Making sense of suboptimal health (亚健康): negotiating and embodying the conceptual space of ‘neither healthy nor diseased’

This thesis looks at the conceptual history and embodied narratives of a concept called suboptimal health (亚健康) and the way it is defined and utilized by different actors, including Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the health food industry, the Chinese government, as well as lay people in their everyday life. Subhealth was championed as ’a new concept of the 21st century’ that ‘troubles the majority of the world population’ by TCM professionals, which was initially fuelled by the commercial development of health foods in the 1990s in China. Since then, there have been different attempts to standardize what is meant by suboptimal health, and numerous efforts to objectively, capture, define measure, and t to treat it.

Drawing on data ranging from documentary data, multi-sited ethnographic data at a TCM clinic, two TCM conferences, and on Chinese social media, as well as interviews with visitors to the TCM clinic and interviews with Chinese people, this thesis looks at the negotiations and embodied narratives of subhealth. Utilized as a vague diagnostic category that mediates between biomedical classification and traditional Chinese medicine classificatory systems, this concept is one possible way people might be granted permission to be ill (or rather to be unhealthy) in the absence of illness. It allows lay people to talk about their unhealth, opening up narratives about here and now, although this permission of being ill seems to also come with the responsibility to look for possible biological explanations and exhaust those possibilities.