As the COVID-19 pandemic sheds light on animal markets and the traffic of wildlife in China, Liz P. Y. Chee's historical investigation of the pharmaceutical use of animal body parts in Chinese medicine is extremely useful and timely. Referring to recent works on “traditional Chinese medicine” (TCM, translated here as zhongyi), Chee shows that the production of medicinal substances (yao) is a dynamic and heterogeneous set of practices, opening spaces for innovation, experimentation, and industrialization. Her object is not so much the patenting of these substances as drugs, which is at the heart of global tensions over the standardization of TCM, but the farming practices that made animal body parts available for the pharmaceutical markets, and the controversies they raise on animal welfare and public health.
The tension between the belief in the efficacy of animal drugs, which supposedly have more vitality than plants, and the concern for biodiversity, which is threatened by the use of charismatic body parts, such as rhino horns, tiger paws, or shark fins, is the motor of a dynamic quest of substitutes. Chee explains that the number of animals used for medicinal substances doubled from around 400 mentioned in the classical Bencao Gangmu, written in the sixteenth century, to 832 in the two-volume Zhongguo yao yong dong wu zhi, published in 1979 and 1983. To describe this “period of intense animal-drug discovery and farming” (p. 8), in Mao's Bestiary, based on pharmaceutical journals edited since the 1950s and collected in the library of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Chee distinguishes three main periods in the history of Communist China: the reorganization of Chinese medicine under Soviet influence, its autonomization during the Cultural Revolution, and, finally, its industrialization during the reform period. Each of these periods is focused on one animal species, among many others: the deer, the chicken, and the bear.
Chee recalls that “traditional Chinese medicine” is a national construction separating medicinal substances (yao) from their medical discourse (yi) to show their efficacy by Western standards. In the endeavor to “scientize Chinese medicine,” Russian pharmacologists were precious allies for Communist China in analyzing the properties of plants classified in the Bencao Gangmu, such as Emil Bretschneider at the end of the nineteenth century or A. P. Kiriyanov in the 1950s. After ophthalmologist Vladimir P. Filatov promoted tissue therapy in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, pharmacologist S. M. Pavlenko praised the use of deer antler in Chinese medicine, in which he found a male hormone that he named pantocrin. This discovery led to the development of deer farming under the Great Leap Forward, with a huge cost in animal lives: out of 433 wild deer caught in the province of Heilongjiang in 1959, 132 survived on farms where they were domesticated.
The practice of wild animal farming, applied to bees, seahorses, and geckos during the same period, relied on the idea that animal body parts or animal products become renewable once the animal is trapped and raised. It also led to the idea that all body parts of an animal can be used, “regardless of previous traditions that had often been quite selective as to which part should actually be taken as medicine and for what purpose” (p. 90). The Great Leap Forward thus relied on the exploitation of animal farming to produce medicines for exportation, with high-value substances, such as musk extracted from deer who lived in the southwest of China, and whose production in captivity turned out to be difficult.
The Cultural Revolution, breaking with Soviet expertise, led to an innovation more in line with Mao's message extending public health to the masses: the use of chicken blood to cure disease and nourish the body. This technique relied on Yu Changshi's discovery that chicken blood at high temperature (43 degrees Celcius) had a capacity to “fight germs and toxicity” (p. 107). While other pharmaceutical products were destroyed as superstitious, chicken blood was available for the masses, as illustrated by a poster showing peasants bringing their own chickens to the doctor. Chee notices that chicken blood therapy was soon criticized as an eccentricity of the Cultural Revolution, but the principle of organotherapy had a longer duration, for instance, in the use of heads of toads to cure hand diseases.
The last chapter is dedicated to the main innovation of the Deng Xiaoping era: bear farming. It was based on North Korean expertise showing that bear bile could be extracted on farms as a renewable product without killing bears and suggesting that it cured many diseases, such as osteoporosis, cataracts, and even influenza or SARS. While it is estimated that there were 400 bear farms in China raising tens of thousands of animals, this industry has been criticized in the last decade by animal welfare associations. Chee opens her book by confessing that this mobilization, very active in Singapore, where wild animal farming has been banned, was at the source of her research, when she visited bear farms in Laos and China with contrasted levels of industrial development and animal welfare.
While the tension between multispecies ethics, public health, and techno-scientific innovation is at the heart of this fascinating and accurate investigation, it also raises ontological questions about the borders between humans and nonhumans or between wild and domestic animals, as pathogenic emergences show that these borders are constantly crossed and blurred by human practices, particularly in Asian contexts whose historicity must be documented.
