Taiwan’s precarious partnerships: Chinese medicine as a form of public and everyday diplomacy in South-South cooperation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Hansjörg Dilger, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 514223576

The promotion of Chinese medicine worldwide is carried out – most prominently by the People's Republic of China – as an instrument of cultural diplomacy with the explicit goal of attaining soft power. The utilization of such diplomatic tools, however, is also of particular importance for marginalized governments, for example the Republic of China on Taiwan, which is largely excluded from international institutions such as the UN or the World Health Organization. Against this background, Taiwan's initiatives in this context are particularly directed at countries in the "Global South" in order to establish new partnerships – and therefore new forms of political legitimacy – under precarious circumstances. Using long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this project will examine initiatives of diplomatic collaboration involving Chinese medicine in Taiwan under the New Southbound Policy, and inquire how "traditional" medicine is being embedded in projects of diplomatic influence under asymmetric global political power relations; how it actively participates in and shapes the making of social and political relations; and how it is itself transformed in practice and transmission through this process. In the context of Taiwan's healthcare system, which integrated Chinese medicine to a large extent but nevertheless places it in a subordinate position relative to biomedicine, we expect practitioners working in contexts of transnational exchange to be challenged with the navigation of their own profession's interests as well as, simultaneously, the potential co-optation by national (diplomatic) interests. These interests can be congruent and enable cooperation, but may also be fraught with contradiction and conflict, for instance in relation to the purview of biomedical regulatory regimes. Considering critical (medical) anthropological perspectives on Chinese medicine, anthropological conceptions of public and everyday diplomacy and global health, this project examines newly emerging transnational relations and practices at the interface of "specifically Taiwanese" and globally hegemonic medical and diplomatic initiatives and discourses. This approach opens up fundamentally new perspectives on Taiwan's role in global health in the context of South-South cooperation with regards to state and civil society actors' participation in the negotiation of (transnational) political interests through the lens of the transmission and clinical practice of Chinese medicine.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants