What is Chinese in Modern Chinese Medicine?. Chinese medicine is a major cultural export of the People’s Republic of China. Although many people consider Chinese medicine to be a reflection of a particularly East Asian approach to the body and to healing, Professor Birdie Andrews, Bennett College, explores how modern Chinese medicine has been created as a deliberate response to the medicine of the West, the former Soviet Union, and Japan. She also examines the influence of Chinese ideas on modern medicine, and concludes that the labels “Chinese medicine” and “western medicine” only have meaning when compared with their cultural “others."