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

研究生朱剑锋将在Karen S.Taussig博士的指导下，研究国家倡导的优生学概念在当代中国城市家庭和医疗机构中的实践过程。十多年来，中国国家的优生优育政策一直以“提高中国的人口素质”为重点。国家利用医疗技术实施其优生学政策，以防止有身体或精神异常的儿童出生，并促进“高质量”婴儿的出生。在经济改革的背景下，生育“高质量”婴儿的努力给寻求尽可能好的产前保健的中国女性带来了新的压力。研究人员将分三个阶段收集数据。首先，他们将关注在生物医学、中医和民间知识的论述中，什么是理想的“高质量”婴儿的文本叙述。其次，他们将研究不同机构内生产高质量婴儿的社会实践，包括当地人口控制行政部门、生物医学和中医诊所以及家庭。第三，他们将采访三组中国妇女，了解她们在围产期保健方面的经历：1978年前生育的妇女，1980年代生育的妇女，以及1990年代后期及以后生育的妇女。这项深入的人种学实地研究将探讨不同妇女对相互竞争的健康知识形式的接触，以及妇女如何回应医疗和家庭当局，以及她们如何协商国家强加的科学和其他形式的知识之间的界限。研究人员使用与科学相关的生殖镜头来检查现代性和质量的思想和实践。他们的发现将有助于社会科学理解不断变化的医疗实践如何影响人、身体和生活等基本社会概念。这项研究还将有助于社会科学家的教育。

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.