Today is October 29, 2025. The north wind is howling, and the temperature has dropped by 30 degrees Fahrenheit in a day, making it perfect weather for a podcast. Let's start with a post from Twitter. A Twitter user named Dr. Wang (whom we'll refer to as Dr. Wang for now) publishes high-quality tweets; episode 97 of this channel, "Why Are You Always Targeted by Scum?", was inspired by one of his tweets. Today, Dr. Wang posted about **Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Injections** (Traditional Chinese Medicine Injections: pharmaceutical preparations of TCM extracts administered via intravenous or intramuscular injection). He pointed out that currently, there are 119 types of TCM injections in China, but only 8 companies have provided post-market evaluation reports. At the end of his post, he advised everyone: "For your health, refuse TCM injections."

I responded to Dr. Wang's post, saying: "Traditional Chinese medicine can gauge the level of enlightenment among Chinese people." It's noteworthy that up until the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic Chinese media could still report on the dangers of TCM injections, with some headlines being quite sharp, even using phrases like "**fraudulent and life-threatening** (Fraudulent and life-threatening: refers to acts of obtaining money through deception and endangering others' lives)." At that time, a widely circulated report quoted **Rao Yi** (Rao Yi: Professor of Neuroscience at Peking University, a renowned biologist who is a strong critic of TCM injections) fiercely criticizing TCM injections as pseudoscience and a fraudulent, life-threatening practice. Back then, some experts still dared to voice their opinions.

Professor Rao Yi pointed out that Western medicine is a typical modern science, entirely consistent with scientific principles. Various regions, including those inhabited by the Han Chinese, may have other traditional medical practices, and if these are inconsistent with science, they will be reformed in the future. Therefore, there is no alternative medical path independent of modern medicine. He believes that the scientific modernization of traditional medicine requires a process. The clue for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine came from traditional Chinese medicine, but all related research was conducted using modern scientific methods. Modern science can derive insights from TCM to benefit all humanity.

Regardless of the medical approach, be it TCM or Western medicine, two core principles remain constant: first, treatment efficacy, and second, manageable side effects. If any medical method attempts to bypass these two tests, it is not only pseudoscience but also a fraudulent and life-threatening practice. While there are reasonable components within traditional Chinese medicine, today, many of its methods are quite unreasonable. Currently, a group of TCM manufacturers are aggressively promoting TCM nationwide, with hundreds of billions in annual sales coming from TCM injections. Rao Yi stated bluntly that this is entirely pseudoscience, a complete and utter pseudoscience.

Rao Yi went on to explain that traditional Chinese medicine was not originally administered via injection. If a medicine is to be promoted on a large scale in the market, similar to Western medicine, it must undergo scientific scrutiny. Western medicines are approved for widespread use because they have passed rigorous animal and human trials. The efficacy of a drug must be reliable and approved before it can be used. However, some injections, claiming to be based on TCM ingredients, demand large-scale promotion without scientific testing. This exploits loopholes, bypassing both the strict testing methods required for Western medicine and the TCM principle against widespread promotion. Such practices are purely commercial; they are not for the well-being of the Chinese people but are fraudulent and life-threatening.

The above are Rao Yi's original words. Combined with Chinese media reports from that time, we see the true nature of TCM injections as **fraudulent and life-threatening**: they adopt the modern medical method of injection but do not follow the basic procedures of modern medical research, testing, and clinical trials. With unknown chemical compositions and unknown side effects, patients are directly used for animal and human experimentation. Many patients have died as a result, and hundreds of thousands have experienced adverse reactions. Due to frequent incidents, the Chinese government has halted some brands, but most TCM injections remain in use.

Traditional Chinese medicine has a long history, but TCM injections only date back about 80 years, invented by the **Eighth Route Army** (Eighth Route Army: The army led by the Chinese Communist Party, active behind enemy lines during the Second Sino-Japanese War) in the Taihang Mountains. At that time, the Eighth Route Army had no medical research and development facilities in their guerrilla bases, but due to a severe lack of medicine, they had to improvise, developing a drug called **Chaihu Injection** (Chaihu Injection: an injectable preparation made primarily from the traditional Chinese herb Chaihu, once used by the Eighth Route Army to treat the sick and wounded). They boiled the TCM herb Chaihu into a liquid and injected it into the veins of patients and wounded soldiers. No one knows how many people this Chaihu Injection actually cured or how many it killed. The sole reason for this invention was the lack of Western medicine.

Eighty years later, over 100 types of TCM injections have appeared on the Chinese market, and it remains a mystery how many people they have cured or killed. The scarcity of Western medicine is still the primary reason for their existence, but in addition to that, another reason has emerged: profit. This is the fundamental reason why Rao Yi and other scientists and doctors criticize TCM injections as being **fraudulent and life-threatening**.

The COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point in China. During the pandemic, the Chinese government promoted the use of TCM to treat the virus, and the media no longer dared to criticize TCM as before. Most scientists and doctors also refrained from openly expressing their professional opinions. China tackled the COVID-19 virus through campaign-style measures, implementing lockdowns and a zero-COVID policy, which consumed vast medical resources and strained the healthcare system. The government's procurement pace couldn't keep up with the consumption rate, forcing them to drastically cut costs, reduce the purchase of effective but expensive Western medicines, and increase the purchase of TCMs with unclear, or even potentially harmful, efficacy.

The Chinese healthcare system is characterized by a hierarchical division of people, where a small fraction at the top of the pyramid possesses the majority of medical resources, while the vast base of the pyramid has pitifully few. For those at the top with abundant medical resources, taking TCM is merely an option. However, for the majority of Chinese people, taking TCM is not an option because decent Western medicines are too expensive, beyond their financial reach, or even excluded from medical insurance coverage. China's medical insurance is divided into "within-system" and "outside-system," with further stratification within the "within-system" category.

The majority of China's population is outside the "system" and has limited access to medical resources; their medical insurance provides very little money for decent Western medicines. Most TCMs, being cheap to produce and of low value, become the primary option. Therefore, to a large extent, the phenomenon of TCM in China is a problem of scarcity of modern medical resources. When the medical resources available to Chinese people outside the system reach the standards of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, or even Russia and Cuba, fewer people will choose TCM, and fewer will blindly believe in it. This is fundamentally a problem of medical resource scarcity.

Even the elderly women with bound feet in my village when I was a child understood the principle: "Western medicine cures diseases, TCM is uncertain." Hospitals in provincial capitals are better than county hospitals, and county hospitals are better than commune hospitals. In the village, there were only barefoot doctors and old TCM practitioners. While old TCM practitioners were more experienced than barefoot doctors, if a villager fell seriously ill, neither could cure them; they had to go to the county hospital because it had decent Western medicine. If the county hospital couldn't cure them, and they still had money, they would go to the provincial capital hospital, where there was even better Western medicine. The scarcity of medical resources in China has not fundamentally improved with economic development.

According to 2020 data from the **World Bank** (World Bank: an international financial institution that provides financial and technical assistance to developing countries), China's healthcare expenditure accounts for 5.59% of its GDP, ranking 120th in the world, lower than African countries like Zambia, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Libya's healthcare expenditure is 6.6% of GDP, Algeria's is 6.3%, Tunisia's is 6.2%, Zambia's is 5.7%, while China's is 5.59%.

Most developed countries spend over 10% of their GDP on healthcare; the United States is highest at 18.8%, Germany at 12.8%, Japan at 11.5%, and South Korea at 8.4%. Even Russia's healthcare expenditure accounts for 7.6% of its GDP, and it implements **universal healthcare** (Universal Healthcare: a system where the government provides or funds healthcare services to ensure all citizens have access). China used to follow the Soviet Union and now aligns with Russia, but it fails to adopt one of the most crucial aspects for its people's well-being: universal healthcare. This was the case during the Soviet era. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia enshrined free healthcare as a basic right for its citizens in its constitution. For over 30 years since then, regardless of Russia's economic fluctuations, its universal healthcare policy has remained unchanged.

Previously, the Chinese government claimed the country was poor and lacked funds for healthcare. However, in the 20-plus years since joining the WTO, China has developed into a middle-income country, yet its healthcare investment still remains at the level of low-income nations. Most citizens outside the system with serious illnesses still cannot afford treatment, being forced to make do with TCM, at most supplemented with some low-quality Western medicine. The government's severe underinvestment in healthcare inevitably leads to strained medical resources. According to World Bank statistics, China ranks behind countries like Libya, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Ecuador in terms of the doctor-to-1000-population ratio. Chinese people may look down on these countries, but their citizens enjoy more per capita medical resources than the Chinese.

These figures are already dismal, but even when considering these poor statistics, one must also account for China's unique disparities between those within and outside the system, and between urban and rural areas. Unlike many countries, the majority of China's medical resources are allocated to the 20% of the population in large and medium-sized cities, while the 80% in rural areas and small towns may not even receive 20% of the medical resources. More than half of the population is essentially excluded from the threshold of modern medical resources. If they fall ill and don't take TCM or TCM injections, what else can they take or be injected with?

In recent years, Chinese media have reported several deaths of children due to TCM injections, mostly occurring in hospitals in small and medium-sized towns, rarely in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Clearly, many victims are children from small-town families, as well as rural families. The majority of Chinese citizens live in rural areas and small towns, and for them and their children, TCM and low-quality Western medicine are the only affordable options. At the very least, TCM can serve as a placebo; whether it's toxic or not, and the extent of its side effects, is entirely a matter of luck.

An indispensable ingredient in the TCM placebo promoted by the Chinese government is the propaganda department's public opinion fraud, which portrays TCM as miraculous, profound, a 5,000-year legacy from ancestors, and superior to modern medicine. This propaganda specifically targets Chinese people outside the system who cannot afford Western medicine, especially those living in rural areas and small towns. Few Chinese people within the system, especially high-ranking officials, believe this propaganda. In reality, if a prominent leader falls ill and doctors don't prescribe imported medicine, do you think their family wouldn't go complain to the hospital director?

Those medicines are produced in developed countries, are all Western medicines, and are very expensive, thus not used by 99% of Chinese people. Because the Chinese government's investment in healthcare is severely insufficient, medical resources are strained, and the limited resources are severely unequally distributed, most Chinese people who fall ill do not receive treatment that meets modern medical standards. It's already the 2020s, and China is the world's second-largest economy, yet the medical conditions for most Chinese people have not significantly improved compared to 80 years ago. When ill, they can only take some herbal medicine; the only "progress" is the availability of herbal injections. Measured by modern medical standards, herbal injections are a deadly joke.

High-ranking Chinese officials, when ill, do not take herbal medicine, much less receive TCM injections; instead, they see Western doctors and take imported medicines. The masses at the bottom of the pyramid are deprived of decent medical resources, which is already unfortunate. But even more tragic is that many Chinese people are so thoroughly misled by official propaganda that they lose the ability to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad, and superior from inferior.

This can be described as a double misfortune for the Chinese people. The first layer is material deprivation: denying them the opportunity to receive treatment that meets modern medical standards when they fall ill. The second layer is cognitive deprivation: destroying their normal cognition, leading them to actively invert right and wrong, and superior and inferior. A person living long-term in an environment with only inferior options will gradually lose the ability to distinguish quality. They haven't seen good things, only bad ones. Yet, in this information age, despite the Great Firewall, it's impossible for them to have never heard of good things entirely.

At the same time, they know they will never have the opportunity to obtain those fabled good things. This triggers a peculiar psychological defense mechanism: "What I cannot get is bad; what I can get is the best." Through this strange psychological defense mechanism, the base of the social pyramid, originally victims, actively joins the ranks of official propaganda.

Listeners are certainly familiar with that propaganda rhetoric, for example: "Western medicine treats the symptoms but not the root cause, only TCM treats the root cause," "Western medicine is chemicals with many side effects, while TCM is pure, natural, non-toxic, and harmless with no side effects," "Imported medicines are all controlled by capital, all foreign conspiracies." This is the unique phenomenon of the contemporary Chinese **TCM Boxer Rebellion** (TCM Boxer Rebellion: refers to a social phenomenon in China characterized by the blind rejection of modern medicine, fervent promotion of traditional Chinese medicine, and imbued with nationalism and anti-intellectualism), whose characteristics are ignorance, xenophobia, and self-deception.

Through an Ah Q-style spiritual victory, they transform the pain of "I cannot get it" into the arrogance of "I don't want it." They were originally victims deprived of quality resources by the government, but now they have become proponents of inferior resources. From an enlightenment perspective, this is a state of ignorance—cognitive ignorance, inversion of superior and inferior, self-amusement, and self-abuse. They harm not only themselves but also their next generation, causing their children to grow up in this misfortune. Many become numb, and many others develop the habit of saying one thing and meaning another.

Only when life is at stake do they think about being honest with themselves. Normally, they boast about the profoundness of TCM, but when they are truly gravely ill and the doctor asks if they want TCM or imported medicine, they will, without exception, demand imported medicine. **Confucius** (Confucius: an ancient Chinese thinker, educator, and founder of Confucianism) said, "Observe a person by listening to their words and watching their actions." Contemporary China, under the illusion created by various spiritual opiates, is rampant with subservience and hypocrisy. In many situations, listening to words has become meaningless; one can simply observe actions. From a scientific perspective, China's TCM Boxer Rebellion is tantamount to chronic suicide.

China's ultra-low healthcare expenditure, ranking 120th in the world, is further exploited by the interest groups of the **TCM Boxer Rebellion**, who profit immensely from it. Typical examples include various life-threatening TCM injections, and the well-known **Lianhua Qingwen Capsule** (Lianhua Qingwen Capsule: a traditional Chinese patent medicine heavily promoted by the Chinese government during the COVID-19 pandemic, but whose efficacy and safety are highly controversial), all of which are of this ilk.

In the past two years, the Chinese government has launched an anti-corruption campaign in the healthcare sector, and like other such campaigns, the result is inevitably more corruption. The traditional Chinese medicine that it has promoted and supported can be said to be the biggest corruption in China's healthcare industry. This corruption, this fraud, is systemic and a state-sponsored act. It consumes already meager healthcare expenditures, provides pitifully low efficacy, and even directly uses patients for animal and human experimentation. When huge amounts of medical insurance funds are spent on herbal medicines with unknown efficacy and TCM injections with equally unknown efficacy but extremely high risks, the already scarce medical resources naturally become even more strained.

Many Chinese intellectuals say that the Chinese people are ignorant because of Party-state brainwashing, but the ignorance of the Chinese people did not start with the Party-state; they have always been ignorant, and the Party-state merely locks them into their existing state of ignorance, preventing them from emerging. On July 14, 1937, two Harvard-educated scholars, **Wu Mi** (Wu Mi: a renowned modern Chinese scholar, writer, and educator) and **Chen Yinque** (Chen Yinque: a renowned modern Chinese historian and classical literature scholar), were strolling in Tsinghua Garden. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident had just broken out, and the Republic of China was in turmoil. Discussing the current situation, Chen Yinque uttered a profound statement: "The Chinese people are ignorant below and deceitful above." Wu Mi recorded this in his diary, which was later published.

Judging China's situation is inseparable from judging the Chinese people. Chen Yinque's assessment of the Chinese people was **"upper deception, lower ignorance"** (Upper Deception, Lower Ignorance: refers to rulers being cunning and deceptive, while the populace is ignorant and foolish, a profound insight by Chen Yinque into China's social structure). To this day, this official-civilian structure of upper deception and lower ignorance in China has not changed. Officialdom is cunning, and the populace is ignorant; this is the fertile ground for the growth of Boxer-like movements. The Party-state mobilizes its propaganda apparatus, locking the populace indefinitely in a cage of ignorance, which is the soil that nurtures the TCM Boxer Rebellion.

For over a century in China, whenever there is a resonance between the officialdom and the social base, a major man-made disaster is not far off. When the government calls for anti-corruption in the medical industry, the TCM Boxer Rebellion calls for overthrowing evil foreign pharmaceutical companies. Doctors prescribing imported medicines become "white-clad devils." The more anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-professional standards, the larger the market for TCM becomes. Medical professionals who uphold their ethics are increasingly marginalized. Today, years of accumulated systemic debt are coming due, and the TCM Boxer Rebellion is using their and their children's health to pay the enormous bills of this systemic deficit.

Debts must eventually be paid, one way or another. When the resonance between official propaganda and the TCM Boxer Rebellion reaches a critical point, a man-made disaster becomes unavoidable, and in the end, who can escape?

In previous episodes, we discussed that TCM, as a scholarly pastime, is quite good, much like zither, chess, calligraphy, painting, poetry, and metaphysics, all of which discuss things that sound incredibly profound. For example, **"The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon"** (Huangdi Neijing: the earliest existing classic of Traditional Chinese Medicine theory, laying the foundation for TCM theory) states, "**A sage treats not the sick, but the not-yet-sick** (A sage treats not the sick, but the not-yet-sick: a famous quote from "The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon," emphasizing the importance of disease prevention)," meaning a sage treats diseases before they manifest, preventing them from occurring. Is this profound? Of course, it is. The question is "how"—how does one treat the not-yet-sick?

Western medicine, or modern medicine, has a clear answer: it invented vaccines and established norms like regular check-ups. Western medicine is not unaware of "treating the not-yet-sick" or that prevention is better than cure. However, it has a significant difference from TCM: it not only understands these grand principles but also knows how to use technology to transform these principles into medicines and actionable professional procedures. TCM, on the other hand, remains at the stage of grand principles—broad and impractical conjectures that sound convincing, but as soon as you ask "how," the facade crumbles.

TCM, like traditional Chinese philosophy, is full of grand principles but lacks any specific experimental analysis or technical thinking. To put it nicely, this is rich imagination; to put it less nicely, it's crude thinking, not yet refined enough to conduct technical analysis of grand concepts. Grand principles are certainly important, but without concrete technical support, they remain at the level of imagination. Specifically in the medical field, the grand principle that prevention is better than cure is undoubtedly important, but developing preventive medicines, such as vaccines, is equally crucial.

We do not live in an ideal world, but in the real world. In the real world, we must not only know what the ideal state is but also how to develop technical means to approach that ideal step by step. Everyone has ideals, but the question is how to achieve them? This is the "how" question. In Chinese tradition, this "how" stands like a wall, with scholarly ideals soaring on one side and the entire populace pulling a cart like old oxen on the other.

Traditional Chinese medicine is essentially a product of this tradition. Compared to Western medicine, or modern medicine, how effective is it? Which is superior? Which is inferior? Look at the average lifespan of ancient Chinese emperors served by imperial physicians, then look at the lifespan of contemporary national leaders served by modern medicine; if your intellect is still salvageable, you will certainly know the answer.

However, in reality, there are so many people who, if their intellect were salvageable, would not become part of the **TCM Boxer Rebellion**. A kind classmate from China once said: "It's pitiful and timid to see those who blindly believe in TCM. They get sick, have no money for treatment, and rely on TCM prescriptions to fend for themselves. The state doesn't provide them with decent modern healthcare, yet they think TCM is amazing and curse anyone who points out the problems. This kind of ignorance makes one lose hope."

He was referring to these TCM Boxer Rebellion members within China. They have attacked Rao Yi and other doctors who questioned TCM injections. Faced with such ignorance, what can ordinary people do? One's character is fate; what else can one do but sigh? Cognition determines destiny. Ignorant people lose their cognitive abilities, and their fate, as well as their children's fate, is decided by others. **Zhuangzi** (Zhuangzi: an ancient Chinese philosopher, a representative figure of Taoism) said this is the fate of a **frog in a well** (Frog in a well: a metaphor for someone with limited knowledge and narrow views). China's well is truly vast, and its history too long; a few leaps inside can create the illusion of flying.

Many people involved in **Chinese traditional culture/studies** (Chinese traditional culture/studies: refers to traditional Chinese culture and scholarship, including philosophical systems like Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism) and TCM are in this state. Of course, not all people involved in Chinese studies and TCM are like this; some have seen the world, seen the ocean, and understand that Chinese studies and TCM are livelihoods, designed to make money but not to harm lives. However, China has now reached a point where fraudulent and life-threatening things like TCM injections are rampant.

At this point, we can summarize. For Chinese people at the top of the pyramid, seeing a TCM doctor and taking TCM is an option because they have access to excellent Western medical resources, meaning excellent modern medical resources. They can use TCM as a supplement or an adjustment. However, for the majority of Chinese people, seeing a TCM doctor, taking TCM, and receiving TCM injections is not an option.

Decent Western medicine is too far away for them, and decent Western medicines are too expensive and not covered by medical insurance. Therefore, fundamentally, the root cause of the TCM, herbal medicine, and TCM injection phenomenon is the scarcity of modern medical resources in China, and the direct reason for this scarcity is that the Chinese government's healthcare expenditure as a percentage of GDP is too low, even lower than many African countries. The Chinese government's solution is not to increase healthcare investment, much less to rationally allocate medical resources, but to politicize healthcare, promote herbal medicine nationalism, and incite the TCM Boxer Rebellion. It mobilizes its propaganda apparatus to boast about the profoundness of TCM, forcing centralized medical procurement to favor TCM.

However, when Chinese leaders fall ill, they do not take herbal medicine, much less receive herbal injections; instead, they see Western doctors and take imported medicines. The citizens at the bottom of the pyramid are deprived of decent medical resources, which is already unfortunate. But even more tragically, many people have also had their ability to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad, and superior from inferior, castrated.

When China's economy was prosperous and its treasury full, the government did not spend money on improving people's livelihoods and establishing social safety nets like healthcare, but instead over-invested in infrastructure and liberally disbursed funds globally. In recent years, as the Chinese economy has entered a downward spiral, the deficits in public welfare have intensified, and healthcare expenditure has become even more constrained. Where there is no money, problems will arise. When problems become severe, society will become unstable, and a tipping point of unrest will erupt.

In recent years, many Chinese people have moved abroad, and some members of the TCM Boxer Rebellion have also emerged with their herbal pots. If you live in the United States, enjoying full access to modern medical resources, yet believe that TCM is superior to Western medicine, and your social circle consists of aunts and uncles who trust TCM folk remedies, then that's not a problem with the United States, nor with TCM or Western medicine; it's a problem with your social circle. Ultimately, it's a problem with your cognition. As the saying goes, "Birds of a feather flock together," and people are no different. That concludes today's discussion; see you next time.