A Corpus-Based Discourse Study of Chinese Medicine in UK National Newspapers*

2017 年 1 月外语教学与研究（外国语文双月刊） Jan. 2017 第 49 卷第 1 期 Foreign Language Teaching and Research (bimonthly) Vol.49 No.1

A corpus-based discourse study of Chinese medicine in UK national newspapers*

Qian Yufang Zhejiang University of Media and Communications Tony McEnery Lancaster University

Abstract: With the increasing focus on personal health in society, the media pays more and more attention to health issues. The media has the power to set agendas to create both public awareness and concern. The discourses they construct inﬂuence the shape of public opinion. This study merges corpus analysis and discourse studies to explore the discursive constructions around Chinese medicine in British newspapers. We found that the agenda surrounding traditional Chinese medicine set in British national newspapers is an important factor in imparting knowledge on Chinese medicine, inﬂuencing the understanding of issues the readers are concerned with, and shaping the public opinion on Chinese medicine. Keywords: corpus-based, discourse studies, Chinese medicine, British national newspapers [ 中图分类号 ] H13 [ 文献标识码 ] A [ 文章编号 ] 1000-0429(2017)01-0073-12

1. Introduction

As early as 4000 B.C., there were legends about Shennong, who tasted hundreds of herbs before they were used medicinally. During the third century B.C., the Classic of Internal Medicine, an eighteen-volume document, laid the theoretical foundation for traditional Chinese medicine. It is still considered to be one of the greatest medical classics in China. Over 4,000 years, scholars and medi-

* This paper is part of the research project “A corpus based comparison between Eastern and Western political discourses” (12 BYY043) supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China.

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cal practitioners have documented the ways of maintaining health and treating illness through the use of herbs, acupuncture, and intelligent life-style practices (Liu 1988a). Chinese medicine encompasses Chinese philosophy, embodying people’s lifestyles and the ways in which they interact with nature. In accord- ance with the theory of the Five Elements (wood, fire, water, metal and earth), traditional Chinese medicine theory emphasises the whole concept of ‘harmony between man and nature’ and ‘therapy based on differentiation between syn- dromes’ (Zhao & Zhao 2010: 1409). Chinese medicine serves as an alternative health treatment, playing a role in serving public health in the UK. The growth and popularity of complementary medicine in Britain is one of the most prominent and influential developments to occur in health care from the 1980s onwards (Lewith et al. 1996). In 2007, there were more than 3,000 Chinese medicine clinics in the UK (Li et al. 2010). How do British newspapers construct discourse around Chinese medicine? How do these discourses reflect British public attitudes towards Chinese medicine? What kind of role do newspapers play in shaping public opinion towards Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)? This study will scrutinise reports from 16 British national newspapers in the last 30 years to explore their representation of Chinese medicine. This observation of discourse focus upon Chinese medicine provides specific evidence of the media’s role in public health vis-à-vis the use of traditional Chinese medicine in the UK.

2. Data collection

The Traditional Chinese Medicine Corpus (TCMC) was constructed using texts published by sixteen British national newspapers between 1986-2015 from a data- base called LexisNexis. The corpus contains article containing one of the following four terms: Chinese medicine, Chinese herbs, Chinese medication and Chinese medical herbs. The ﬁles retrieved were saved in plain text format, with one for each year’s data, totalling 3,099 texts of 2,791,910 tokens. The programme WordSmith Tools 6 (Scott 2014) was used in this study. It is an integrated suite of tools for corpus exploration and statistical analysis, including concordance, wordlist and keyword functions amongst other utilities.

3. Corpus analysis

Corpus techniques such as keyword, cluster and concordance analysis are used to explore perceptions of TCM in serving public health in the UK during the last 30 years. To do this, we ﬁrst of all observed the frequency with which TCM was mentioned in UK national newspapers from 1986 to 2015, and then carried out corpus analysis.

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3.1 Number of articles on TCM in UK national newspapers (1986-2015)

Figure 1. Number of articles on TCM in UK national newspapers per year (1986-2015)

It can be seen that until 1995 the number of articles on Chinese medicine expe- rienced a steady increase. From 1998 to 2000 the number of articles increased no- tably. This elevated rate of reporting on Chinese medicine remained stable through 2015, with minor ﬂuctuations. Examining the corpus data may explain the reasons, either positive or negative, for the sustained news focus on Chinese medicine.

1） Treatment and efﬁcacy (47.3%) 2） Animal parts used in TCM (17.1%) 3） Ofﬁcial concern towards Chinese medicine (9.6%) 4） The Royal family’s interest (5%) 5） Others (21%)

Looking back at the dissemination of TCM in the UK, we can find that Chinese medicine clinics first appeared in the UK in the early 1980s. The purported efficacy of TCM in treating the symptoms of many illnesses, from multiple sclerosis to infer- tility, attracted the attention of the press. For example, The Independent (29 January, 1991) published an article entitled “Dr Luo and her Chinatown magic; Hundreds of people queue at her surgery for relief from eczema. Now Western doctors are looking at her methods, says Mark Handscomb”. The publicity surrounding the skills of Dr Dinghui Luo dramatically increased interest in TCM in the UK and throughout Europe. Media coverage of other successful cases in the treatment of disorders increased public interest in unorthodox medicine. The Royal family’s interests in alternative medicines were frequently reported, especially Princess Diana’s interest in TCM, which was mentioned 158 times from 1998 to 2015. In the 1980s, the British Government was unlikely to interfere with what might be viewed as the rights of individuals to choose the traditional health care therapies in which they have confidence (Stone & Matthews 1992: 75). TCM increased in popularity. However, in 2000, several media outlets revealed some near-fatal inci-

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dents in which patients undergoing TCM treatments were given incorrect drugs. In one case two women suffered serious kidney damage after taking the herbal prepara- tion Aristolochia instead of the harmless drug Stephania. These incidents led to more awareness from the government and practitioners. Measures were to introduce tight- er regulation of alternative therapies. The Chinese Medicinal Plants Authentication Centre at Kew Gardens was established. In the same year, the Herbal Medicine Reg- ulatory Working Group (HMRWG) and the Acupuncture Regulatory Working Group (ARWG) were founded and the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee published a 140-page report on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (Select Committee on Science & Technology 2000), which covered a range of therapies including Chinese medicine. Since then, Chinese medicine in the UK has been gradu- ally moving toward standardization (Cheng & Shen 2010). In the last thirty years, issues like i) the evidence of the effectiveness of Chinese medicines; ii) the risks to patient safety from Chinese medicines and Chinese medicine practices; iii) the establishment of educational standards for training practitioners and the benchmarking of standards for accrediting practitioners and iv) animal parts used in Chinese medicine have been discussed in British national newspapers.

3.2 Keyword analysis As Scott (1997) points out, keyword lists tend to reveal three types of words: proper nouns, keywords of aboutness and grammatical words. That is to say, the overall charac- terisation of the aboutness of the corpora may be undertaken by using a keyword analysis and exploring the links between the keywords. In this article the exploration of the keywords will be supported by looking at concordance lines. Our aim in using keywords analysis is to assess the aboutness of the TCMC over the last 30 years. Five hundred keywords were extracted by comparing the TCMC with the English Gigaword corpus via WordSmith Tools 6. In order to uncover the main issues in the UK press related to TCM over the last thirty years, the keywords list was grouped into eight categories, which subsequently required more detailed qualitative analyses of individual keywords via concordancing to ascertain why they occurred in the TCMC, and the most common ways in which they were used. In this paper, we will focus on the analysis of the first three categories, i.e. TCM concept, Chinese medicines and animals.

Table 1. Semantic categories of keywords in the TCMC

Semantic category Keywords

TCM concept Yin, Yang, chi, health, remedies, energy, complementary, remedy, medication, Qi, diagnosis, holistic

Chinese medicines ginger, ginseng, wine, alcohol, ginkgo, plant, milk, meat, seeds, garden, food, water, ingredients, drugs, vitamins, supplements, zinc, capsules, tablets, soup, tea, herb, fruit

Animals tiger, rhino, wildlife, bear, horn, bile, elephant, seahorse

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3.2.1 Yin and yang Examining the keywords in Table 1, we can see that the key concepts in traditional Chinese medicine Yin and Yang, Qi (pronounced Chi, the Chinese term for energy), and holistic treatment have been frequently represented in the British national newspapers since the 1980s. The phrase yin and yang occurs 117 times, qi 284 times, Chi 785 times, and energy 1941 times in the TCM corpus. In line with the tendency of British newspapers in reporting about TCM, there has been increased mention of these terms from 1998, though a decline in frequency of mention is sustained from 2009 onwards. The following examples (1-5) are extracted from the TCMC, showing that the “yin-yang” discourse is associated with theory (Example 4), philosophy (Example 4), principle (Example 1), good health (Example 2, 3), heart of TCM (Example 5), harmony (Example 3), and balance (Example 1, 2). It seems that newspapers mention core concepts of Chinese medicine to help readers to develop a better understanding of Chinese medicine.

(1) The underlying principle of Chinese medicine is that there is a flow of energy through the body and that malaise or illness occur when that energy flow (chi) is out of balance. (The Guardian, 24 October, 1988) (2) Acupuncture treats mind and body; it demands a responsibility and a contribution from the patient and, by its very method, encourages an awareness of the balance (Yin Yang) that is the path to good health. (The Guardian, 8 July 1989) (3) Harmony of yin and yang means good health. (The Guardian, 4 September, 1997) (4) Fundamental to all Chinese philosophy is the theory of yin and yang. When a practitioner observes someone’s conditions that are also detecting whether it displays more yin or yang characteristics. (Sunday Mirror, 12 November 2000) (5) The terms yin and yang are central to TCM. Yin represents bodily fluids, such as blood, sweat, semen and saliva, while yang refers to person’s energy or vitality. This concept of energy or ‘Qi’ is at the heart of TCM. (The Express, 28 May, 2001)

However, while a fundamental principle in Chinese medicine, yin and yang is quite novel in the Western world. The diagnosis and treatment system is different from Western medicine. In TCM, the human body is regarded as an organic whole, unified but with parts opposing with each other. While Western medicine cares mainly about isolable disease categories or agents of disease. Therefore, it is not sur- prising that the discourse of yin and yang is mingled with sceptical voices in British newspapers. The words bafflingin (6) and so-called in (7) are case in point.

(6) These are all important questions in the slightly baffling world of TCM because they can indicate whether a person’s yin and yang energies are out of balance. (The Times, 30 June, 2012) (7) In the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the menopause is believed to be due to the decline or exhaustion of qi (energy or power) and tian kui (fertility) in the body. This

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apparently causes body imbalance, or so-called disruption of your yin and yang. (Daily Mirror, 11 December, 2014)

After examining the discourse around yin and yang, we move on to look at the discourse of Chinese herbs.

3.2.2 Chinese herbs The development of Chinese medicine has a long history. The Shennong Ben Cao Jing (The Divine Farmer’s Classic of Materia Medica) (Shennong, 3245 B.C- 3080 B.C), written more than 4,000 years ago, was the earliest book on materia medica in the world. Recorded in the book are over 365 kinds of medicines, among which 252 kinds are plant medicines, 46 animal medicines, and 67 mineral medicines (Cui 2009). Through centuries of medical practice, knowledge of herbs in the Chinese materia medica has been accrued by repeated observation and experiment. In the Compendium of Materia Medica, there are 1,892 kinds of medicines covering herb, animal and mineral medicines (Li 2011). Each medical herb has been shown to have speciﬁc characteristics according to the theories of yin-yang, zang-fu organs, channels and collaterals, and principles of treatment (Liu 1988a: 43). Observing the co-occurrences with used in Chinese medicine in concordance lines, we extracted 90 kinds of Chinese medicines (see Table 2) in the TCMC. 64.4% are Chinese herbs, 10% food medicines, and 25.6% animal medicines. We can see that the use of herbs in medical therapy is one of the key points represented in Brit- ish newspapers. Among them ginger and ginseng attracted the most attention. Ginger occurs 405 times, while ginseng 384 times. The following section focuses on ginger and ginseng to show how British newspapers represent these herbs.

Table 2. Chinese medicines mentioned in British newspapers (1985-2015)

Magnets, moss, Huperzia serrata, mint, toxin, hydrangea root, reishi, ganoderma, liquorice fruit, seed pods, ginkgo, pungent, ﬁve-pointed fruits, eucommia, radix puerariae, Siberian ginseng, amber, dong quai, cordyceps sinensis fungus, ginger, Artemesia shrub, Ephedrine, sinica (Ma Huang), liquorice, Panax ginseng, rhubarb roots, horny goat weed, shou wu wan (polygonum multiﬂorum), alkaloids, astragalus, goji berry (wolfberries, lycium barbarum), new ginger, mahakanni, bupleurum, rye, Mahonia aquifolium tree, aristolochia, astragalus root, myrrh, houttuynia cordata leaf, urtica urens, artemesia annua, wormwood tree, pine needles, birthwort, rhubarb roots, clematis, horseradish, pomegranate bark and root, lobelia, andrographis paniculata, dang shen, kudzu, pueraria lobata, ephedra bush, sweet wormwood, reishi mushroom, poppy plant (58)

green tea, yumberry, bird’s nest soup, shiitake mushroom, mushroom, curcumin, funghi, soya bean curd, watermelon (9)

tiger, bear bile, rhinos, leopard bones, shark gill, bovine gall stones, rhino horn, toads, seahorse, pangolin, Amur tiger, shark ﬁns, polar bear, dried placenta, black bear, small deer, snake, pangolins, powdered cock-coaches, eupolyphaga sinensis, gall bladders, caterpillars, sheep stomach fungi (23)

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The reporting on ginger and ginseng started from the late 1980s. The interest in ginger sharply increased from 1999 and reached its climax in 2004. After that it declined with some fluctuations. On the other hand, ginseng had more fluctuations, with its first sub-climax in 1994, a second one in 2000, and an overall climax in 2004. After 2006, ginger gained more attention than ginseng. The following examples show the discourses around ginseng and ginger.

Ginseng

(8) It is the live velvet antler that is so highly prized in the Orient, where it is dried and cut into thin slices to treat all sorts of conditions and diseases. Promotional literature from Hong Kong describes it as being ‘as important as ginseng’ in Chinese medicine. (The Independent, 10 June, 1989) (9) The capsules generally won’t do anything, but the real root is very potent.’ Ginseng, he warns, is not suitable for everyone and the unaware could easily take too much. (Daily Mail, 02 April, 1994) (10) ‘Chinese ginseng may be taken to relieve pain. (Daily Mail, 04 July, 1995) (11) EXPERTS SAY: It has been used for thousands of years in Chinese medicine, and studies have suggested that it might have a beneficial effect in some. (The Mirror, December 23, 1999) (12) The study is the first to show that taking ginseng, which is extracted from the ginseng root, combined with ginkgo biloba, an extraction from the leaves of the world’s oldest tree, can make a signiﬁcant difference to brain function. (The Independent, April 15, 2000) (13) And cancer survivors who started using ginseng after their diagnosis had greater emotional well-being and a more active social life. (The Sun, 1 April, 2006) (14) GINSENG is a really great natural pick-me-up - an adaptogenic plant that helps the body cope with demanding situations by boosting concentration and energy. It’s been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. (The People, 25 August, 2013)

Ginseng is one of the living fossil plants on the earth, and is regarded as the “King of herbs”. According to the record in the traditional Chinese classic (Shennong Ben Cao Jing, ginseng is warm (neutral) in property, tastes sweet and slightly bitter (Cui 2009). In TCM, it is used to achieve goals which are important in that belief system: reinforce the vital energy, strengthen the function of the lungs and spleen, promote the secretion of body fluids, and relax the nerves. However, it is a“ foreign good” in British newspapers and the issue of efficacy is a major concern throughout the corpus. On one hand, ginseng is portrayed as an ancient herb used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. On the other hand, researchers are urged to carry out studies to explore its efficacy. Unlike earlier reports, which used the modal verbs may (Example 10) and might (Example 11) to show some degree of uncertainty, reports around ginseng become more positive after the first tests result released in

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2000. Although there are still cautious discourses around it, it seems that ginseng is increasingly accepted as a beneﬁcial medicine in British national newspapers.

Ginger

Unlike ginseng, which is a precious Chinese herbal medicine, ginger is a cheap and popular root, which is either used in medication or food therapy. According to The Essential Book of Traditional Chinese Medicine Volume II (Liu 1988b: 93), it is hot in property, warming the spleen and stomach and dispelling pathogenic cold from them, and warming the lungs to dissolve phlegm. It is used in treating symp- tom-complexes of internal cold due to direct attacks from the interior of the body by exogenous pathogenic cold, or due to the hypo-function of the spleen and stomach with cold manifestations (e.g., chronic gastritis, chronic colitis, dyspepsia); cough and expectoration of profuse sputum due to pathogenic cold in the lungs and col- lapse. It is not a strange herb for the British public. However, the publicity of its unique medicinal function became a focus of reporting.

(15) In moxibustion, dry leaves or moxa wool are burnt on the skin on a slice of ginger, say, to create an intense deep heat. (The Times, 14 November 1989) (16) Ginger is “very health giving, and is used a lot in Chinese medicine to deal with childbirth and the after effects. It also provides a warm after-glow”. (Sunday Express, 25 March, 2001) (17) Ginger is perfectly safe to be taken regularly for extended periods. You can obtain ginger tablets by mail order from Larkhall Green Farm by phoning 0l81-874 1130. (Daily Mail, 15 December, 1997） (18) GINGER: Used in Chinese medicine for 5,000 years. It’s a great treatment for early morning sickness in pregnancy, travel sickness, and circulatory problems but some of the inedible Chinese gingers are powerful anti-inflammatories. (The Express, 05 October, 2004) (19) Ginger is widely believed to help nausea, with some evidence that it is better than placebo in morning sickness and sea-sickness though not necessarily in IBS. (The Guardian, 9 June, 2015)

British newspapers construct ginger in a very positive way. It can be seen that the words co-occurring with ginger convey a positive discourse prosody, with it co-occurring with phrases such as very health giving, perfectly safe, great treatment and widely believed. Interestingly, compared with the cautious discourse around ginseng, there are few cautious discourses around ginger. Although ginger is popular due to its apparent efﬁcacy in treating many diseases, such as nausea, emotional problem, morning sickness etc., inappropriate use of ginger can cause problems. As a Chinese saying goes,“ Eating three slices of ginger in the morning is better than drinking ginseng soup, while eating ginger at night is as bad as eating arsenic/pi ·80·

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shuang 砒霜 .” Therefore, the missing of some detailed information could lead to an incomplete picture or lack of understanding of the efﬁcacy of some medicines. As a major source of medical information, the media can be particularly important in educating policy makers and the general public about new forms of medicine (Calloway et al. 2006).

3.2.3 Chinese medicine and animals In the same way as we extracted the names of different herbs, the following words from the TCMC are related to animals used in Chinese medicine:

Tiger, bear bile, rhinos, leopard bones, shark gill, bovine gall stones, rhino horn, toads, seahorse, pangolin, Amur tiger, shark ﬁns, polar bear, black bear, small deer, snake, powdered cock-coaches, eupolyphaga sinensis, gall bladders, caterpillars

Examining the concordance lines of Chinese medicine, we find that two discourses are constructed around Chinese medicine relating to animals. One is the animal extinction discourse and the other is the illegal trade discourse, e.g.:

(20) The rhinos were poached to oblivion in the 1970s and 1980s and were declared extinct in 1998. They were poached to feed the insatiable demands of the Chinese medicine trade (no, not an aphrodisiac; they use rhino horn to treat fevers). (The Independent, 30 December, 2010) (21) They visit a vast market where endangered animals are sold as pets or for the Chinese medicine trade. (The Times, 04 July, 2011) (22) The giant manta ray, one of the world’s most graceful and mysterious creatures, is facing a new threat from the Chinese medicine trade. (The Guardian, 28 December, 2012) (23) Poaching threatens rhinos with extinction: The Chinese“ medicine” market offers huge rewards for shooting one and hacking off its horn. (The Independent, 18 June, 2015)

The above examples show that British newspapers link the extinction of rare animals to Chinese medicine, implying their disapproval of the use of animal parts in Chinese medicine. Moreover, the British newspapers constructed a discourse of illegality when relating the animal parts trade with Chinese medicine, e.g.:

(24) Britain’s own efforts to do this seem to be working. In 1995, in Operation Charm, a team from Scotland Yard raided 12 medicine shops in the Chinese communities of London, Bir- mingham and Manchester and found illegal products, mainly tiger parts. (The Independ- ent, 18 January, 1999） (25) Derek Fatchett, a Foreign Ofﬁcer Minister, launched a campaign to stop the illegal trade in tiger parts which has cut their population in the wild to less than 5,000, compared to 100,000 a century ago. The campaign, organised by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, aims to stop tiger poaching and to reduce the use of tiger parts in traditional Chinese medicine. (The Times, 21 January1999)

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(26) A large and grisly collection of body parts from endangered animals has been seized by police in a raid on a traditional Chinese medicine shop in London, showing that the out- lawed trade is continuing. (The Independent, 18 April, 2003)

Hence we see that the British national newspapers have equated the trade of tiger parts with illegal trade, related to the demands of Chinese medicine, and constructed the idea that “Chinese medicine leads to illegal trade”. Let us look at more examples:

(27) China is the largest market for illegal wildlife trade. Ivory is popular among wealthy Chi- nese, rhino horn and other rare animal parts are popular as remedies in traditional Chinese medicine. (The Guardian, 08 November, 2014) (28) Over the centuries, not surprisingly, bears began to vanish. It’s a similar story to many other animals targeted by the Chinese medicine trade, such as tigers, pangolins, Sumatran and Javan rhinos, Asian turtles, and more. Like bears, these have all faced relentless hunting for purported curatives. This over-hunting, combined with massive habitat loss, has led to the complete destruction of some populations and declines in others. (The Guardian, 10 April, 2015) (29) The number of rhinoceros poached in South Africa, mainly to supply the traditional Chi- nese medicine industry, grew from 13 in 2007 to 668 in 2012 and 1,004 in 2013. (The Times, 2 May, 2015)

4. Discussion

In this study, we examined the discourses around Chinese medicine in the UK press by using corpus techniques. In the construction of the yin-yang discourse, Brit- ish national newspapers introduced some basic knowledge about it, i.e. the concept of balance and harmony of yin and yang in the Chinese medicine’s theoretical system. It would seem that newspapers potentially play an important role in educating the general public about TCM. Although scepticism about TCM appears in reports throughout the 30 years, the British national newspapers reconstructed Chinese medicine in a new social context, which raised the awareness of TCM with policy makers and practitioners. In the TCMC, there are a large number of quotations from medical experts, generally reinforcing the view that medical experts predominate in the presentation of health matters to the public at large. Such ‘expertise’ is largely a factor of power and knowledge, which doctors and health professionals have used as a tool for political and social control (Turner 1987). Chinese medicine as a new form of medication serving for public health in the UK since the 1980s, is still struggling to be accepted. According to a survey on the public attitude towards Chinese medicine conducted in 2015 (https://www.statista. com), over 36% of individuals surveyed thought traditional Chinese medicine is

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possibly effective at treating illness, and approximately 50% of individuals surveyed reported that acupuncture is possibly an effective treatment. The statistics show that acupuncture is more popular than Chinese medicines. It may be due to the evidences of its efficacy. Discursive constructions around traditional Chinese medicine in British newspapers may influence the usage of Chinese medicine by lay people, its ac- ceptance by mainstream health professionals and the formulation of public policy towards TCM (Lewis 2011). The interaction between newspapers, the public and the government helps to educate the public and form their attitudes and opinions through the way they present people and issues (Bell 1991: 4). At the same time, newspapers play an important role in urging the government to produce an appropriate policy for public health and the use of TCM. Such an interaction has influenced the development of TCM in the UK. As can be seen in the previous analysis, the scepticism discourse around Chi- nese medicine has run through the 30-year period covered by the corpus. The corpus suggests that, if it is to be accepted, TCM will need to be based upon scientific research and testing of it as a treatment. Efficacy is the key to survival of any form of medicine. The popularization of knowledge about TCM has a long way to go in the UK. The discourses around Chinese medicine are socially constructed, and this is a practice showing a ‘complex and artificial set of criteria for selection’, which is ‘far from neutrally reflecting social reality and empirical facts’ (Fowler 1991: 2). The discourse of illegal trade of animal parts reflects environmental concerned, encouraging policy makers and the practitioners to comply with the UN’s Wildlife Trade Regulations.

5. Conclusion

British national newspapers are important in imparting knowledge about TCM, inﬂuencing the understanding of issues the readers are concerned with and shaping public opinion around TCM. On the one hand, they educate the British public on the key concepts of Chinese medicine; on the other hand, scepticism has been run- ning through the reports over the past 30 years. The dynamic interaction between scepticism and imparting knowledge has stimulated the development of Chinese medicine in the UK.

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收稿日期：2016-11-28 通讯地址：Rese arch Centre for Discourse and Communications, Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, Hangzhou 310018, China (Qian Yufang) Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YL, UK (Tony McEnery)

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