Mei Zhan

Civet Cats, Fried Grasshoppers, and David Beckham's Pajamas: Unruly Bodies after SARS

This article discusses the viscerality of consumption; in particular, consumption‐as‐eating and consumption‐as‐spending as a set of heterogeneous, contestatory discourses and practices of identity production and subject formation. To do so, I bring together two intersecting events: the Chinese governments ban on wild animal markets during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak, and Chinese and European media frenzy over the visit to China by the Spanish football club Real Madrid in the wake of the epidemic. In discussing these events, I pay specific attention to unruly bodies—both human and nonhuman—as consumables and those who consume them. In examining translocal encounters of these unruly bodies, I suggest that, in post‐SARS China, discourses and practices of consumption produce emergent socialities that at once refigure racialized Orientalist tropes and conjure up discrepant neoliberal imaginaries of lifestyle and consumer choice.

A Doctor of the Highest Caliber Treats an Illness Before It Happens

“A doctor of the highest caliber treats an illness before it happens,” a seemingly antiquated doctrine in traditional Chinese medicine, is enjoying surging popularity among practitioners in urban China and the United States today. In this essay, I examine how the meanings and contours of traditional Chinese medicine have shifted in recent decades as it is molded into a “preventive medicine” through translocal encounters. From the 1960s and the early 1970s, the emphasis Chinas socialist health care placed on preventive health among the rural poor shaped the practice of Chinese herbal medicine and especially acupuncture. This version of preventive medicine was also exported to the Third World, which China strove to champion. Since the end of the Cold War and especially during the 1990s, as China strives to “get on track with the world” (specifically, affluent nation-states, especially in North America and the European Union), traditional Chinese medicine has been rapidly commodified and reinvented as a new kind of preventive medicine tailored for cosmopolitan, middle-class lifestyles. The emergence of this radically new preventive medicine resuscitates certain stories of antiquity and continuity, emphasizing that traditional Chinese medicine has always been “preventive” while obliterating recent memories of the proletariat world and its preventive medicine.

Cosmic Experiments: Remaking Materialism and Daoist Ethic “Outside of the Establishment”

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss recent experiments in ‘classical’ (gudian) Chinese medicine. As the marketization and privatization of health care deepens and enters uncharted territories in China, a cohort of young practitioners and entrepreneurs have begun their quest for the ‘primordial spirit’ of traditional Chinese medicine by setting up their own businesses where they engage in clinical, pedagogical, and entrepreneurial practices outside of state-run institutions. I argue that these explorations in classical Chinese medicine, which focus on classical texts and Daoist analytics, do not aim to restore spirituality to the scientized and secularized theory of traditional Chinese medicine. Nor are they symptomatic of withdrawals from the modern world. Rather, these ‘cosmic experiments’ need to be understood in relation to dialectical and historical materialisms as modes of knowledge production and political alliance. In challenging the status of materialist theory and the process of theorization in traditional Chinese medicine and postsocialist life more broadly speaking, advocates of classical Chinese medicine imagine nondialectical materialisms as immanent ways of thinking, doing, and being in the world.