Needle Diplomacy. Acupuncture and Scientific Exchange in Cold War China and the United States

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Abstract

In the early 1970s, while China was emerging from the height of the Cultural Revolution, a surprising technology helped pave the way for the future rapprochement between China and the United States: the acupuncture needle. As an ostensibly apolitical practice, acupuncture came to serve as a scientific lubricant that eased the Cold War tensions between the two countries, providing an entryway into Sino-American people-to-people exchanges and future intellectual collaboration. At the same time, acupuncture represented an alternative imagining of a new world order, one in which scientific knowledge could just as easily flow from East to West as it did the reverse. By showcasing China’s ability to break new ground in the realm of medicine and surgery, acupuncture became a form of soft power that highlighted the innovative capacity of Chinese communism and the revolutionary potential of Mao Zedong Thought. Through the captivating achievements of new needling technologies, the Chinese government was able to not just extol the effectiveness of Maoism on a global scale, but to also — albeit briefly — direct the terms of its diplomatic engagements with the capitalist West.