoshi) came to China to learn our culture and technology.

TCM books were among the things they carried back most; TCM traveled in the footsteps of these cultural envoys to their homelands and at one time became the mainstream medicine of those countries.

Our Chinese civilization has a history of lagging behind the world by generations, even by ten or more generations, yet each time after being beaten we have stood up again. And each time we rise, we become a stronger people than before. Only when we are strong will the light of Chinese civilization shine before the world once more.

As someone trained in science and engineering, influenced by Western civilization, I once long held Chinese traditional medicine in contempt. It was only after I myself fell ill with asthma, sought help everywhere in vain, and taught myself TCM to cure my own asthma that I realized how narrow-minded my superstition of modern science had been.

These years I have used TCM to treat many advanced cancer patients. As my clinical experience has grown and more and more patients have been cured, I have from the bottom of my heart come to recognize the TCM I once scorned, and realized that I had lived in ignorance and prejudice.

Chinese medicine and materia medica are a great treasure house. In modern times, like the fate of our nation, they underwent a centuries-long overall decline that left us lacking in confidence. Their renewed rise depends on our new generation of TCM practitioners making them stronger.

I once took part in various online debates about TCM, but in the end realized that without the renewed rise of Chinese civilization, TCM cannot rise on its own.

And the renewed rise of Chinese civilization is inevitable, though it will take some time. Yet that renewed civilization will, after a phoenix-like rebirth, further perfect itself, drawing new nourishment from the wisdom of the age and blooming once more into a still more brilliant flower of civilization.

The TCM that rises again will likewise not be the TCM of dusty old books. Even if a few people occasionally venerate the past and belittle the present, the community of TCM has never been complacent and self-sealed.

Throughout the history of TCM, generation after generation of practitioners, building on the experience of their predecessors, have continually innovated, accumulated rich clinical experience, and steadily pushed TCM forward. This is an undeniable fact.

I believe our new generation of TCM, as our nation rises again, will make new contributions to medicine and to humanity.

To quote Einstein: "A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a constant pursuit of success accompanied by unrest."

Staying away from strife, quietly studying medicine, rescuing more patients from the claws of disease, and advancing TCM through this practice—this is what our new generation of TCM practitioners should be doing most of all.

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