The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to train a strong military to ward off the Nationalists and Japanese in wartime Yanan, but faced tremendous challenges in protecting the health of its residents. Scholars have focused on the role of Norman Bethune in developing health care and scientific research in the base areas. This paper highlights the understated role of the Overseas Chinese in financing, managing, and reforming treatment for the sick and wounded through the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps and the China Defense League. They developed a new form of biomedicine that stressed cosmopolitanism and dialecticism, challenging the straightforward nationalistic rhetoric that colored understandings of science, medicine and society in the region. While appearing to promote the manufacturing of Classical Chinese Medicine, the CCP in reality, saw such pharmaceuticals as merely as a cheaper alternative to western drugs. They saw classical medicine through western scientific lens, even though that would change after 1949. Even though the CCP often articulate nativist sentiments towards medical development, their doctors eagerly embraced foreign assistance to establish self-sufficiency in the base areas. While advocates of a nativist Communist ideology shaped representations of healthcare in Yanan, the Overseas Chinese medical personnel, and their local counterparts were fashioning a cosmopolitan form of biomedicine that saved lives in wartime China.
