BUILDING THE NATION THROUGH WOMEN'S HEALTH: MODERN ...

The curriculum included 2,200 hours of classroom lecture and 3,000 hours of practicum in
midwifery and public health.
In the Chinese Communist Party-controlled areas, midwifery took a slightly different
turn, back towards jieshengpo who were given training in aseptic techniques. Karen Minden
examined CCP healthcare efforts in the Shensi-Gansu-Ningxia border region, which
encompassed 35,000 square miles and had a population of 1.5 million people. Minden found
that between 1936 and 1949, health policies were a crucial part of CCP success in these rural
areas. 599 Improving maternal and child health was a component of these efforts: pregnant and
post-partum women received better rations of meat, cooking oil, salt and vegetables, and
newborns were given “35 feet of spun cloth and five catties of raw cotton.” 600 According to Kim
Taylor, during the civil war (1945-1949), Chinese communists in rural areas like Yan’an began
to utilize and support traditional Chinese practitioners, and opposed the “evil, imperialist”
Western medicine. 601 Mao Zedong in 1944 stated that “We must call on the masses to arise in
struggle against their own illiteracy, superstitions and unhygienic habits…This approach is even
more necessary in the field of medicine….Our task is to unite with all intellectuals, artists and
doctors of the old type who can be useful, to help them, convert them and transform them…” 602
However, as Minden and Taylor both have noted, necessity, not only ideology, drove the
movement to utilize traditional Chinese medical practitioners, as there were not enough modern
physicians to serve this large rural area. The CCP set up short-term training programs for para-
medical personnel to establish medical co-ops in their villages, and Minden found that many of
599
Karen Minden, “The Development of Early Chinese Communist Health Policy: Health Care in the Border
Region, 1936-1949.” American Journal of Chinese Medicine VII, No. 4 (1979): 299-315.
600
Minden, “The Development of Early Chinese Communist Health Policy,” 303.
601
Kim Taylor, Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China (1945-1963): Medicine of Revolution. New York, NY:
Routledge, 2004.
602
Mao Zedong, “On the United Front in Cultural Work,” in Selected Readings, Peking: Foreign Language Press,
1967, pp. 185-6, as quoted in Minden, “The Development of Early Chinese Communist Health Policy,” 304-5.
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