Medical-Political Interaction And Revolutionary Mobilization:A Study Of The Yan’an Central Hospital

Hospitals were an integral part of the Chinese Communist Revolution.During the Agrarian Revolutionary War,when war and epidemics led to heavy casualties among the military and civilians,building a modern hospital system was particularly necessary for the CPC.The hospital system was further developed after the arrival of the CPC Central Committee in Yan’an.Among them,the Yan’an Central Hospital was a medical institution built by the CPC to safeguard the health of the cadre groups of the central organs during the War of Resistance and was directly led by the Central Health Department.The reasons for its creation were closely related to the changes in the layout of hospitals in the Shaanxi-Ganjiang-Ningxia border area during the War of Resistance and the revolutionary aspirations of the CPC.The medical staff is the core component of the hospital.As medical education was weak in the Shaanxi,Gansu and Ningxia border areas,the CPC decided to mobilise medical personnel from the National Unification Area and overseas to prepare for the construction of the Central Hospital.However,the ability of foreign medical personnel,mainly intellectuals,to join the revolution was affected by a number of factors:firstly,objective environmental factors,such as the course of the world anti-fascist war and the political relationship between the Communist Party and the state.The second was subjective emotional factors,such as family,friendship and recognition of the CPC’s resistance to the war.Under the organisation and mobilisation of the CPC and escort along the way,a group of foreign medical personnel were successfully inducted into the Central Hospital,but in the early stages of their work they were in conflict with the local cadres and masses.Thereafter,the CPC formulated preferential treatment policies and carried out political education to truly integrate them into the revolutionary ranks.The professional and ideological characteristics of the foreign medical personnel themselves dictated that the CPC’s mobilisation strategy towards them should be different from that of the peasant-worker group.Before 1942,the epidemic prevention system in the Shaanxi-Ganjiang-Ningxia Border Region was based on a tripartite health system that was controlled by the party,government and military,resulting in the relative independence of the epidemic prevention activities of grassroots units such as the Central Hospital and a lack of close communication between epidemic prevention agencies.Since then the epidemic situation has become increasingly serious and the border district government has decided to adopt the medical profession’s suggestion to form an epidemic prevention committee to bring grassroots departments at all levels into a unified epidemic prevention system.Due to the complexity of grassroots society,the epidemic prevention policy was not implemented smoothly down the line.In response,the CPC preached the economic value and political function of epidemic prevention on the one hand,and strengthened the administrative element of the epidemic prevention process on the other.The combination of health and administration made epidemic prevention in the Shaanxi-Ganjiang-Ningxia border area not only the best way to protect the health of the military and the people,but also the epitome of Communist regime building during the war.