There isn't much strategy behind pro-TCM papers other than "publish and perish" due to the hyper-competitive and metrics driven nature of Chinese academia. Most of these papers will be published in lower tier journals and used as a line-item within their CV in order to meet departmental KPIs or get promotions or funding, and some nameless bureaucrat won't care because metrics have been hit and his ass has been covered.
My SO had to publish similar kinds of papers when she was in Vietnam - she also had to spend $4-6k in "gifts" for the members of her thesis defense committee (despite her earning a stipend of around $100/mo) and publish politically oriented papers otherwise some technicality would come up to prevent her from getting permission for further research in Japan on an ASEAN grant, and this was at Vietnam's equivalent of JHU.
There is a similar trend in India with Aryuveda/Unani.
The strategic and commercialized research that matters always aligns tends to align with modern medicine.
That said, folk medicine does have credence in a lot of Asia (even in China today) due to issues around access and trust. There is a need for mid-level practitioners, and working on mainstreaming and retraining folk medicine practitioners as MLPs could help from a primary care perspective, and is a strategy both China and India are starting to leverage.
I read this response and immediately thought - it's not an exclusive problem of the Chinese academia, Western academia is struggling HARD with the problem.
It's such a big problem in Western academia that the political class in several countries are able to deny "experts", and their understandings.
People in general have seen so many missteps within Western academia, both allowing some really poor science to be published, and wrongly denying (and ridiculing) what turned out to be solid (thankfully some of these things are discovered when actual scientific method is employed and hypothesis are tested), that they are willing to accept politicians who deny science.
The problem exists in Western academia as well, but not to the same magnitude as in much of Asia.
In Western and especially American academia, there are private sector grants and commercialization avenues for research. Outside of top tier programs (think Peking tier programs in China or AIIMS tier programs in India), that's nonexistent in most Asian countries, so your department's funding is at the whim of government bureaucrats who tend to be recruited via civil service exams and promoted based on political loyalty, not based on domain experience.
Furthermore, Folk Medicine programs are heavily sponsored in a number of Asian countries as a misguided attempt at building an MLP pipeline plus as a cash grab by local or provincial governments who often treat these kinds of programs as businesses.
> Outside of top tier programs (think Peking tier programs in China or AIIMS tier programs in India), that's nonexistent in most Asian countries, so your department's funding is at the whim of government bureaucrats
That's a bit surprising, after seeing so many people I know in academia who are basically being used as private sector R&D on the cheap (see all the formal methods work being funded by cryptocurrency outfits...), I would have assumed that most large corporations even outside of "innovation" sectors would take advantage of this.
But maybe this effect in places like the US are just downstream of the wild wage arbitrage you get by doing this.
Because the gap between tier 1 programs and those that aren't is massive in countries like China and India.
Generally, those institutions managed by the central government of both countries are better managed than those under local and provincial governments.
R&D output, calibre of student base, and access to research equipment is also reflected by that trend. And any private sector funding goes to those programs.
And it's hard to describe the mismanagement that happens in lower tier programs in countries like China and India compared to the US - corruption remains a massive issue in both countries.
> In Western and especially American academia, there are private sector grants and commercialization avenues for research. Outside of top tier programs, that's nonexistent in most Asian countries, so your department's funding is at the whim of government bureaucrats who tend to be recruited via civil service exams and promoted based on political loyalty, not based on domain experience.
This is sad, and misinformed.
Multiple countries fund their academic research through the state. Adding the misinformation about being "promoted based on political loyalty" is a strong sign of your bias.
Funding can only come through one of three routes:
1. State - which is where people are supposed to be working for the betterment of their country, but is vulnerable to the bias of the politics of the day.
2. Private - which is where people are motivated by a profit, but is vulnerable to the bias of the politics of the company.
3. Voluntary/Charity - which is where people are motivated by whatever wakes them up in the morning, but is vulnerable to the donors.
ALL funding models are vulnerable to the bias of whoever is in control of the funding.
I'm not saying state funding is bad or private funding is good.
I'm saying that having a mixture of both provides checks and balances to moderate the influence of both.
> Adding the misinformation about being "promoted based on political loyalty" is a strong sign of your bias
I'm talking about countries like China and India, where folk medicines have been politicized, lateral movement into the bureaucracy is non-existent, and criticism against TCM and Aryuveda is being slowly suffocated.
> There is a similar trend in India with Aryuveda/Unani.
It might actually be worse. There's a strong religious/nationalist element to some Ayurvedic promoters in India which vociferously rejects any kind of scientific rigor - the attitude amounts to "if Western science says Ayurveda is wrong, Western science must be wrong". TCM doesn't seem to attract the same degree of dogmatism.
It isn't all that different. The religious aspect of Aryuveda/Unani isn't that significant (no one is quoting sutras or the Koran in AYUSH "research"), and Aryuveda/Unani programs (BAMS/BUMS) aren't much different from their TCM equivalents in their "research" (they're aping systemic and evidence based methods the same way TCM "researchers" are) as well as curriculum.
India's AYUSH Ministry (founded 2014) is itself based on China's NATCM and the formalization of TCM in the 60s-70s.
And just like in China, BAMS/BUMS is used as a stopgap MLP in rural and underserved communities the same way TCM is in China.
Both are holdovers from the anti-colonial movement of the 50-70s that continue to be cynically used as stopgaps for failures at expanding MLP in both countries, because no real doctor wants to work in a rural primary clinic earning $200-400/mo when they can demand 6-7x that working as a doctor in an urban area with superior amenities.
That said, I've started seeing much stronger criticism of AYUSH in India than the equivalent for TCM - AYUSH doctors are increasingly shown as "negative" or "antagonist" characters or quacks in most state subsidized TV shows in India, even in BJP ruled states (eg. Gram Chikitsalay (2025) and BJP ruled Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh; Laakhon Mein Ek (2019) and BJP ruled Maharashtra; Panchayat (2025) and BJP ruled Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh) but recent CDramas like 你好，我的大夫 (2023) and 老中医 (2018) humanize and treat TCM as if it's not a quack field.
I mean, you could change some trivial details and end up with a valid description of JHU. How much is tuition in Vietnam? There're your "gifts". And so on. What language was "replication crisis" initially coined in? (No, for real, I don't know.)
Public medical school tuition is around $3-6k per year in a country where most households aren't earning above $300/mo, financial aid is nonexistent, and "student loans" for the middle class means going to some tattooed chain smoker jeweler who pounds Ruou San Dinh like water and demands double digit interest rates.
> you could change some trivial details and end up with a valid description of JHU
You don't have JHU students (or any Western medical students) moonlighting as unlicensed doctors under their professors working license and giving them a $200-500/mo cut. This is fairly common at UMP Hanoi and HCMC, let alone lower tier programs. You also don't need to pay a $1-3k bribe in speed money to get your working license in the US.
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There's a reason my SO immigrated abroad like a lot of her peers - if you don't have the right connections or enough money (black or white), you will not succeed in Vietnam.
Thao Dien, Landmark 81, Sunrise City, and D1 is not representative of middle class Vietnam - neighborhoods like D10 and Phu Nhuan is.
American medical school tuition is $40k-$70k a year, median monthly household income is about $6.5k. Meanwhile, median household income in Vietnam is actually closer to $650 a month; the population of households earning the lowest amount is quite high, but ~75% of Vietnamese households earn more than $400 a month.
But then, most US households aren't sending their kids to medical school in the US; the income of your average medical student's family is significantly higher than the median here. I'll assume the same is true in Vietnam. Though, if not, and doctors are instead coming from a much more representative sample of the population, good on them; it's better than we've managed.
The differences are colorful but seem to represent a front-loading of obstacles that the US medical education system spreads out on the back end. And there's no higher-earning market to try to get to from here in order to make the math work.
FWIW, the point here is not to lionize Vietnam's system, but to point out how embarrassing that there are any comparisons to be drawn at all between how their schools and one as "prestigious" as JHU operate. And, per the original post I replied to, there are.
My SO had to publish similar kinds of papers when she was in Vietnam - she also had to spend $4-6k in "gifts" for the members of her thesis defense committee (despite her earning a stipend of around $100/mo) and publish politically oriented papers otherwise some technicality would come up to prevent her from getting permission for further research in Japan on an ASEAN grant, and this was at Vietnam's equivalent of JHU.
There is a similar trend in India with Aryuveda/Unani.
The strategic and commercialized research that matters always aligns tends to align with modern medicine.
That said, folk medicine does have credence in a lot of Asia (even in China today) due to issues around access and trust. There is a need for mid-level practitioners, and working on mainstreaming and retraining folk medicine practitioners as MLPs could help from a primary care perspective, and is a strategy both China and India are starting to leverage.