Abstract
At achieving power in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party had no choice but to assimilate the pre-revolutionary, Nationalist, medical apparatus into the new state structure; this created a rift in the Party’s ideological hegemony. The Patriotic Hygiene Campaign, Mao’s episodic public health response to the alleged biological warfare attack waged against China by the US in the context of the Korean War functioned was a means of challenging the significance of medical expertise and promoting the model of ‘people’s war’, or mass mobilisation, as the correct way of constructing socialism in China. It was to this challenge of medical authority that the first re-interpretation of Bethune’s ‘spirit of selflessness’ was performed on part of the head of the medical establishment. Fu Lien-chang subverted the memorial’s radical semantic content by means of an exegesis that placed emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge and skill as a prerequisite of the selfless offering of one’s services to the masses. This technocrat formula of sublimation dictated that in order to sacrifice yourself for the masses, you first had to become someone worthy of being sacrificed.
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Notes
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© 2013 Christos Lynteris
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Lynteris, C. (2013). The Sublimation of Skill. In: The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137293831_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137293831_2
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