Statement of Research Plan How do professionals, through institutional, ideological, and governmental power, justify their knowledge and profession? In this research, I focus on a very specific group of transnational knowledge producers: medical doctors who practice Chinese medicine in British Malaya and the Philippines, who offered two models of institutional building. I argue that through processes I call institutionalization, ideologization and governmentalization, doctors of Chinese medicine in British Malaya and the Philippines successfully validated, and even expanded the influence of, Chinese medicine by maneuvering the transnational political landscape between Southeast Asian colonial governments and the Chinese Nationalist government from 1929 to 1945. As I would like to ascertain the connection between the Rockefeller Foundation and medical doctors of Chinese medicine in Southeast Asia, I propose a three-day research trip at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Westchester, New York in mid-January 2023. Since weather conditions may vary, it is possible that I will delay my visit to early February. The final product of this research will be a history honors thesis submitted in April 2023.

In the first chapter of my thesis, I argue that by building medical organizations which published journals and facilitated collective action, doctors of Chinese medicine expanded their audience group and laid an institutional infrastructure of their maneuvering of transnational politics for the survival of their profession. While those based in British Malaya adopted a bottom-up approach by building their organizations from scratch, those in the Philippines were more reliant on the National Medical Institute in China, and their approach can be characterized as top-down. This difference in institutional building led to differential survivability of these organizations in the postcolonial period. In my second chapter, I focus on the way these doctors, by appropriating the rhetoric of “National Medicine” in China, connected their medical work to a non-territorial form of Chinese nationalism and protected themselves from the attack from colonial governments and practitioners of biomedicine. Finally, in my last chapter, I highlight how these doctors navigated the subtle politics between the Chinese Nationalist government’s aim of expanding its influence internationally and Southeast Asian colonial governments’ concern over local Chinese population backed by an offshore government. In this way, they made Chinese medicine a government-regulatable discipline with guidelines of education, examination, and licensing. Their efforts, although severely disrupted by WWII in Southeast Asia (1942-1945), had profound implications for the state management of Chinese medicine in post-colonial Southeast Asia. While the top-down model in the Philippines left little traces in the postcolonial period, the bottom-up model in British Malaya paved the way for official recognition and management of Chinese medicine in certain parts of the colony after independence, such as today’s Singapore.

The final product of this research will be a history honors thesis, which will be submitted in April 2023. To complete my second chapter (“nationalism”) and third chapter (“transnational politics”), I plan to look into the role of the Rockefeller Foundation as a mediating philanthropical institution between the Nationalist Government of China and colonial powers in Asia, including Britain, France, and Japan. In the first half of the 20th century, the Rockefeller Foundation carried out multiple medical programs in China, building hospitals, facilitating biomedical labs, and managing medical aids. A significant portion of the materials produced by the agents of the Rockefeller Foundation and their communications with medical doctors in Asia are preserved at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Westchester, New York. By researching in the Foundation’s archives, I would like to ascertain two issues: (1) whether doctors who practiced Chinese medicine in Southeast Asia used the Rockefeller Foundation’s transnational medical programs to bolster their own influence in Southeast Asia and to get access to the Nationalist Government in China; and (2) if the former hypothetical link is established, whether these doctors collaborated with the Rockefeller Foundation in sending medical aids to China during WWII in East Asia (1937-45) and Southeast Asia (1942-45).

The purpose of this archival trip is threefold. First, few works of scholarship on Chinese medicine have focused on the potential existence of links between transnational medical networks (in my case, the Rockefeller Foundation’s programs in Asia) and networks of Chinese medicine outside of China. An examination of this subtopic will enrich our understanding of the dynamics among transnational medical networks in the second quarter of the 20th century. Second, scholars often portray the Rockefeller Foundation as a champion of biomedical enterprises in Asia, particularly in China. Yet, few have looked at the Foundation from the perspective of non-biomedical healing systems and asked whether the Foundation stepped into these fields. It is possible that at the Rockefeller Archive Center, I may find evidence that highlight the collaboration between doctors of Chinese medicine in Southeast Asia and agents of the Rockefeller Foundation in China in terms of managing medical aids to China’s war effort against Japan. Third, studying the Foundation’s archives may facilitate our understanding of the relationship between doctors of Chinese medicine in Southeast Asia and medical officials in the Chinese government. In the 1920s and 1930s. a significant number of biomedical doctors in China were trained through programs sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Many of them, after graduation, entered the Chinese government in Nanjing, secured positions in the Department/Agency of Public Health, and used their connections with the Rockefeller Foundation to facilitate their work. Therefore, when doctors of Chinese medicine in British Malaya and the Philippines contacted Chinese medical officials to draw support for the preservation of Chinese medicine in Southeast Asia, their communications might end up in the Rockefeller archive.