In 2019, The Economist ran a leader that treated Traditional Chinese Medicine not as folklore or a wellness trend, but as a state project with global ambitions.
The article starts with Xinhua’s boast that TCM “might just be about to take over the world”, and reads that not as a joke but as a glimpse into Beijing’s plans. It traces how TCM has moved from being dismissed as superstition by early Republican leaders to being folded back into official ideology under Mao and, more aggressively, under Xi Jinping.
“Traditional Chinese medicine is being rebuilt as an instrument of nationalism and industry, not as a branch of science.”
TCM as policy, not personal preference
The leader’s central move is to treat TCM as infrastructure rather than a series of individual consumer choices. It describes the rapid growth of TCM inside China: thousands of hospitals adding TCM departments, hundreds of thousands of licensed practitioners, and new laws that force general hospitals to place TCM on an equal footing with conventional medicine. Abroad, the same apparatus uses Confucius Institutes and cultural diplomacy to seed TCM teaching in places like America and Britain.
Campaigns that try to “educate the consumer” about rhino horn run into something larger: a government that is actively rewarding TCM’s expansion at home and marketing it overseas.
“If the state keeps building the scaffolding for TCM, no poster campaign in an airport is going to count as a meaningful brake.”
Science, placebo and political theatre
The Economist piece is unusually blunt for a mainstream outlet in separating three things: lifestyle advice, scientifically tested drugs, and everything else that gets bundled under the TCM label. It acknowledges that TCM can encourage healthier habits and that a tiny number of modern medicines have roots in traditional recipes. But it draws a hard line at using that history as cover for the rest.
The leader calls most TCM treatments “at best a placebo and at worst a harmful distraction”, and notes how the government leaned on Nobel laureate Tu Youyou’s work on artemisinin to claim a victory for TCM as a whole. In reality, as the article points out, what mattered was isolating a compound and testing it, not the philosophy of qi.
The article’s argument is simple: whenever a traditional remedy works, it stops being “traditional” and becomes medicine; what remains under the TCM umbrella is protected more by politics than by evidence. This line of reasoning is key as it undercuts the idea that rhino horn demand is a matter of “ancient wisdom” that outsiders are too crude to understand. The Economist treats it as a modern policy choice.
Wildlife as raw material
Although the leader is written for a general readership, its most vivid passages are about the environmental cost. It sketches the Tibetan plateau, scraped and dug up by fortune‑hunters chasing a fungus that grows from caterpillar corpses, and then turns to the trade in animal parts: pangolin scales, tiger bone, rhino horn, and other “ingredients” with no proven medical value. The piece makes a quiet but sharp point: every time Beijing legitimizes animal‑based TCM, it legitimizes the markets and supply chains that turn endangered bodies into pills and powders.
This is the bridge between a craftsperson shaping horn in a workshop and the abstraction of “demand in Asia”. What looks like personal belief in a clinic is backed by state messaging, hospital quotas, and an industrial appetite for wildlife.
“TCM built on endangered species is politics, not medicine.”
Why this matters for demand‑reduction work
From a conservation or policy perspective, the leader is useful because it refuses to pretend that public campaigns alone can tame demand. It treats health‑system design, trade policy, and cultural nationalism as the real levers.
For anyone working on rhino horn demand reduction, the subtext is uncomfortable. If the state keeps promoting TCM at home and abroad, while treating wildlife‑based remedies as part of that export package, then NGOs are effectively swimming against a state‑backed current. The article doesn’t say this outright, but the logic is there.
The piece helps reframe the question from “Why do individual buyers still want horn?” to “Why are governments still underwriting a system that asks for rhino horn?”
“Once you see TCM as infrastructure, the rhino horn trade stops looking like a thousand private choices and starts looking like a policy outcome.”
