Abstract
Since the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Chinese have taken major steps toward repudiating accepted ideas of the superiority of western technology and the neutrality of science. In the West, the development of science and medicine within the capitalist system has led to the monopolization of science by elites. This is not an automatic result of scientific and technological advancement, as some western sociologists will have us believe. Rather it results from capitalist relations of production. In part, the Cultural Revolution was a great struggle to put human needs in control of science and technology, including medicine. The Chinese sought to tear down the system of hierarchical relations which developed with industrialization in the West and in the Soviet Union and which threatened to overwhelm China's socialist experiment as well. This cultural revolution promoted a political ideology in which acupuncture and other form's of traditional medicine could be studied and practiced as a science on par with western medicine because they meet the needs of the people—the basis for medicine within China's socialist context.
Notes
For a critique of western sociological thought, including a critique of one of the major critics of industrialization, see Vincente Navarro, “The Industrialization of Fetishism or the Fetishism of industrialization: A Critique of Ivan Illich” in Social Science and Medicine, 9.1 (July 1975), pp. 351–63; cf. Andre Gorz, “Technical intelligence and the Capitalist Division of Labor,” Telos, 12 (Summer 1972) pp. 27–41. Gorz argues the productive forces that develop under capitalist control are shaped and distorted by capitalist priorities.
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