A handbook for “chicken blood treatment”
This has not been a good year for health gurus. Zhang Wuben, a nutrition advisor whose TV spots and bestselling books pushed raw vegetables as the cure for a host of serious medical conditions, was busted for faking his credentials and charging immense sums for brief consults. More recently, the media turned its eye on Li Yi, a Daoist master who offered high-priced services to China’s rich and famous and claimed extraordinary physical powers including the ability to cure cancer. And just last week, urologist Xiao Chuanguo was sentenced to five-and-a-half months in prison for ordering the beating of two science writers who had accused him of fabricating test results to inflate the success rate of a procedure he developed.
In an article written in the early 1990s, essayist Sang Ye expressed the hope that the Chinese public would no longer be held in the grip of pseudoscientific, quack cure-alls: “This is the information age, and no one can stay on top for five hundred years, or perhaps even five hundred days.” Yet less than a decade later, self-made doctor Hu Wanlin was able to kill scores of people over the course of several years by prescribing qigong treatments and poisonous herbal concoctions for all sorts of maladies. Before his arrest and imprisonment, Hu had been the subject of fawning reports in the press and a hagiography authored by a bestselling novelist.*
Sang Ye’s essay, published in the April, 1992 issue of the literary journal Dushu (读书) under the title “Have the Chinese People Awakened from Their Dream?” (国人梦已醒?) was prompted by the popularity of several books promoting the paranormal abilities of purported psychic masters: one claimed psychokinetic powers that would enable him to obtain Soviet and American nuclear weapons through teleportation; another detailed the process by which she acquired fluency in the information language of the universe, allowing her to speak with aliens; a third book came with an accompanying cassette tape into which a master had infused his power, to be released during playback. He then presented a short rundown of some of the previous health fads that had swept the country during his lifetime:
One was kombucha (红茶菌), a kind of algae, or perhaps a kind of mollusk, soaked in water.* It was said that eating or drinking it would prolong life, turning everyone into the God of Longevity, able to witness the paradise of the future. Another was known as “drinking cold water” (喝凉水): two ounces of cold water taken in the early morning were useful for something I’ve now forgotten, probably preventing or curing illness. Third was “injecting chicken blood” (打鸡血): people carried a young rooster to the hospital, where several milliliters of chicken blood would be drawn and then injected into their body. Doing this once a week would make you aggressive, and as powerful as an ox. Fourth was “arm swinging” (甩手). Getting up at five in the morning to stand on the roadside breathing in the dust and exhaust while swinging your arms for an hour was said to eradicate everything from the common cold to cancer. Fifth was something akin to that that “external alchemy,”* although it was known as “post-standing” (站桩), but it too had a burst of popularity. The explanation given was rather different from the workings of external alchemy: it was highly aggressive, with examples like how an eighty-year-old woman could train to be able to stun punks and so forth. Once these had passed, people began experimenting with whether they could “hear” printed characters or go three days without eating, and then they discovered that there were indeed people who could “pass a car” or who were “impenetrable to the blade.” Others who were privy to the files of Chinese and American intelligence agencies could not explain why American files, like their Chinese counterparts, consisted of cabinet after cabinet of paper instead of magnetic computer disks. And once all of that had passed, today’s masters now enjoy their time on top.
Many of these practices have stuck around in one form or another. Kombucha is still promoted as a health supplement in many parts of the world, exercise fads come and go every few years, and drinking water is always recommended (though not as a cure for cancer). Chicken blood, on the other hand, is a relic of a different age. These folk remedies flourished at a time when trained doctors and effective medicine were scarce, and the notion that a vast array of medical conditions, from abnormal blood pressure to infertility to baldness to leukemia, could be cured with a simple regimen of intramuscular injections of chicken blood was very attractive to people who had few other options, or who harbored suspicions about the class consciousness of the medical establishment.
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