Acupuncture and mutual exchange in Chinese and Soviet science

Previous accounts of the scientific relationship between communist China and the Soviet Union have depicted it as one of subordination, with the Russians exporting knowledge to the Chinese or scavenging from their bodies of knowledge. A new article in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, however, posits that the relationship between Chinese and Soviet scientists was instead one of mutual exchange. In “Brief Encounter: Acupuncture, Pavlov, and Scientific Exchange Between China and the Soviet Union, 1949-1961,” authors Liang Wan, Simon Huxtable, and Sarah Marks explore the role of acupuncture in uniting the Pavlovian science of the Soviets and Traditional Chinese Medicine, forming an arena for Sino-Soviet collaboration.

Ivan Pavlov’s findings in the field of physiology were not only celebrated by the Soviet government, but also by Chinese health officials for what they saw as the potential of Pavlovianism to “scientize” zhongyi, or Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Reciprocally, the Soviets were eager to learn from the Chinese tradition of acupuncture and further articulate its correspondence with Pavlovian thought. This period of scientific dialogue primarily took place in the 1950s and was facilitated by a desire in both China and the USSR to update their scientific theory and engage with international ideas in order to forge “a modern trans-communist, Sino-Soviet scientific amalgam that could transcend Western science.”

The affinity between Pavlov’s theories and the Marxist understanding of dialectics led the Chinese government to encourage the uptake of Pavlovianism across the health and science initiatives of the People’s Republic. Acupuncture practitioners in China incorporated Pavlov’s findings into their practice and reinterpreted concepts of traditional Chinese medicine, such as yin-yang and qi, in terms of Pavlovian physiology. This reinterpretation reinforced a holistic understanding of the body within Chinese medicine, an emphasis that continues to shape its theory and practice today.

Meanwhile, collaborative efforts like the 1954 Soviet-Chinese Technical Commission brought Soviet doctors to China and allowed them to study acupuncture and other elements of the Chinese healthcare system up close. The program spurred the partial translation of Chinese author Zhu Lian’s foundational text The New Acupuncture into Russian, and led one visiting Soviet scientist to declare that TCM represented “the richest spring of medical knowledge, albeit a spring that requires scientifically formulated, in-depth and systematic work.” By the late 1950s, Soviet acupuncture research had become a distinct school of its own, and, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, approximately 1.5-2% of all Soviet physicians were acupuncture practitioners.

In the early 1960s, the Sino-Soviet friendship began to wane. After its period of interest in international scientific dialogue, Mao’s republic began to focus instead on its own national medical heritage. But despite this growing divide between the communist powers, the influence of their cooperative engagement with acupuncture and other scientific findings remained. “Soviet and Chinese medicine,” write the article authors, “mutually benefited and were developed through these interactions.” Ultimately, the authors conclude, “Our case rebalances agency in Sino-Soviet exchanges and challenges the idea of imperial scavenging or the notion that Soviet medicine ‘crowded out’ Chinese tradition as an inevitable byproduct of this neo-imperial relationship.”