~This Issue's Index~

BOOK REVIEW

The one child policy is the oft-discussed core of China's population control policy, but in 995 China passed a eugenics law-aimed at improving the quality of the population-that urges voluntary sterilization for parents deemed unsuitable for reproduction and forced abortion of fetuses discovered to carry a serious defect. Renamed the Maternal and Infant Health Law after international uproar, this law raised not only policy and ethical questions, but also scholarly questions about the history of eugenics in China.

The word "eugenics" conjures up images of biogenetically engineered perfect human beings, and reports in the Western press of official discrimination against mentally disabled Chinese raise ethical alarm bells. However, while China's authoritarian system still allows the government great powers of intervention into the private lives of its citizens, the present danger is not that the dictatorial government of one fourth of the world's population is forcefully implementing eugenic measures against popular will. In Imperfect Conceptions, Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China, Frank Dikötter argues it is a complex issue of how the current government is adopting and adapting the deep historical and cultural roots of eugenics thinking and medical knowledge in China

Dikötter's historical study of eugenics in late imperial, republican, and communist China shows that the 1995 law was a contemporary development in the eugenics movement that has experienced its ups and downs in China as in the West. Dikötter provides an international context for eugenics discourse in China, providing insight into how Western eugenics combined with traditional notions of reproduction and inheritance in China.
For example, Chinese tradition holds that every aspect of a pregnant woman's life must be controlled, for it was believed that maintaining balance in cosmic forces, in essential bodily fluids, and in lifestyle before and after conception was essential to the birth of healthy babies. Herein lies the basic eugenic belief that human intervention-in the form of behavior and morality-can shape heredity.

Although the state has only recently taken an official role in the control of human reproduction, its current policies stem from the age-old concept of the individual's responsibility to the collective. It is this emphasis on the collective good that has driven modern eugenics discourse since the late nineteenth century, when Chinese intellectuals the well-to-do gentry, and government officials explored how to improve the Chinese race after the arrival of the stronger Western imperialist nations. Indeed, nationalism in its many forms remains an important force in eugenics today.
Dikötter shows that it is the introduction of modern science in China, particularly after World War I, that opened the real possibility of implementing the eugenic vision. It is in the republican era (1911-1948) that elites called for increased intervention of medical professionals and the state into the sexual lives of citizens.

Dikötter emphasizes the holistic nature of eugenics discourse, ranging from the ancient belief that fetuses were influenced by the outside environment to the modern faith in science as a unified and monolithic understanding which could provide truth in all domains. He explains, for example, how the opposed neo-Mendelian and neo-Lamarckian ideas were fused into the belief that both genetic and acquired physical and mental defects were passed onto the future generations. As opposed to the hard inheritance of genetic determinism, intellectuals of the republican era, like their imperial counterparts, believed future parents of a child could enhance the quality of their offspring before, during and after conception, according to Dikötter's model of soft inheritance.

As Dikötter traces the historical development of eugenics discourse and cultural attitudes surrounding birth defects, he reveals that public support for eugenic policies increased. Individuals with prominent physical defects, such as hairy man Li Baoshu (1920s) and hairy child Yu Zhenhuan (1980s), were put on display, reflecting the timeless fascination with the gruesome and also increasing interest in eugenics among ordinary people and medical researchers alike. With science on the comeback after the Maoist era and the prioritization of economic modernization and raising the standard of living, all sorts of pundits and writers and other non-experts joined scientists in calling for eugenic measures.

Government policy on inferior births also increased in severity from the 1950s on, culminating in the 1995 eugenics law, giving rise to many technical and ethical problems. A eugenics policy assumes that all handicaps are irreversible and that education would have no effect. Furthermore, poor definitions of disorders, handicaps, illnesses, and fitness as well as local control of implementation not only erode individual rights but also increase corruption and bureaucratic incompetence.
This book shows us the greater problem in post-Mao China-eugenics has been legitimized by medical knowledge that is ever-changing, not to mention packaged and disseminated by those who have a vested interest in the control of human reproduction. But the value of this book lies not in sweeping political statements, but in its illuminating look at the trajectory of eugenics thinking in the Chinese national psyche.