Created by: Historical Materialism Group of the Proletarian Liberation Struggle Association
In contemporary China’s reform society, some medical students from the bourgeoisie have been defeated in fierce urban employment competition and have to leave the bright lights, drunkenness, and material temptations of big cities, turning their eyes to county hospitals, hoping that here can become their second stage for opportunism and social climbing. However, after working in county hospitals for a period, their opportunistic dreams are shattered, and they start to long for the “free competition” of big cities again. From the experiences of these three bourgeois intellectuals working in counties, we can clearly see the brutal exploitation and oppression of rural laborers by China’s monopoly bourgeoisie. Take Luo Lang as an example, Luo Lang, enjoying the generous treatment of the “talent introduction” policy of the reformist government, was employed at a county hospital at the foot of the Daba Mountains. Luo Lang said, “Returning to the county to officially start work was the moment my ideals officially shattered.” Luo Lang’s ideal, according to his own words, was to contribute a little to grassroots medical care, but just from a few fragments of his two-year work experience, it is evident how ugly and hypocritical Luo Lang’s ideals are. Luo Lang works in the gastroenterology department, where he condescendingly advises patients to undergo various examinations, mocking the laborers for thinking he is deceiving them for money, calling them “ignorant”; the farmers in his area often take gastrointestinal medicine “Headache Powder,” which he merely criticizes, believing such drugs cannot treat gastrointestinal diseases and may even worsen stomach damage; he points out that the high incidence of gastric ulcers, gastrointestinal bleeding, alcohol-induced liver disease, and cirrhosis among rural people is caused by their consumption of leftover food, foods that stimulate gastric acid secretion and are high in sugar like pumpkins and sweet potatoes, and poor-quality bulk white liquor, but he fails to see that farmers are forced to eat these due to exploitation by the bourgeoisie. In imperialist China, the poverty of the rural population is far more severe than that of urban workers, with extremely backward agricultural production and worsening living conditions reaching astonishing levels. Due to poverty, people cannot afford medical examinations and can only take “Headache Powder” for stomach pain, suffering from various diseases caused by overwork.
Among these doctors who come to the grassroots, Luo Lang is from the countryside and should have a strong emotional connection with the laborers, but under the influence of bourgeois higher education, he has developed a sense of arrogance he calls “boastful.” He believes that as a senior intellectual, coming to a small county town should be a respected position, but the reality is different. When he tries to offer free examinations to county residents and is refused by the department head, he feels powerless; after being repeatedly humiliated by the department head, he becomes depressed, quickly compensates a large penalty for breach of contract, and returns to the “progressive” city hospital environment, thinking, “The past two years have been somewhat wasted.” Clearly, Luo Lang is entirely preoccupied with personal gains and losses, and the laborers he is supposed to serve are no longer visible in his work. As for Zhang Fang, an anesthesiologist, she came to a county hospital because she failed to secure a position at her hometown county hospital, and her words are full of dissatisfaction with the conditions of the small county hospital. She says that what finally overwhelmed her was disagreements with local doctors over medical concepts, but she plans to leave the county “to find a job or take exams for a formal position”—so why bother with such lofty excuses to beautify herself? Hu Xueyang is a dentist who, under the pressure of employment competition and unable to beat other top students applying for provincial tertiary hospitals, had to humble herself and work at a county hospital. However, her salary of over ten thousand yuan and two and a half days off still pleased her, and she has not given up her dream of jumping to a city hospital in a few years.
Whether it is Luo Lang, Zhang Fang, or Hu Xueyang, as intellectuals, they inevitably depend on a certain class. In capitalist society, since they hold narrow personal goals and seek to climb upward, they inevitably serve the bourgeoisie and cannot truly help the laboring people, nor benefit them greatly. In a class society, nothing is free from politics, and medicine cannot be separated from politics either. Capitalist doctors are only motivated by profit, indifferent to social political and economic conditions, and cannot understand the profound suffering of the laboring people. Luo Lang does not consider the social roots of why laborers cannot afford healthcare nor study politics to change the society; he only seeks personal gain. When his covert, base personal goals cannot be achieved, the superficial reform measures he uses to decorate himself become pointless, and he naturally cannot persist in serving the laborers. Zhang Fang and Hu Xueyang, typical petty-bourgeoisie concerned only with personal life, are full of dreams of opportunistically becoming superior; they look upward and are naturally unable to pay attention to the living conditions of the laboring people or to genuine politics. As for doctors like Liu Xiangfeng from Xiangya or those involved in the 2024 Qingdao surrogacy incident, who are willing to risk patients’ lives for thousands of yuan or violate morality for surrogacy surgeries, what compassion do they have for the laboring people? A doctor who cannot cure his own corrupt heart cannot heal the wounds of the people. The exploitation and oppression of capitalism are the root causes of the poverty and illness of the laboring people. If a doctor does not focus on the political and economic situation of capitalism and hates it, no matter how skilled their medical skills are, they cannot truly benefit the people. Therefore, the greatest doctors are like Norman Bethune, who devote all their energy to the cause of people’s liberation and make their own contributions. Those bourgeois intellectuals who are still deeply entangled should learn from Bethune and become “a noble person, a pure person, a moral person, someone detached from low-level pleasures, and someone beneficial to the people.”[1]
Mao Zedong Selected Works Editorial Committee · Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Type B): China Youth Publishing House, June 1964 ↩︎