China Western Influence

For thousands of years China relied on traditional, “spiritual” medical techniques to heal any ailment. When Europeans began trading with and bringing Western influence to China, medicine was one of the last areas to change. Many Chinese people were reluctant to take part in Western medicine due to the vast differences between Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine and strength of tradition, as traditional medicine had been passed down for generations. However, Chinese medicine underwent a long period of modernization from the late Qing Empire into early Republican China. The increased feminist and Western influence in early Republican China brought a major turn in Chinese medicine by moving from primarily traditional practices to more …show more content…
By not only bringing in physicians to treat patients, but also to inform the local authorities of the medical issues at hand and how to treat them with Western medicine, the French, and other European powers, had a large influence on China’s transition to modern medicine in the early Republican era. Following the Japanese victory in the Sino-Japanese war at the end of the nineteenth-century, China experienced a sudden influx of European powers competing for a share of the empire. This influx led to increased Western influence in society and medicine. “The French government had been coveting the far south of China for the easy access it provided to the Chinese market,” and began “the project of appointing French physicians in southern China,” in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. Paul Doumer’s policy of ‘a peaceful expansion’ and the regular outbreaks of plague in Southern China led to an increase in the influence of French physicians in early twentieth century China. The “sentinelles …show more content…
European influence was pivotal in not only moving the country towards a new government structure, but also modernizing medicine. With the influx of Europeans to China following the Sino-Japanese war, in combination with the plagues devastating much of Southern China, Western medicine became an influential force in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Republican thought encouraged feminism as a means of moving China away from its traditional customs. Women were told to venture out of the house to take on new literary and social activities, however, women were primarily supported in literary ventures that were light and did not threaten the male dominated intellectual world. Because feminism was supported in Republican China primarily as a means of proving that the country was fully transformed from its Classical Chinese state, women were not viewed in a fully feminist light. Republican China’s support of feminism was not a whole-hearted feminist movement as Chinese people did not want to fully incorporate women into the intellectual world, it was merely a means of proving that the traditional Chinese ways were in the past. Though women were not supported in all forms of intellectual freedom, they found their way into the medical world and, in some cases, women’s