Performing Expertise without Experts: Barefoot Doctor Program and Medical Expertise in Rural China

Chang Liu, The New School for Social Research

During China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a large number of lay medical workers—the “barefoot doctors”—were trained in a short period and worked in rural areas to provide primary medical care while continuing their farmwork. The barefoot doctor program demonstrates an experimental collaboration between experts and lay people. Recent scholarship has primarily examined the role of this program in introducing Western medicine into rural China (Fang 2012; Pang 2017). However, these literatures are often less engaged with meaning making and interaction among various actors in the program, and their insights have yet to be brought into theorizing the barefoot doctor program as a network of medical expertise in rural China. Drawing on the model of “boundary objects” proposed by Star and Griesemer (1989) and Gil Eyal’s (2013) theory of expertise, this paper investigates how the barefoot doctor program emerged as a new network of medical expertise, with a focus on how the barefoot doctor program “outsourced” medical and health services from experts to lay people. I argue that the success of the barefoot doctor program was a social outcome of the cooperative work among the “alliance” of the heterogeneous participants. In this network, barefoot doctors work as a key node, bridging rural residents and professional medical doctors together. As a result, the power of professional experts was diminished, while the network of medical expertise was extended and strengthened. Through this historical analysis, this paper also aims to provide a compelling explanation for the seeming paradox in socialist China’s state policy: anti-intellectual but pro-science and technology, as well as the persistent tension between political ideologies and knowledge of professionals and experts in China, in other words, the enduring struggle between “redness” and “expertise” (MacFarquhar 1974) from the socialist period to the present.

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 Presented in Session 177. Social Science Histories of Expertise (1): Selected Histories of Knowledge and Ignorance