In 1995 the People's Republic of China passed a controversial Eugenics Law, which, after a torrent of international criticism, was euphemistically renamed the Maternal and Infant Health Law. Aimed at "the implementation of premarital medical checkups" to ensure that neither partner has any hereditary, venereal, reproductive, or mental disorders, the ordinance implies that those deemed "unsuitable for reproduction" should undergo sterilization or abortion or remain celibate in order to prevent "inferior births." Using this recent statute as a springboard, Frank Dikötter explores the contexts and history of eugenics in both Communist China and Taiwan. Dikötter shows how beginning in Late Imperial China, Western eugenics was imported and combined with existing fears of cultural, racial, or biological degeneration in Chinese society, leading to government regulation of sexual reproduction. Imperfect Conceptions is a revealing look at the cultural history of medical explanations of birth defects that demonstrates how Chinese assumptions about the relationship of the individual to society form the very core of their attitudes toward procreation. Dikötter explains the patrilineal model of descent, where a person is viewed as the culmination of his or her ancestors and is held responsible for the health of all future generations. By this logic, a pregnant woman's behavior and attitude directly influence the well-being of her baby, and a deformed or retarded child reflects a moral failing on the part of the parents. Dikötter also shows how the holistic medicine practiced in China blurs any distinction between individual and environment so that people are held responsible for illness. Drawing on cultural, social, economic, and political approaches, Dikötter goes beyond a simple authoritarian model to provide a more complex view of eugenic policy, showing how a variety of voices including those of popular journalists, social reformers, medical writers, sex educators, university professors, and politicians all disseminate information that supports rather than questions the state's program. Imperfect Conceptions reveals how Chinese cultural currents―fear and fascination with the deviant and the urge to draw clear boundaries between the normal and the abnormal―have combined with medical discourse to form a program of eugenics that is viewed with alarm by the rest of the world.

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

History

Frank Dikötter

Asia

Columbia University Press

Based on extensive research and many newly discovered sources, Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China examines the radical changes in Chinese society during the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of the Chinese prison system. More than a simple history of prison rules or penal administration, this book explores the profound effects and lasting repercussions of the superimposition of Western-derived models of repentance and rehabilitation on traditional Chinese categories of crime and punishment. A society's prisons reflect much about its notions not only of law and order and the rights of the individual, but of human nature itself, its tractability and capacity to change. In China during the tumultuous years from 1895 to 1949, these notions were transformed in dramatic ways. Frank Dikötter identifies penal reform as a radical modern tool to achieve an indigenous Chinese vision of social cohesion and the rule of virtue. Modernizing elites in China viewed the reformation of criminals as a constitutive part of a project of a national regeneration in which good order, economic development, and state power could only be obtained by shaping obedient subjects. This groundbreaking account of the evolution of Chinese penal theory is brought together with a richly textured portrait of daily life behind bars. Petty villains, abusive guards, ambitious wardens, and idealist reformers people its pages and vividly trace China's complicated movement from empire to republic to communist state.

Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China, 1895-1949

Exotic Commodities is the first book to chart the consumption and spread of foreign goods in China from the mid-nineteenth century to the advent of communism in 1949. Richly illustrated and revealing, this volume recounts how exotic commodities were acquired and adapted in a country commonly believed to have remained "hostile toward alien things" during the industrial era. China was not immune to global trends that prized the modern goods of "civilized" nations. Foreign imports were enthusiastically embraced by both the upper and lower classes and rapidly woven into the fabric of everyday life, often in inventive ways. Scarves, skirts, blouses, and corsets were combined with traditional garments to create strikingly original fashions. Industrially produced rice, sugar, wheat, and canned food revolutionized local cuisine, and mass produced mirrors were hung on doorframes to ward off malignant spirits. Frank Dikötter argues that ordinary people were the least inhibited in acquiring these products and therefore the most instrumental in changing the material culture of China. Landscape paintings, door leaves, and calligraphy scrolls were happily mixed with kitschy oil paintings and modern advertisements. Old and new interacted in ways that might have seemed incongruous to outsiders but were perfectly harmonious to local people. This pragmatic attitude would eventually lead to China's own mass production and export of cheap, modern goods, which today can be found all over the world. The nature of this history raises the question, which Dikötter pursues in his conclusion: If the key to surviving in a fast-changing world is the ability to innovate, could China be more in tune with modernity than Europe?

Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China

Business & Money

Economics

The era between empire and communism is routinely portrayed as a catastrophic interlude in China's modern history. But in this book, Frank Dikötter shows that the first half of the twentieth century was characterized by unprecedented openness. He argues that from 1900 to 1949, all levels of Chinese society were seeking engagement with the rest of the world and that pursuit of openness was particularly evident in four areas: governance, including advances in liberties and the rule of law; greater freedom of movement within the country and outside it; the spirited exchange of ideas in the humanities and sciences; and thriving and open markets and the resulting sustained growth in the economy. Copub: Hong Kong University Press

The Age of Openness: China before Mao

University of California Press

This is the first systematic study of a topic which cuts straight through the heart of many aspects of intellectual life in modern China and has hitherto remained unexplored because it has been deemed to be embarrassing and politically unfashionable: the discourse of race. This book looks at the emergence of racial stereotypes during the nineteenth century, the gradual formation of a racial discourse at the turn of the century, the conceptualization of racial nationalism at the beginning of the 1910s, and the institutionalization and habituation of this discourse by the academic community in the 1920s and '30s. It also provides the first analysis of eugenics--the pseudo-science of race improvement--in Republican China. The work is based on a wide variety of sources, some hitherto neglected by sinologists, such as primers on anthropology, genetics and eugenics, pamphlets on racial nationalism, medical handbooks, schoolbooks and caricatures. The author first demonstrates that racial categories of analysis were not confined to the edges of Chinese thought systems, but have been widespread and influential during the past century. Secondly, he argues that racial discourse did not result from 'Western influence' but was largely due to endogenous developments which had only a minimal relationship to Western thought. Thirdly, he dispels the myth of Chinese 'cultural universalism' to show that outgroups were often classified according to physical characteristics alleged to be permanent. And finally, he indicates that this discourse did not exist in isolation of social movements but was part of a symbolic universe in perpetual change. Frank Dikotter's conceptual approach is grounded in discourse analysis, social constructivism and intergroup sociology. He makes detailed comparisons with Western notions of race, and approaches a number of related topics such as Occidentalism, non-Darwinian evolutionism, categorical thought, the construction of emotions, and the misuse of science. Racial prejudice is still endemic in the People's Republic of China and the book provides the background to a better understanding of this crucial phenomenon. The Discourse of Race in Modern China will be of interest not only to students of Chinese affairs, but also to those concerned with the history of mentalities, race studies, group psychology, medical anthropology and cultural studies in general.

The Discourse of Race in Modern China

Stanford Univ Pr

Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up and overtake Britain in less than 15 years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives. Access to Communist Party archives has long been denied to all but the most loyal historians, but now a new law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era. Frank Dikotter's astonishing, riveting and magnificently detailed book chronicles an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented. Dikotter shows that instead of lifting the country among the world's superpowers and proving the power of communism, as Mao imagined, in reality the Great Leap Forward was a giant - and disastrous - step in the opposite direction. He demonstrates, as nobody has before, that under this initiative the country became the site not only of one of the most deadly mass killings of human history (at least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death) but also the greatest demolition of real estate - and catastrophe for the natural environment - in human history, as up to a third of all housing was turned to rubble and the land savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. Piecing together both the vicious machinations in the corridors of power and the everyday experiences of ordinary people, Dikotter at last gives voice to the dead and disenfranchised. Exhaustively researched and brilliantly written, this magisterial, groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

"The Chinese Communist party refers to its victory in 1949 as a liberation.' In China the story of liberation and the revolution that followed is not one of peace, liberty, and justice. It is first and foremost a story of calculated terror and systematic violence." So begins Frank Dikotter's stunning and revelatory chronicle of Mao Zedong's ascension and campaign to transform the Chinese into what the party called New People. Following the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, after a bloody civil war, Mao hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City, and the world watched as the Communist revolution began to wash away the old order. Due to the secrecy surrounding the country's records, little has been known before now about the eight years that followed, preceding the massive famine and Great Leap Forward. Drawing on hundreds of previously classified documents, secret police reports, unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, eyewitness accounts of those who survived, and more, "The Tragedy of Liberation" bears witness to a shocking, largely untold history. Interweaving stories of ordinary citizens with tales of the brutal politics of Mao's court, Frank Dikotter illuminates those who shaped the "liberation" and the horrific policies they implemented in the name of progress. People of all walks of life were caught up in the tragedy that unfolded, and whether or not they supported the revolution, all of them were asked to write confessions, denounce their friends, and answer queries about their political reliability. One victim of thought reform called it a "carefully cultivated Auschwitz of the mind." Told with great narrative sweep, "The Tragedy of Liberation "is a powerful and important document giving voice at last to the millions who were lost, and casting new light on the foundations of one of the most powerful regimes of the twenty-first century."

The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

The Tragedy of Liberation

Bloomsbury Paperbacks

How To Be A Dictator EXPORT

Bloomsbury Publishing

Dictators

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Books by Frank Dikötter