Abstract

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the leadership of the new country carried out a political, cultural, and scientific campaign to “comprehensively learn from the Soviet Union,” with the goal of rapid development on all fronts. In the realm of medicine, this had profound consequences. The hegemonic Soviet theory of physiology and psychology—Pavlovianism—became highly influential in China, first as Party Line and second as the basis for a reformed “traditional Chinese medicine”. In the early 1950s, Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity had the status of unquestioned orthodoxy. However, a disagreement between the Ministry of Health and national leader Mao Zedong led to an important shift in 1954. After that date, instead of adopting the Soviet theories wholesale, Chinese medical practitioners used Pavlovianism to shape Chinese medicine’s underlying theoretical constructs. The influence of this reconstruction persists to this day, in practices thought of by the public as thoroughly Chinese, like acupuncture, holistic thinking, inner organs theory, and acupoint injection therapy.