Gaining increasing media attention, transnational exploitation of animals in the pharmaceutical industry, such as the cruel practice of bear bile farming and the hunting of pangolins to near extinction, is stirring up heated conversations on animal rights and ecological sustainability. In Mao's Bestiary, Liz P.Y. Chee provides an often-neglected historical perspective centring on the history of faunal medicalization in the PRC from 1949 to the 1990s. “Faunal medicalization” is a term Chee coined to describe “the process of fashioning and refashioning animal-based drugs for service to Chinese state medicine and, in the import/export realm, the larger Chinese economy” (p. 5). This book is also a most welcome contribution to the historiographical turn toward pharmaceuticals in the history of medicine, which is only beginning to emerge in Asian studies.
The first two chapters lay out the book's major interventions in the history of Chinese medicine. Chee joins recent scholarship on the history and anthropology of Chinese medicine in treating it not as a stable tradition but as a modern category constantly in the remaking. She observes two important transitions beginning from the 1950s: the reconfiguration of the pharmaceutical sector, and the influence of the Soviet Union. In chapter one, Chee points out that Mao's China largely retained laboratory research on Chinese drugs carried out in Republican China. But instead of abandoning Chinese medicine, the state now used drugs as boundary objects to facilitate the merging of the two medical systems. In chapter two, Chee identifies the Soviet Union as an important factor in the modernization of both Traditional Chinese Medicine and biomedicine, while existing literature has mostly focused on the influence of Europe, America and, in recent decades, Japan. China and the Soviet shared a border and its surrounding ecosystem with animals and plants to be exploited for medicinal use. In addition, Soviet's tissue therapy was promoted in China as a category of biomedicine, giving scientific sanction to the use of animal tissues.
Chapters three to five follow a chronological order and characterize the impacts of three major political turns on faunal medicalization: the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960), the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the Reform Era (1978–present), each corresponding to a signature animal: deer, chicken and bear. Chapter three illustrates how the Great Leap Forward prompted unprecedented state intervention in the local harvest of raw drugs, including the collecting and distribution of knowledge on the farming of a wide variety of animals such as deer, seahorses and tokay geckos. The Great Leap Forward also saw folk medicine acquiring a place in the expanding Chinese pharmacopeia, in line with observations made by historians of the PRC about the celebration of grassroot innovation. Chicken blood therapy was invented during the Great Leap Forward and swept the entire nation in the Cultural Revolution. Chee notices that although celebrated as folk medicine coming from non-specialist, chicken blood therapy was in fact invented by a professional doctor crafty in the art of propaganda.
If faunal medicalization in the early PRC was promoted to resolve drug shortage, in the Reform Era discussed in chapter five, the driving force was now profit. Thriving at the boundary of drug, commodity and food, the “economic animal” industry benefited from the fragmented regulatory system of this period (p. 139). Here Chee emphasizes the transnational making of the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. The 1927 Japanese laboratory finding of an effective ingredient was a source that continued to fuel efficacy claims for bear bile products, while the bear farming technique may have originated in North Korea, although this connection remains a conjecture with no solid evidence.
Relying almost exclusively on printed journals and brochures, Chee is able to tell a refreshing story on the interplay between medicine and PRC politics. It is encouraging to fellow China scholars as we observe both archives and field sites becoming increasingly inaccessible. The most thoroughly cited source is Pharmaceutical Bulletin, the official journal of the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association, which can be found in many Chinese universities and libraries. Carefully examining articles, reports and opinion pieces in the journal over three decades, Chee keenly distils the major transitions in PRC's pharmaceutical sector accounted in the book. In other words, the history of PRC's pharmaceutical sector told in this book is largely a history as reflected in Pharmaceutical Bulletin. The breadth of the chosen source does limit the scope of the study. For example, a story focusing on the official attitude and the production side does not really justify the author's claim that it was the expansion of production that promoted the consumption of faunal drugs, especially if the main consumer was indeed overseas Chinese (p. 87). It would be necessary to investigate the culture and social history of pharmaceuticals, where multiple actors such as doctors, pharmacists, drug developers, salespersons, patients and consumers each play their own roles.
In sum, Mao's Bestiary tells a fascinating story of why and how animals figure so prominently in traditional Chinese medicine as we see today. Shedding light on the pharmaceutical industry in Asia, it contributes to an important historiographical transition in the history of medicine and is worth the attention of historians, anthropologists and sociologists interested in this field. Its engaging topic and accessible writing style also makes it suitable teaching material for undergraduate courses on the topics of medicine, modern Asia, and animals and the environment.
