Winning the competition at the start line: Chinese modernity, reproduction and the desire for a 'high quality' population

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of pregnant women's practices of prenatal health care in contemporary urban China based on long-term fieldwork (from 2003 to 2007) in Zhengzhou, the capital city of Henan province, central China. It illustrates how three discourses of population quality, economy and modernity shape people's understandings and practices of producing one "high quality" baby for both individual family and for the Chinese nation. This unborn "high quality" baby is calling to the future competitions for accumulating economic wealth and social privileges both at a national and a global level. These three discourses are inscribed into the pregnant women's bodies through the implementations of Chinese state's population policies and its profit-driven economic reforms. The dissertation offers detailed life stories of how urban Chinese women consuming various prenatal health care products and services. It displays these stories within the process where the state (re)produces "high quality" subjects and populations by exerting both its regulatory power and disciplinary power through powerful agencies--local family planning committees, women and children's health institutions, hospitals, education systems, and the market. In order to problematize the discourse of population quality, this dissertation foils the migrant rural working mothers' childbirth stories to challenge the urban middle class women's notions on the distinctions between high quality and low quality bodies. In order to challenge the discourse of economy by which the Chinese state hope to cultivate consumer markets, the dissertation demonstrates the possible collective resistances emerging from the market of health products and individual resistances by the pregnant women's older mothers who achieved their motherhoods in late 1970s and early 1980s when China was strongly influenced by Mao's socialist ideologies. This dissertation eventually points to the discourse of "modernity" that is deeply internalized by Chinese people. This discourse validates and disguises uneven power relationships within and beyond China. This invisible but unequal "start line" ensures the winners of the competitions for better life from the moment it starts.;[key terms: China, childbirth, on-child policy, prenatal health care]...