Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects and Eugenics in China 1st edition by Frank Dikötter (1998) Hardcover

by Frank Dikötter

In 1995 the People's Republic of China passed a controversial Eugenics Law, which, after a torrent of international criticism, was euphemistically renamed the Maternal and Infant Health Law. Aimed at "the implementation of premarital medical checkups" to ensure that neither partner has any hereditary, venereal, reproductive, or mental disorders, the ordinance implies that those deemed "unsuitable for reproduction" should undergo sterilization or abortion or remain celibate in order to prevent "inferior births." Using this recent statute as a springboard, Frank Dikötter explores the contexts and history of eugenics in both Communist China and Taiwan. Dikötter shows how beginning in Late Imperial China, Western eugenics was imported and combined with existing fears of cultural, racial, or biological degeneration in Chinese society, leading to government regulation of sexual reproduction.Imperfect Conceptions is a revealing look at the cultural history of medical explanations of birth defects that demonstrates how Chinese assumptions about the relationship of the individual to society form the very core of their attitudes toward procreation. Dikötter explains the patrilineal model of descent, where a person is viewed as the culmination of his or her ancestors and is held responsible for the health of all future generations. By this logic, a pregnant woman's behavior and attitude directly influence the well-being of her baby, and a deformed or retarded child reflects a moral failing on the part of the parents. Dikötter also shows how the holistic medicine practiced in China blurs any distinction between individual and environment so that people are held responsible for illness.Drawing on cultural, social, economic, and political approaches, Dikötter goes beyond a simple authoritarian model to provide a more complex view of eugenic policy, showing how a variety of voices including those of popular journalists, social reformers, medical writers, sex educators, university professors, and politicians all disseminate information that supports rather than questions the state's program.Imperfect Conceptions reveals how Chinese cultural currents―fear and fascination with the deviant and the urge to draw clear boundaries between the normal and the abnormal―have combined with medical discourse to form a program of eugenics that is viewed with alarm by the rest of the world.

Genres: China, History

Hardcover

First published November 1, 1998

About the author

Frank Dikötter (Chinese: 馮客; pinyin: Féng Kè) is the Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China on leave from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Born in the Netherlands in 1961, he was educated in Switzerland and graduated from the University of Geneva with a Double Major in History and Russian. After two years in the People's Republic of China, he moved to London where he obtained his PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1990. He stayed at SOAS as British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and as Wellcome Research Fellow before being promoted to a personal chair as Professor of the Modern History of China in 2002. His research and writing has been funded by over 1.5 US$ million in grants from various foundations, including, in Britain, the Wellcome Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, The Economic and Social Research Council and, in Hong Kong, the Research Grants Council and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.

He has published a dozen books that have changed the ways historians view modern China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992) to China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower (2022). His 2010 book Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe was selected as one of the Books of the Year in 2010 by The Economist, The Independent, The Sunday Times, the London Evening Standard (selected twice), The Telegraph, the New Statesman and the BBC History Magazine, and is on the longlist for the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.

Reviews

[Andre · Rating 4 out of 5]

If anyone ever comes to you and talks about the great, and probably superior, ways of ancient Chinese medicine, how about you ask that person whether a pregnant woman should eat hare meat even if it means her child gets a hare-cleft or how she should make sure to not look at monsters and ugly people so her child will become neither, or what she should do if she has a ghost pregnancy or gives birth to tadpoles. Tell him that nocturnal emissions are caused by excessive body heat and that heat stimulates the storage of semen, not to mention that all women, children and elderly people are unbalanced and are potentially sick.
And yes, that really is from that allegedly oh so great writing of “ancient” China and not even remotely everything. In fact this book makes a good point as to why eugenics thought found fertile ground in China and why it should not be overlooked to still exist. Sure this book was written in the 1990s but from my perspective the Chinese government has not stopped what they are doing.
And it is not as though those Chinese writings would not sound familiar today: Raising the spectre of racial extinction, many writers claimed that the poor physical quality of the population was one of the key causes of the nation's backwardness... As in Italy and Germany during the same period, the ideal of universal citizenship rights was not very popular; modernising elites insisted that the presumed natural divisions between nations and within the nation be respected.
And apparently the economic reforms and population policies implemented since 1978 have created the conditions for a greater acceptance of eugenic discourse. Apparently in 1995 China enacted a eugenics law that was called "The Law of the People's Republic of China on the Maternal and Infant Health Care."
Makes you wonder whether the eugenics laws of the 1990s are still in effect in China these days. From what I can gather, they probably are.



PS. Menstruation was seen as an evolutionary throwback with dangerous consequences and women basically just less evolved men.

[哲伦 周 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dikotter is the academic crab-eater.