Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (review)

388 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 Edwin G. Pulleyblank is a professor emeritus in the Department ofAsian Studies at the University ofBritish Columbia. He haspublished extensively in variousfields of Chinese history and historical linguistics. Frank Dikötter. Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction ofSexual Identities in the Early Republican Period. Honolulu : University ofHawai'i Press, 1995. ix, 233 pp. Hardcover $28.00, isbn 0-8248-1676-5. Frank Dikötter is opening up new areas in the study ofmodern China. His book, The Discourse on Race in Modern China (Stanford, 1992) drew on political, social, and medical literature to challenge the common opinion that, apart from what was learned directly from the West, Chinese thought had been relatively free from racism. This new book may be somewhat less controversial, but it, too, draws a picture oftwentieth-century attitudes toward, or discourse about, sex in China that differs widely from the presumably Western-derived liberal or humanistic values that are supposed to have inspired many Republican-era writers and intellectuals. However, even if it implicitly rejects some assumptions by intellectual or literary historians of modern China, Sex, Culture and Modernity is more a new exploration than a revisionist thesis. For his sources Dikötter draws on a wide range ofpublications from the new commercial presses of the early twentieth century, mostiy located in Shanghai, often by the Commercial Press. These publications include medical treatises, sex-education pamphlets, university textbooks, scientific journals, the popular press, and periodicals. In this "relatively coherent web" ofpublications intended for the new, urban, educated classes, a broad range of experts and pseudo-experts—all drawing on the prestige of science and modernity—created a new discourse on sexuality in China. The subjects they covered (treated serially in five consecutive chapters) were: the construction or reconstruction of female identity, the nature of sexual desire, the "regulation ofpopulation" through the modern "sciences" of demography and eugenics, venereal diseases (including homosexuality as a form of antisocial© 1996 by University deviance), and finally "the cultural construction of 'youth'." All centered on sex, ofHawai'i Pressand all, according to Dikötter, subordinated individual gratification or self-realization to social or national purposes. Reviews 389 This sounds surprisingly Confucian for an era that was supposedly in revolt against the bonds of tradition. What was new about the new discourse—apart from the media it used, the audience it addressed, and the cultural credentials of its participants—was the "naturalization" of sex. It was now treated as a scientific rather than a moral, religious, or "cosmologica!" topic. This goal ofindividual conformity to social norms also shifted in the new nationalistic milieu. Notjust family values or social stability were at stake but the physical and political survival of the nation, of "the race." It is obviously a modern discourse. But there are two main reasons why it differs considerably from similar discourses in the modern West even though most of the ideas and terminology were lifted direcdy from Europe and America. First, as Dikötter somewhat testily asserts, there were already some changes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese thinking about sex that prefigure any Western influence. He positively stresses ideas about "companionate marriage " (romantic love?) and "reproductive health" (incipient eugenics?). Therefore , Western influences did not simply register on a Chinese tabula rasa or strike a previously static and unmoving object. There may be room for argument about how significant these pre-Western movements were, and Dikötter admits that more research needs to be done. Still, the point about internal momentum in Chinese history is worth making or repeating. The second reason for the great difference between modern Chinese and modern Western discourses about sex and practically everything else is the difference in modern historical experience. Small wonder that early twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals, obsessed with saving the country, urged family-centered procreative sexual behavior that would supposedly strengthen the nation in its life-or-death struggle with "imperialism." In seeing how modern Chinese purveyors of"scientific" Western knowledge constructed a nationally self-strengthening discourse about sex, one is reminded ofBenjamin Schwartz' classic account ofhow Yan Fu reinterpreted nineteenthcentury British liberalism into an ideology for...