Imperfect Conceptions

by Frank Dikötter

Frank Dikotter's work analyzes the relationship between medicine and ideas about reproduction in China, from the late Ming to the present. Drawing on sources ranging from treatises on reproductive disorders to flyers advertising freak shows, he shows how the notion of reproduction as a potentially dangerous phenomenon - one that has to be strictly regulated to safeguard the nation's eugenic future - permeated Chinese society. The process was accelerated by the appropriation of genetics and embryology in the late 19th century and by the publication of works of popular medicine.

Genres: China, History

236 pages, 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.