Organizer: Carol Benedict, Georgetown University
Chair: Frank Dikotter, University of London
Discussants: James Trent, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville; Frank
Dikotter, University of London
Focusing on the issue of eugenics, this panel addresses the ways in which Chinese state and society have sought to define and control persons with disabilities in the twentieth century. Approaching the topic from three different disciplines-sociology, anthropology, and history-the panelists highlight continuities and discontinuities in Chinese discourse about and actions towards the disabled.
Carol Benedict's paper focuses on police treatment of lepers in Guangdong in the 1930s. She argues that while campaigns against lepers were not a direct manifestation of eugenicist policies, they were at least partially the result of Chinese efforts to bring public health into line with international norms, which in the 1930s were highly influenced by the eugenics movement. Whereas Benedict focuses on Guomindang policy during the 1930s, Veronica Pearson discusses how eugenicist thought continues to be influential in contemporary China. Indeed, she argues, the draft Eugenics Law proposed in 1993 is a continuation of policies promulgated by the Chinese Communists since the 1930s and 1940s. The two papers thus complement one another and demonstrate that twentieth-century Chinese eugenicist thought cannot be ascribed to a particular period or party.
Matthew Kohrman's paper bridges the temporal gap left between Benedict and Pearson's presentations, examining as he does both the Republican and the contemporary periods. Like Benedict, he emphasizes the dominance of eugenics in the discourse about the "disabled" in the 1930s but he goes on to argue that within the growing realm of government-directed disability programs in post-Mao China, eugenics has been powerfully overshadowed by an emergent social assistance model. Also like Benedict, Kohrman places Chinese ideas about disability into a global context, arguing that 1930s eugenicists such as Chen Da were inspired by Western scientific methods. He sees the current rhetoric of assistance as a partial by-product of the international disability-rights movement. This contrasts somewhat with Pearson's presentation, which stresses the differences between Western and Chinese ideas about disability. Frank Dikotter, one of the panel discussants, pioneered the study of eugenicist thought in China. The other discussant, James Trent, has written extensively on the history of eugenics and disability in the United States.
Chinese Police Campaigns Against Persons with Leprosy, 1934-37
Carol Benedict, Georgetown University
This paper documents and analyzes police campaigns against lepers in Republican China. Between 1934 and 1937, there were a series of incidents in Guangdong in which provincial police arrested, detained, and in some instances, euthanized, people with leprosy. These campaigns emerged out of several important developments in Republican Chinese thought and institutions. They reflected official concerns that China's public health service had to conform to international norms and they manifested a growing Chinese interest in eugenics. They were also the result of newly instituted police-directed public health programs.
Detention of persons with leprosy was first and foremost a consequence of China's desire to attain modernity. In the 1930s, isolation of lepers was considered the most "modern" response to a perceived public health menace and leprosaria were being established around the world. Determined to modernize public health, provincial governments in China began to set up isolation centers for lepers in 1934. These efforts intensified in 1937, when the national Guomindang government called for strong measures to deal with the "leprosy problem."
The 1930s was also a time when the international eugenics movement was gaining ground in China. Although eugenics never achieved a significant degree of institutional organization in Republican China, notions of race improvement were widespread in society. Interest in eugenics was fueled largely by Chinese nationalism and fears that China's political and military decline could only be arrested through "racial betterment." The idea that euthanasia might be used to achieve this goal was current in China in the 1930s, as it was elsewhere. The execution of lepers seems to be one instance in which such state-sponsored euthanasia was actually carried out.
Provincial police, the institutional bodies that conducted these executions, were actually an innovation of the late Qing reform era but the Republican government continued to endorse their use in public health work after 1927. The development of a police-directed model of public health, together with new ideas about modernity, eugenics, and state-sponsored euthanasia culminated in the 1930s' campaigns against lepers.
In Search of Quality: Population Policy and Eugenics in China
Veronica Pearson, University of Hong Kong
The purpose of this paper is to outline the ways in which eugenicist policies impinge on psychiatry in China and to discuss why, from the Chinese perspective, eugenics is treated as a matter of quality control, apparently devoid of the moral implications that are so strong for those with a Western professional background.
The Minister of Public Health announced a draft Eugenics Law at the Standing Committee of the fifth meeting of the National People's Congress in December 1993. It caused little stir in China but received a good deal of adverse publicity in the Western press. The aim was to "prevent new births of inferior quality," particularly in under-developed and economically poor areas. Restrictions on marriage and childbirth were to apply to those with hereditary, venereal or reproductive ailments, severe psychoses or contagious diseases. The minister pointed out that as well as ten million people with a learning disability, China also had another ten million persons disabled from birth "who should have been prevented through better controls." The law was promulgated in October 1994 and took effect in June 1995. Provisions in the Maternal and Infant Child Care Law appear to have been "diluted" in comparison with the original draft Eugenics Law, presumably in response to international pressure.
This concern with eugenics has been a continuing theme in marriage legislation since the Communists began issuing regulations in the areas of China they controlled in the 1930s and 1940s. The National Marriage Law of 1950 prohibited marriage if one of the parties suffered a "serious illness" such as venereal disease, mental illness, leprosy or other illness with which a person should not, according to medical opinion, enter marriage. The 1981 Marriage Law continued this trend, followed by regulations jointly issued in 1986 by the Ministries of Health and Civil Affairs restricting marriage and childbirth in a number of groups including those with a psychotic disorder and a clear statement about what the state believed to be the benefits of a frankly eugenicist policy.
Provisions of the Gansu People's Congress Regulations Concerning Prohibiting Reproduction by Intellectually Impaired Persons are also based on eugenicist principles. Gansu has a very large population of learning disabled people, almost certainly because it is the area most seriously affected by iodine deficiency disorder. It has been reported that 1,000 women were sterilized during the first year after these regulations were implemented.
To the Western observer, this policy is misguided on two grounds. First, it is morally unacceptable. Second, it is not effective. At least one of the illnesses mentioned in the 1981 Marriage Law, leprosy, is largely unrelated to heredity. The policy assumes that we know infinitely more than we do about the hereditability of mental retardation, schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis. Many of the instances of learning disability in China are not hereditable, such as those caused by perinatal trauma or iodine deficiency disorder. Indeed, the government estimates that 80 per cent of intellectual impairment in China is caused by the latter. What beliefs, cultural and professional, perpetuate these policies? And to what extent are they implemented?
Damaged Bodies and Nation Building: Objectifying Disabled People in Modern China
Matthew Kohrman, Harvard University
During two periods of modern Chinese history, the category of disability (can) has been implicated in nation-building programs and made the subject of scientific scrutiny.
Attention to disability during the first period, the 1930s and 1940s, centered around eugenics. A pivotal figure drawing attention to the disability category during this period was Chen Da, an American-trained demographer and professor of sociology at Qing Hua University. Chen's goal was to apply Western statistical techniques to study the Chinese population in order to produce social policies aimed at racially cleansing and building China into a world power.
The second disability era, which began in the mid-1980s and continues through today, is dominated primarily by a discourse of assistance. Driven by the global disability-rights movement and Beijing's post-Maoist project of casting China as a modern and moral member of the international community, the discourse of assistance prompted the "1987 National Survey of Disability." This survey generated the statistical justification for building China's first disability advocacy organization, the Disabled Person's Federation.
Unlike the eugenics perspective, the current assistance approach to disability, as directed by the Federation, has been remarkably successful in garnering financial and institutional support. The Disabled Persons' Federation, however, has a long way to go before it will improve significantly the lives of those falling under its institutional aegis. This paper will analyze the intellectual shift from eugenics to assistance and discuss how this shift is affecting "disabled people" living in China today.