Another major area where great victories were achieved during the Cultural Revolution was health. An article in PR #12, 1976, “Beat Back Right Deviationist Wind on Medical and Health Front,” explains the struggle on that front:
The old Ministry of Health [before the Cultural Revolution] focused its main effort in the cities, while neglecting the rural areas. . The medical system, methods of diagnosis and treatment, the orientation of medical research all catered to the needs of a minority in the cities. Whether to serve a majority of the people or a minority is the fundamental difference between the proletarian line and the revisionist line in medical work. The medical and health front has undergone profound changes since the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In terms of manpower, facilities and funds, the emphasis in health work has gradually been shifted to the countryside. . The situation there has changed for the better, particularly since the emergence of ’barefoot doctors’ [over 1,000,000 peasants trained to treat the health problems particular to the countryside with modern and traditional means and teach preventative health care] and the cooperative medical service, two socialist new things. But Teng Hsiao-ping lost no time in attacking the ’barefoot doctors’ as ’deficient profess’ ally’. Under his instigation, a gust of cold wind was stirred up to negate the cooperative medical service as a ’communist thing being done in the period of socialism’. It goes without saying that the ’barefoot doctors’ should continue to enhance their proficiency through practice and training. But when Teng Hsiao-ping attacked the ’barefoot doctors’ as ’deficient professionally’ his intention was not to help them raise their level, but to create public opinion for putting an end to this new approach to medical problems.
In the historical period of socialism, many new things have emerged that are young shoots of communism. If these were done away with because they are communist embryos, the transition to communism would be impossible, the only possibility left being the restoration of capitalism.
Teng Hsiao-ping alleged that at present the major problems on the medical front consist of ’neglecting technique’ and ’failing to cultivate professional skill’. He said so as if the principal contradiction in the field of medicine is not the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but the question of whether to cultivate or neglect technique.
Advocating ’cultivating professional skill’ and ’learning technique’ is merely a camouflage put up by Teng Hsiao-ping. The theory of the dying out of class struggle has always been a deceptive revisionist theory. .
Only by grasping class struggle and putting proletarian politics in command can the problem of technique be correctly solved. Is technique studied for the purpose of improving the peoples’ health or for seeking personal fame and gain? If this question is not solved. . one is bound to lose his bearings.
The Minister of Public Health, Liu Hsiang-ping, who championed the socialist new things in medicine, has been removed. The movie “Spring Shoot”, produced in the spring of 1976, which features a peasant woman who becomes a barefoot doctor and leads in the struggle against capitalist-road tendencies in healthcare, has apparently been denounced as part of an “anti-Party plot” of the “gang of four.” (PR #5, 1977, pp. 19-22) However, this does not necessarily mean that the present leaders will immediately try to uproot the socialist new things in health care. Recent articles in the Peking Review show that this is not the case.
Healthcare is an area where concessions can be made without threatening the re-establishment of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Revisionists must attack the ideological foundations of socialism. . education and culture. They have no choice but to wage an immediate all-out war against the socialist new things on these fronts. They also must immediately return to relying on professional management in the factories and communes, material incentives, and foreign technology; they are sure to strengthen class differences in society through altering the relations of production. However, on the health front it is not crucial to attack the socialist new things such as the barefoot doctors and the cooperative medical services.
The new leaders may try to maintain these new shoots of communism in healthcare, at least in form. (As we have seen, Teng Hsiao-ping did not attack the ’barefoot doctors’ in form, attacking only their ideological base.) However, if they are successful in consolidating bourgeois control in other fields, healthcare will inevitably become bureaucratized and inefficient, and bourgeois right (health care to those who can pay) will return in full force.