Jongsik Christian Yi

This project documents the making of Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine (TCVM) as a new hybrid veterinary medicine emerging from the revolutionary political economic experiment in Maoist China from 1949 to 1976. It argues that TCVM was constructed as “commune science,” a process and product of knowledge construction in which elite scientists, laypeople, and nonhuman animals collaboratively participate for the dual purpose of serving socialist industrialization and sustaining the communal ways of living in a “commune” as an ecological community. By shedding light on the everyday lives of grassroots veterinarians and their animal patients, I will reveal one of the most understudied aspects of China’s revolutionary past.