I’m trying to work out if the following is racist - I don’t think it is, since it could happen anywhere in the world.
I had read, though I have no idea where, that “Ancient Chinese Medicine” was largely made up in the 50s, post WW2, when China was suddenly much more exposed to the rest of the world, and her peoples were suddenly aware that everyone else was getting decent health care, and they were not. So the theory went, it was invented as much as a way to provide “health care” cheaply, as any other reason. Being China, the public were told it was a thing, and so, they had to act like it was a thing, and now: it is a thing.
I’d qualify this with I have no proof, and no idea what I’m talking about, except it made sense to me at the time, to explain exactly the issue you’ve raised.
Chinese medicine wasn’t invented in the 1950s but:
In 1950, Chairman Mao Zedong made a speech in support of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) which was influenced by political necessity.[16] Mao believed he and the Chinese Communist Party should promote TCM but he did not personally believe in TCM and he did not use it.[16] In 1952, the president of the Chinese Medical Association said that, “This One Medicine, will possess a basis in modern natural sciences, will have absorbed the ancient and the new, the Chinese and the foreign, all medical achievements—and will be China’s New Medicine!”
Mao also institutionalised the “barefoot doctors” who provided basic healthcare in villages.
Granted, the impact of Chinese pseudo-medicine on wildlife is immense. But fuck everything, the real trouble is habitat loss. And it’s right at our front door, not only in China, Africa or South America.
Given the current state of affairs, we will be lucky if our grandchildren share the world with elephants, tigers and the likes, at all. Zoos might keep some taxa alive, and breeding programs might even keep them genetically diverse enough for a while. But we’ve reached a point where this is just make-up.
Let’s face it, most wildlife is going to vanish. And each taxon is gone forever. 4.5 billion years of evolution, lost in a couple of hundred years, most of it during the last decades.
Grandchildren? I fully expect all of them to be extinct within my lifetime. Possibly humanity as well (though that would come right at the very end of my lifetime, of course).
