UC San Diego

This thesis explores the imaginary in the marketing of integrated medicine in China through an analysis of an episode of the television show, "Health Appointment" ("Jiankang Youyue"), which airs on CCTV (China Central Television), the primary state television broadcaster within the People's Republic of China. Primarily, I seek to address how the self is implicated in the imaginary of integrated medicine and, ultimately, show how the notion of a `genetic self' emerges as an attempt to resolve the issues of subjectivity faced by persons diagnosed with mental illness. The `genetic self' integrates Five Phase Theory into biomedical notions of the 'neurochemical self' (cf. Rose 2003) and, in doing so, indicates that, in the intersection of biomedicine and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), biomedicine is not entirely hegemonic. Relating this to economic, historical, and political processes, I show that globalization consists of reciprocal processes in which traditional Chinese medicine is not replaced, but rather reinterpreted, and biomedicine is reformulated in accordance with traditional medical beliefs. The repeated emphasis on a cure throughout the promotion of `Five Phase Balance Regulation Therapy' on "Jiankang Youyue" illustrates how TCM and biomedicine are both reformulated through the integration of the two cultural systems of medicine