Chinese propriety medicines: an "alternative modernity?" The case of the anti-malarial substance artemisinin in East Africa

This article discusses various modes of "modernising" traditional Chinese medical drugs (zhong yao) and transforming them into so-called Chinese propriety medicines (zhongchengyao) that are flooding the current neoliberal wellness markets. This article argues that the chemical procedures used in the manufacture of Chinese propriety medicines are highly culture-specific and deserve being considered as instantiations of an "alternative modernity" (e.g., Knauft 2002), rather than of "Westernization". These Western-Chinese combinations, produced in strife toward fulfilling Mao Zedong's Communist-revolutionary vision, have a potential to represent a critical alterity to Western health policies, challenging rhetoric against such combinations. However, as is also noted in this article based on ethnographic fieldwork in East Africa, their potential alterity has been corroded for at least two reasons. First, the medical rationale for dispensing these medications has been shaped by commercial demands in ways that have worked toward transforming the formerly scholarly Chinese medical tradition (as outlined by Bates 1995) into a consumer-near and popular "folk medicine" (as defined by Farquhar 1994:212). Second, the repertoire of Chinese propriety medicines is impoverished as its efficacious "alternatively modern" drugs are being redefined as "modern" biomedical drugs. The article concludes that the potentially critical alterity of any formerly scholarly traditional medicine is more likely to be lost in those fields of health care that are both highly commercialized and polarized by the biomedical imperative to distinguish between "traditional" and "modern" medicines. As example for demonstrating how contentious the issue is, qinghaosu (artemisinin) is put center stage. It is an anti-malarial substance which in the 1970s Chinese scientists extracted from the Chinese medical drug qinghao (Herba Artemisiae annuae). Some Chinese practitioners in East Africa argued that artemisinin belonged among the Chinese propriety medicines they sold. Although according to Western biomedical criteria and the Chinese scientists who were involved in its chemical identification, artemisinin is a "modern" Western drug, their polemics deserve to be more closely analyzed as what social scientists have recognized as an "alternative modernity"