“A Good Guy” Again: Biosociality in a Cancer Self-help Organization

ABSTRACT

The notion of biosociality has been employed in the understanding of forging new forms of social groupings and other forms of social solidarity, with its feasibility and basis challenged in non-Western contexts. According to our study of a Chinese cancer self-help organization, an emergent biosociality occurs through an increasingly common diagnostic biomedical category, cancer. But what truly binds these people tighter is the pre-modern local knowledge of qi, as well as state ideology about living a useful life. A new form of biosocial citizenship, “a good guy (haoren yige),” linked to cancer, is thus endowed.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• biosociality
• cancer
• good guy
• qigong
• self-help organization

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to our informants in Leyuan for their unconditional trust, patience, and assistance. We also sincerely thank Professor Jing Jun, Pan Tianshu, Cheng Yu, Huan Jianli, Liu Qian, Yu Chengpu, Lai Lili and other colleagues in our medical anthropology panel at the 2017 Annual Meeting of Chinese Anthropology and Ethnology for their penetrating comments of our paper, for which we received the annual “Best Paper Award.” We also thank Benjamin Ross, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago, for his assistance with English language editing. Last but not least, we thank the editor Professor Lenore Manderson and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. The entry threshold for Leyuan is low, and 200 yuan (c US$30) covers lifetime membership. Leyuan members then have unlimited access to services provided by the organization.

2. The same holds true for most other cancer self-help organizations in China. Necessary expenditures for these organizations include office space, staff salaries and day-to-day expenditures. Thus, they lack the extra money for more regular employees.

3. In Chinese folk tales, Ganoderma is said to have the power to conjure the dead.

4. The four key informants are all female. Three are anti-cancer stars, with an average age of 63, and an average of 12 years after treatment. The other one is a staff member, who had worked at Leyuan for three years.

5. Written in 1922, “The Peanut” (Luo Huasheng), by writer Xu Dishan, conveys the idea of becoming a useful person, and was set as a textbook for primary school students.

6. Zhang was regarded as the Helen Keller and Pavel Korchagin of China. She was elected as chairwoman of China Administration of Sports for Persons with Disabilities (CASPD), the national paralympic committee of China.

7. Yuan was diagnosed with advanced malignant lymphoma in 1980 when he was in his early thirties. He suffered the stigma of cancer and lost his job. Thus, he decided to establish a space for cancer patients to comfort each other and establish lines of communication.

8. The metaphorical birthday stands for a celebration of the time since cancer diagnosis or surgery. To cancer survivors, rehabilitation means renaissance.

9. To motivate anti-cancer stars to volunteer their time to Leyuan, they are offered a discount, contingent on how much they contribute to the business. The exact discount is confidential, as are salaries in workplaces.

10. The most popular ganoderma product in Leyuan, for example, costs survivors about 2000 yuan (c US$290) per month.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Guangzhou Concord Medical Humanities Research and Education Foundation (201903).

Notes on contributors

Feifei Li

Feifei Li is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Science at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and is working on how cancer survivors are supported in Chinese cancer self-help organizations, as well as how these organizations sustain themselves.

Chadwick Wang

Chadwick Wang is an associate professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in Department of the History of Science at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His research interests focus on how social solidarity might be achieved by networking with non-human actors like games and disease in contemporary China.