Abstract
Encounters between several bodies of therapeutic knowledge have led to a restructuring of the entire health system, including a transformation in medical ethics. Defining "new ethics" with both Chinese and international characteristics, is part of the ongoing knowledge production process: plural health ideas, practices and medical sciences develop within the broader framework of social and economic transition. Such transition simultaneously reveals and encourages China's influence and position in an era of globalization including in the technical and knowledge production domains. Re-alignments in medical ethics in Reform China (post-1979) highlight a rather under-explored aspect of medical plurality enabling these ethics to be used as an analytical lens to provide information about social and political issues. In this article, two sets of ethical principles, one from Late Imperial China (Late Ming Era), the other from post-Mao China (1980s), are detailed and analysed. They were selected as case-studies mainly because they reflected at the time of their emergence an on-going radical change in society in the realm of health and medicine. Therefore both sets unveil the process of legitimizing a "Chinese medicine" in a context of epistemological shift: such a process takes various conceptual and practical forms framed along the lines of the current dominant ideological system and constrained by socio-economic and political factors. Finally, issues relative to research ethics, bioethics and the New Health Reform guidelines raised in the 2000s, which represents also a significant historical turn for China, are discussed. Drawn from the overall discussion throughout the text, several concluding remarks contribute to advocate for "win-win" encounters - from the East to the West and from the South to the South, and for more implementable transnational/global ethics designing.