‘I want our children and grandchildren to live in a better, healthier, more beautiful world,’ says Dr. Jingduan Yang. Step by step, he’s working to build it.
By Makai Allbert
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May 17, 2025Updated:May 17, 2025
When Jingduan Yang was just a boy, his father asked him: “You like to eat meat?”
Yang nodded.
“Well, then,” his father replied flatly, “you’d better learn medicine—or you’re going to go hungry.”
Born in Hefei, Anhui province, in 1962 as the youngest of eight siblings, Yang grew up under the weight of family tradition and the turbulence of a changing China.
His ancestry traces back to renowned Chinese doctors, including a royal physician to the Qing Dynasty emperor. His father, a fourth-generation practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), expected to pass down this legacy to his firstborn son.
However, in Yang’s case, tradition allowed for an exception. With his eldest brother sent for “re-education” in the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the duty of upholding the family’s inheritance fell to Yang.
At 13, Yang began shadowing his father, learning the ancient art of Chinese medicine. His father hoped that, at the very least, he could become a “barefoot doctor”—a physician who travels through villages to treat farmers in need, usually carrying a simple toolbox of acupuncture needles and herbs. Most importantly, this way, he could ensure he never went hungry.
In 1977, China reinstated its national college exam system. Yang took the exam and scored high enough to choose his field of study. The opportunities were numerous, but undoubtedly, medicine was his destiny. “I never questioned that,” he said.
Following his father’s advice that “Traditional Chinese medicine is best learned at home” and believing combining it with Western medicine would make him a more capable doctor, Yang enrolled in the prestigious Fourth Military Medical University.
This choice of school, while seemingly straightforward, was discreetly influenced by his family’s troubled political past.
Yang’s father was a former resistance fighter against the Japanese during World War II. Due to his outspoken temperament, he had been targeted by the Chinese Communist Party. As a result, he changed the family name from Tao to Yang to conceal his identity. Now, he urged his children to attend military universities, believing that the trust the communist leadership placed in military graduates would grant a protective veil over the family.
Unbeknownst to young Yang, as he left home for medical school, he embarked upon a journey that would take him from the constraints of communist China to the freedom of the West and from the wisdom of the past to the frontiers of modern medicine.
A Foot in Two Worlds
Once in medical school, Yang found himself straddling two worlds—one rooted in empirical science, the other in millennia-old philosophy. “That’s where the confusion started,” he said.
During summer breaks, he regularly engaged in spirited debates with his father about the discrepancies between the two medical systems.
“In medical school,” he recalled, “we learned blood is produced in the bone marrow. But Chinese medicine says it’s produced by the kidneys—I couldn’t reconcile these two.”
The answer would elude Yang for a decade, the contradiction lingering in his mind. “I couldn’t convince [my father] … and he couldn’t convince me.”
These discussions, at times muddling and frustrating, sowed the seeds for what would become Yang’s lifelong quest: to harmonize the wisdom of the East with the rigor of the West.
By his fourth year, Yang’s exceptional performance earned him a scholarship to study abroad in Sydney. At 21, he was wide-eyed and unaware of the revelations that awaited him.
In Australia, Yang experienced the Western world’s cultural and academic openness. He lived in a seaside cottage under the wing of professor Thomas Stapleton, a stern but warm-hearted mentor. Every morning, the professor made him and his cohort to run along the beach before plunging into the frigid ocean. The training was intensive yet liberating.
Back in China, his curriculum was conventional and rigid—anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry—psychology wasn’t included. In Australia, he had room to breathe, to ask questions, to probe the meaning of life itself.
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