BUILDING THE NATION THROUGH WOMEN'S HEALTH: MODERN ...

elieve pregnancy discomfort. Furthermore, much Western obstetrics was counterintuitive to
Chinese traditional cultural norms and ideas about the body and health, such as the Chinese
emphasis on avoiding cold water during pregnancy. 579
New technologies were (and still are) used to explain racial and cultural differences in
biological instead of social terms, “endow[ing] medical authorities and government with greater
powers of intervention in the regulation of reproduction.” 580 Dikötter looked at how social
problems in China are attributed to scientific causes, namely the poor quality of lower class and
minority groups. 581 Anagnost showed that these beliefs are still prevalent in China today. 582
This focus on biological explanations moves the responsibility of China’s development and
modernization from the state onto the people. The irrefutability of science in the Republican era
reinforced racial, cultural, and gender stereotypes.
In holding biology as the embodiment of physical and mental worth or deviance, and the
physical body as the site of technological change, differing perceptions of the body, sexuality,
and reproduction emerge. These new technologies and perceptions have led many scholars to
explore the social framework on which scientific language and culture is based. Whereas in the
past, “nature” was the moral and ethical norm, in Republican China science and technology
began to take on that role and were often considered unassailable and irrefutable. However,
scholars recently have begun to deconstruct the way biological processes are portrayed, not in
Republican China per se, but in the West, uncovering cultural biases that often reveal gender and
class prejudices. Emily Martin has paved the way in this field with her analysis of the
579
Wu, “Introducing the Uterus to China.”
580
Dikötter, Frank, “Reading the Body: Genetic Knowledge and Social Marginalization in the People's Republic of
China.” China Information 13.2/3 (1998): 1-99.
581
Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China and Imperfect Conceptions.
582
Ann Anagnost, "A Surfeit of Bodies: Population and the Rationality of the State in Post-Mao China," in
Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 22-41.
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