Last year, the Chinese government announced that married couples across the country would now be allowed to have up to three children, marking a dramatic reversal of the one-child policy, which was first enacted in 1979 to limit Chinese couples to one child each through a range of incentives and punishments. Months later, as part of further efforts to encourage couples to have more children to counter falling birth rates and aging population, the government declared that it would seek to reduce abortions for “non-medical purposes”. However, at the same time, births in Xinjiang have reportedly plummeted amidst the ongoing crackdown on the Uyghurs and other minority groups in the region.
What do these various shifts in rhetoric and policy mean for how we understand questions of reproductive (in)justice and gender (in)equality in contemporary China? Who is most affected, how and why? What forms of support, resistance and/or negotiation have emerged in response to these changes? And what might we learn by placing these trends within a broader historical and global context?
The fourth panel of the Contemporary China Centre Conference, Deconstructed, our new format for 2021/22, brings together leading international experts to discuss the changing discourses and practices of reproduction in contemporary China. Based on their own research areas and case studies, panellists will examine questions of reproductive control, healthcare, technologies, education, activism, and the right to parent.
This event will also introduce a new collection of Chinese propaganda posters about the one-child policy and birth control methods, soon to be available at the University of Westminster Archive.
The event is free to attend and open to all. A Zoom link will be provided to all those who register via Eventbrite by 12 April.
Speakers
Chair: Prof. Gerda Wielander (University of Westminster)
Dr Sarah Mellors Rodriguez (Missouri State University)
Sarah Mellors Rodriguez is assistant professor of East Asian history at Missouri State University. Her forthcoming book, Reproductive Realities in China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), uses interviews and archival research to analyse how ordinary people, particularly women, navigated China’s shifting fertility policies both before and during the one-child policy era.
Dr Kailing Xie (University of Birmingham)
Kailing Xie is lecturer in International Development at the University of Birmingham. Her work investigates the underlying social, cultural and political tensions underpinning China's economic success through the lens of gender. Kailing's book Embodying Middle Class Gender Aspirations: Perspectives from China's Privileged Young Women (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) throws light on how gender affects the lives of well-educated urban Chinese women born in the 1980s. This book examines gendered attitudes in China to marriage, reproductive choices, career choices, and aspirations for a good life.
Past events in CCC Conference, Deconstructed series can be found on our Youtube Channel.
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Hosted by The Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster.
