The making of Chinese medicine in Hong Kong

This paper aims to examine the development of Chinese medicine in Hong Kong and argues that Chinese medicine is not a mere healing practice but a discursive practice against its unique institutional context.

Reviewing the medical history in the colonial and post-colonial era, this paper delineates the dynamics between Chinese medicine and Western medicine, and the discursive shaping of Chinese medicine in Hong Kong.

While Chinese medicine in post-colonial Hong Kong is modernizing itself from a traditional medicine to the scientific Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), it partakes in the decolonization and nationalization project and is geared towards the standardized TCM.

This paper proposed a critical cultural perspective in studying the discursive formation of Chinese medicine in Hong Kong.