Innovations in acumoxa: Acupuncture analgesia, scalp and ear acupuncture in the Peopleʹs Republic of China

This paper examines three ‘innovations in acumoxa’ (zhenjiu) that were promulgated by the Chinese government during the Maoist periods of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976): acupuncture analgesia (zhenjiu mazui), scalp acupuncture (touzhen) and ear acupuncture (erzhen). They all bear features of Chinese and Western medical practice, a characteristic which has been exploited in Chinese politics of health. On the one hand, the innovations have been promoted for the nationalistic reason in virtue of their being inherently Chinese. On the other hand, by equating Western medical practice with science, they signify modernity and progressiveness. In the late eighties, all still enjoyed official backing. Although they were no longer exclusively practised in government hospitals, they still stood for what they had originally been promulgated. Acupuncture analgesia, while no more practised in the clinic, is still the prototype of a Chinese scientific therapy, now subject to biomedical research in laboratories. Scalp acupuncture, which never became widely known as a modern Chinese-Western innovation, is still being practised exclusively by skilled doctors. Ear acupuncture is now practised also outside government institutions, for the same reasons of being easily applied, easily learnt and extremely economical as it had originally been promulgated. Paradoxically, ear acupuncture, the most popular of the three, was ‘discovered’ outside China, by a French doctor, and is founded on the principles of reflexology, a therapy that the biomedical establishment does not consider scientific.