Winning the Competition at the Start Line: Chinese Modernity, Reproduction and the Desire for 'High Quality' Population

Graduate student Jianfeng Zhu, supervised by Dr. Karen S. Taussig, will investigate the cultural processes through which the state-advocated eugenics concept of 'high quality population' is practiced within contemporary urban Chinese families and medical institutions. For more than a decade, the Chinese state's eugenics policy has focused on 'raising China's population quality.' The state uses medical technologies to operationalize its eugenics policy to prevent the birth of children with physical or mental anomalies and also to promote the birth of 'high quality' babies. In the context of economic reforms, efforts to give birth to 'high quality' babies puts new pressures on Chinese women as they seek the best possible prenatal health care.

The researchers will collect data in three phases. First, they will focus on textual narratives of what counts as an ideal 'high quality' baby in the discourses of biomedicine, traditional Chinese medicine, and folk knowledge. Second, they will examine the social practices involved in producing 'high quality' babies within different institutions including local administrative departments of population control, biomedical and traditional Chinese medical clinics, and families. Third, they will interview three cohorts of Chinese women about their experiences with perinatal health care: those who gave birth before 1978, those who gave birth during the 1980s, and those who gave birth during and after the late1990s.

This in-depth ethnographic field study of different women's engagements with competing forms of health knowledge will explore how women respond to both medical and family authorities, as well as how they negotiate the state-imposed boundary between science and other forms of knowledge. The researchers use the lens of reproduction in relation to science to examine ideas and practices of modernity and quality. Their findings will contribute to social scientific understanding of how changing medical practices influence such basic social concepts as person, body, and life. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.