Reproductive Policy in 20th Century China

Some folks here might be interested in an interview that my UK colleague Sharon Yam conducted with Sarah Mellors Rodriguez:

While China’s reproductive policies have long been studied as a mechanism of biopolitical control, the everyday reproductive experiences of Chinese people are often eclipsed. Spanning more than a century, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez’s important monograph Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911–2021 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) fills this gap by examining how Chinese citizens, especially working-class women, navigated the changing cultural and sociopolitical landscapes of reproduction. Supplementing state archival research with oral history interviews, the book enacts a feminist methodology that highlights the lived experiences of individuals from different class backgrounds. Meticulously researched and cogently written, Rodriguez’s volume is an important addition not only to China studies, but also to scholarship on reproductive politics, health, and medicine.

It can be a little dense but there’s a lot of interesting stuff about the collision of traditional Chinese medicine with Western eugenics with the mess of different policies pursued by the CCP in the first 25 years of the CCP. Ground level response to policy even in an authoritarian state is extremely complex, with plenty of regional and temporal variation.