Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China (review)

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1 Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China (review) Laurence A. Schneider China Review International, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2000, pp (Article) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: /cri For additional information about this article Access provided by Penn State Univ Libraries (26 Apr :01 GMT)

2 Reviews 73 Frank Dikotter. Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects and Eugenics in China. London: Hurst and Co.; New York: Columbia University Press, pp. Hardcover $27.50, ISBN Frank Dikotter is one of today s most imaginative and stimulating historians of modern Chinese thought and culture. The compact book under review is his third since 1992, and it shows him to be continuing his hot pursuit of a body of closely related issues on nation, race, gender, and eugenics that resonate from book to book. He also continues to find creative approaches to topics with fresh and unusual data and to exercise an astute, intuitive mode of analysis. This latest study also reveals the persistence of some rough-hewn writing that a reader could find trying and that could undermine some of the aforementioned qualities. (I note that this review is based on a copy of the uncorrected proofs. ) Broadly speaking, eugenics is the concern for improving the hereditary qualities of new generations of people. In the twentieth century, some have claimed that their eugenic theories and practices were science based. As Dikotter notes, however, eugenics was not so much a clear set of scientific principles as a modern way of talking about social problems in biologising terms (p. 4). Conventionally, a positive or negative approach is taken in the practice of eugenics. The former considers, for example, ways of making a family line or nation physi-

3 74 China Review International: Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 2000 cally stronger or more intelligent by determining who in the population has desirable characteristics and then having those people reproduce. Thus, Pan Guangdan ( ), China s preeminent eugenicist, could seriously recommend in the 1930s that China would improve its government by breeding a pool of good administrators. This was to be accomplished through a program in which the best officials were selectively interbred. Negative eugenics focuses on the elimination of undesirable human qualities: disease, physical weakness, low intelligence, and even behaviors like criminality, alcoholism, or immorality. Dikotter s provocative approach to eugenics in China is in this negative realm, where he explores the larger implications of eugenic attitudes by way of literature addressing the problem of babies born with severe defects, or what the vernacular has called anomalies or monsters. The literature in question is fascinating. Apparently quite extensive, it was written for popular audiences (as opposed to the educated elite), who sought guidance in eugenic matters. Dikotter pointedly seeks here to shift the study of eugenics from the level of the cultural elite to informal, popular, anonymous eugenics supporters. He looks beyond institutional boundaries of formal organizations to see how eugenics discourse permeated the concerns of many ordinary men and women (p. 6). Dikotter s study is divided chronologically into three units: the first dealing with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the second with the twentieth century to 1949, and the last with the PRC up to the government s recently announced eugenic policies. All three sections are informed with one set of arguments that are in effect the real subjects of this book. The author argues that eugenics in China is itself a manifestation of some very old, persistent, pernicious cultural syndromes. First and fundamentally is patrilineal culture and second is a holistic way of thinking that perhaps is a reflection of that culture. In his narrative, Dikotter s usage of these terms is not based on sound initial definitions, and the further we read the more freighted the terms become. Be that as it may, patrilineal culture is seen as the source of an inimical subordination of individuals to collectivities, and especially the subordination of individuals reproductive rights to the rights of the lineage. Thus, producing healthy male children is essential to the continuity of the lineage, and women are obliged to do what is required to achieve that end. Holistic thinking, Dikotter argues, denies the existence of a disembodied and autonomous self (p. 9). Not only does it demand that individuals be defined as part of a larger collectivity, it also requires the acknowledgment of an organic intimacy between individuals and natural or social environments. Further, medical holism, he says, emphasizes complementarity of body and mind, and the interdependence between the human person and the environment (p. 11).

4 Reviews 75 This patrilineal culture with its holistic thinking was fertile soil for eugenics. In part 1 of the book, Dikotter draws extensively on secondary studies on Chinese medicine (somehow excluding the work of N. Sivin), as well as fifty popular medical texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The latter texts address eugenics issues and proffer practical advice to prospective parents mostly to prospective mothers, since the burden of a healthy child was seen to be largely a woman s responsibility. Here, Dikotter shows us how it was thought that hostile forces in a pregnant woman s environment could cause her illness, resulting in a fatal disorder for the child, and how the holistic approach reinforced a belief in the link between social disorder and biological retribution or a belief that a monster birth could be biological retribution for social deviation. In these texts, the illness of offspring is often analogically related to the moral failure of the progenitors. Since morality and health were linked, the birth defects of a child could be attributed to the improper social behavior of its parents (p. 10). Dikotter s overall argument concludes with the claim that the persistence of popular eugenics literature into modern China is linked with the persistence of patrilineal cultural patterns and holistic thinking. In parts 2 and 3, he asserts that the latter are reconfigured in twentieth-century China. For example, the nation replaces the lineage, but its demands on individuals and individuality are at least as great especially demands to produce healthy, strong children for nationalistic ends. Examining an impressive array of popular eugenics pamphlets and newspaper and journal articles from the Republican period, Dikotter convincingly describes a strong and broad current of modern eugenics interest that ran counter to values of New Culture individualism and scientific rationalism. At the same time, he shows how other modern intellectual currents from the West redefined and reinforced eugenics. He quite correctly emphasizes, for example, the remarkably strong role played by neo-lamarkism throughout the Chinese intellectual community, and in particular the scientific muscle it gave to eugenics theory. Fundamental to both were the linked beliefs that acquired characters could be inherited, and that the environment (not Darwin s natural selection, not some genetic material within the body) was the source of organic change. As he moves through the Republican period and into the PRC, the author brushes past some questions that warrant greater consideration, if only to strengthen his narrative. He does not discuss just how well developed Mendelian- Morgan genetics had become in China, and so we are given an insufficient sense of the tension between the neo-lamarkians and the modern geneticists and how each approached the problems of birth defects. Further, during the Republican period there was some very sophisticated public criticism of eugenics. It would have been helpful to hear some of the debate that ensued and to learn of its consequences. Finally, while there is reference to the fact that during the 1950s the

5 76 China Review International: Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 2000 CCP sponsored a strong anti-eugenics line, linking eugenics with Nazi Fascism, it should have been further noted that the CCP supported Russian Lysenkoism, which likewise rejected eugenics (even though its biology was based on the same neo-lamarkian principles that informed the eugenicists discourse). Indeed, so strong was this sentiment that until 1980, the CCP proscribed the study of human genetics and medical genetics on the grounds that they were essentially eugenics. I found the last unit of this study the most satisfying, perhaps because the author had access to such a superabundance of data on the stunningly rapid emergence and proliferation of eugenic thought in post-mao China. Dikotter convincingly describes some important new conceptual and institutional developments for eugenics in the 1980s and 1990s. Most prominent is the transmission of eugenics from informal, extra-institutional culture to government policy and legislation at the local and central levels. The author argues that a eugenics lobby has formed and has been responsible for this development. He also notes that, paralleling this political development, subtle changes have occurred in eugenic thinking, reflecting China s contemporary social problems. For example, Dikotter sees an attempt in China to link health problems with the rampant adoption of Western values and ways of life. Medical discourse, he observes, thus continuously makes simultaneous statements connecting the spiritual alienation of the modern individual with the biological estrangement of his offspring (p. 19). As stimulating as this book is, it nevertheless has some weaknesses. Most important is the handling of central concepts like patrilineal and holism. The latter, for example, is used dozens of times, and seemingly never twice in quite the same way. It becomes a mantra and eventually appears to be explaining everything. I applaud Dikotter s efforts to find continuity in Chinese culture, but his claim that Qing-era patrilineal-holisitic culture is reconfigured into modern nationalism, and so forth, is not much more than an assertion, and one that warrants some careful elaboration. Additionally, there are some problems with documentation that perhaps come from a lack of patience with detail, or perhaps a lack of editing. References and text sometimes do not work together. For example, footnotes on page 90 cite publications from 1919 through the 1920s, but the text talks about the 1930s. The busy first paragraph on page 74 has no documentation at all. Finally, nowhere does the author provide a patient, detailed look at his key resource, the eugenics handbooks. It would have been most helpful to get a closer look at how one of these was organized, written, and illustrated. In brief, Imperfect Conceptions is rather well conceived but a bit imperfect in the execution. Laurence Schneider Laurence Schneider is a professor of Chinese History at Washington University, St. Louis, specializing in Modern intellectual history.