In a Beijing hotel I inhabited for a few days, a note on the sink politely informed me that drinking the tap water would probably mean a speedy trip to the hospital. Oddly, the warning was awkwardly cushioned with a promise that the water, though poisonous if drunk, was great for the skin. I’m still not entirely sure whether this was meant seriously, or just as an idle pleasantry, but if you take this kind of promise of good health at face value, you quickly realise that the Chinese are barraged continually with health, happiness and longevity, to name only the most generic.
Food and drink are rarely sold without reference to health; one brand of tea keeps it simple, with ‘drink often and you will be healthy’, while another goes for ‘every drop makes you healthier’. A friend informed me in a sagely tone that the quivering blob of fungus on my plate was good for the skin. Sure, health and diet go hand in hand in the West, but China has taken the next step: even supermarket products regularly claim to improve one’s emotional state. ‘Relaxation’ is a particularly popular effect, promised by countless brands of tea. One article on the Xinhua news site prescribes rose tea as a cure for anger, or, failing that, an ice-cold beer.
More specific requests can be catered for as well. The Health section of the Beijing Youth Daily claims today that jujube berries, whatever they may be, are able to help you sleep when stewed, to keep you thin, curvaceous and in good colour when eaten with ‘an appropriate amount of crystallised sugar’, to ‘enrich the blood’ and function as a laxative when boiled with rice (why anyone would need those two effects at the same time is beyond me), and to smooth the skin when mashed to a paste with ginger and liquorice, among other uses. A sterner note is dropped in at the end for a bit of gravitas, with a warning that such effects apply only to women, and that those with ‘moist phlegm’ should think long and hard before trying the berries as well.
The few explanations offered for these miraculous effects give some insight into the popularity of the remedies themselves. The West has its fair share of health crazes, but we tend to prefer ours smothered in scientific jargon that few fully understand, credible by virtue of their complexity (do you know what an antioxidant does?). Chinese health crazes tend instead to wear their folksy anti-intellectualism on their sleeve, either simply asserting their claims without going into the details, or drawing on the mess of pseudoscience that makes up Chinese medicine, which tends to prefer analogy to explanation. Zhang Wuben, a self-styled nutritionist so popular that his recommendations sparked panic buying, claimed that aubergines could reduce one’s level of body fat. His reasoning? Aubergines soak up a lot of oil when cooked, and thus, if eaten raw, can soak up fat from the body.
Much like alternative medicine in the West, the appeal of the absurd is the sense of empowerment it brings, a fact nowhere better shown than in the remarkably fast turnover in Chinese health fads. Countless past miracle-cures have been forgotten, or even ridiculed (notably the craze for chicken blood injections in the 60s – I kid you not), without weakening the demand for new remedies. What the people really want are not herbs and leaves of any particular kind, but simplicity and control. The fads are emotional, not rational in origin.
Simplicity brings comfort, as the Party knows well: a statement released at the height of the bird flue crisis reassured the People that ‘traditional Chinese medicine has, after five months of clinical trials, been proven effective in curing and preventing bird flue’. End of sentence. No citations, no specifications of which of a huge number of remedies did exactly what. Just a simple order to boil your leaves and don’t swarm the hospitals in a panicking mob.
At the same time, peddlers of the miraculous are regularly imprisoned or censured, but in general only if they are actually dangerous, such as one Hu Wanlin who about ten years ago tried to cure colds with sodium sulphate and killed over a hundred people. Cannier quacks like Zhang Wuben buttress their more eye-catching claims with plenty of quite reasonable advice: drink plenty of water, eat red meat in moderation and so on, and most get away with it. Jujube berries, though no miracle cure, are still pretty good for you. Thus, China’s officials seem content to let people play doctor, so long as no one gets hurt.
There are plenty of fairly prosaic reasons for the endlessness of the health craze – lightly regulated advertising; a government that exploits superstition for short-term stability; an inadequate healthcare system that makes self-medication more attractive. Yet that desire to have control, no matter how fantastical, is something different, having survived campaigns against superstition and a steadily growing standard of education. Most likely, it speaks volumes about the lack of trust in figures of authority prevalent in China. Even relatively patriotic Chinese have little faith in the character of the local health officials they interact with day to day, and even doctors, past class enemies, can be viewed with suspicion. Trust may be built one day, but until then life in China will continue to be saturated with promises of instant solutions to problems great and small, and no one, bar the odd grumpy scientist, has the heart to prove them wrong.
