Xikou, China — THE fur is flying, not to mention the acupuncture needles, the firewort and the $15,000-a-pound bull gallstones. China's ancient healing arts, as integral to national identity as the Great Wall or steamed dumplings, have become embroiled in the country's struggle to balance tradition and modernity.
A relatively obscure professor at a regional university kicked off the controversy in October with an online petition calling for traditional medicine to be stripped from the Chinese Constitution. It has a protected status here that, at least in theory, guarantees it equal footing with its Western counterpart.
Professor Zhang Gongyao and fellow critics have blasted Chinese medicine as an often ineffective, even dangerous derivative of witchcraft that relies on untested concoctions and obscure ingredients to trick patients, then employs a host of excuses if the treatment doesn't work.
For adherents of the 3,000-year-old system, this borders on heresy. The Health Ministry labeled Zhang's ideas "ignorant of history," and traditionalists have called the skeptics traitors bent on "murdering" Chinese culture.
Ironically, the firestorm dovetails with a growing embrace of Chinese medicine abroad as an antidote to the perceived soulless, money-obsessed nature of Western healthcare.
On a trip to China in mid-December, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said the two countries planned to trade lessons on how to integrate Western and Chinese medicine.
"It's an area of interest for China and the U.S.," he said.
Many Australians, Europeans and Americans see the limitations of advanced science, said Rey Tiquia, an expert in Chinese traditional medicine based in Australia, even as more Chinese view their traditions as old-fashioned.
"For Chinese," he said, "it's still the lure of something new and shiny, like riding a car rather than a bicycle."
Since 1949, the number of traditional doctors trained in China has fallen by nearly half to 270,000, while the number of Western-trained doctors has jumped twentyfold to more than 1.7 million.
Criticism that traditional medicine is not scientific dates back centuries. But Zhang's prescriptive remedies -- including an end to national insurance coverage for traditional medicine, rigorous scientific standards and obligatory Western training for traditional doctors -- have hit a nerve at a time when traditional Chinese medicine is increasingly on the defensive.
