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

by Frank Dikötter

With the disintegration of Confucian cosmology after the fall of the imperial system in China, medical science was introduced as an epistemological foundation for social order. The construction of sexuality as a dangerous drive which was thought to form the very core of the individual led to the emergence of a wide range of identities like the menstruating girl, the hysterical housewife, the masturbating adolescent and the syphilitic husband. The naturalization of desire also introduced a tension between the sexual responsibilities of the individual and the coercive intervention of civil society in the name of the collective health of future generations.
Although new categories of analysis, such as 'population', 'race', 'sex', 'woman' and 'youth' were introduced to early Republican China from abroad, their reception and adaptation were founded on cultural reorientations which may have taken place as long before as the 17th and 18th centuries. Instead of describing the rise of normative naturalism as a derivative discourse from 'the West', this book recognizes that the roots of modernizing representations may have had to be sought in a rich and diverse past in China itself.
The author's analysis is based on medical and lay texts such as handbooks, marriage guides and introductions to physiology and sexual hygiene. The epilogue demonstrates how the sexual identities invented early this century are still in place in China today.

Genres: China, History

392 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Frank Dikötter (Chinese: 馮客; pinyin: Féng Kè) is the Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China on leave from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Born in the Netherlands in 1961, he was educated in Switzerland and graduated from the University of Geneva with a Double Major in History and Russian. After two years in the People's Republic of China, he moved to London where he obtained his PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1990. He stayed at SOAS as British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and as Wellcome Research Fellow before being promoted to a personal chair as Professor of the Modern History of China in 2002. His research and writing has been funded by over 1.5 US$ million in grants from various foundations, including, in Britain, the Wellcome Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, The Economic and Social Research Council and, in Hong Kong, the Research Grants Council and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.

He has published a dozen books that have changed the ways historians view modern China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992) to China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower (2022). His 2010 book Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe was selected as one of the Books of the Year in 2010 by The Economist, The Independent, The Sunday Times, the London Evening Standard (selected twice), The Telegraph, the New Statesman and the BBC History Magazine, and is on the longlist for the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.

Reviews

[Andre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man some of these medical statements in regard to male and female bodies sound so wacky that I wonder whether they are based on anything real. Perhaps it was just special language. And much of this sounds rather like justifications of older gender roles. One guy really considered women to be weaker and less intelligent. There were drawings showing them to be of thinner bones and smaller head. Sure, women have a lower bone density than men on average but that is density and not size. These opinions on menstruation and menopause are really ridiculous and sexist. And their statements on "hysteria" sound even worse than the ones from Europe at the time. The prior statements on male and female bodies were not new to me however, I remember reading somewhere that male bodies were considered to be a higher evolved form of the female body.And not only did the new notions of sexual behavior increase anxiety, but both young, attractive and ugly women were considered dangerous. So the only "safe" women are middle-aged/old average women?
Interestinly, the word "xingyu" doesn't mean sexuality, as it is so often translated as, and probably means a biological drive for heterogenital intercourse. That would explain a few things in regard to the really conflicting nature of statements regarding homosexuality in imperial times. And that is nothing compared to the negative representations of female sexuality.
They wackyness continues, I mean exposure to solar rays can have positive health results but not to this degree...then again light killing germs was also what people stated during the covid pandemic.
Wow, what this Wang Shiduo wrote in the 19th century is full on population control that is reminiscent of the CCPs policies, possibly even more extreme. And apparently his notions were all indigenous, you can't blame this on "the West" like so many would do. And he was not the only one. That was full on eugenics what was going on there.
And in China the notions of syphilis as a cause of racial decline was perpetuated well into the 1940s, in Europe it was discarded after World War I, and since in Europe there were still some people believing that a woman can somehow store the essence of prior lovers and so pass their traits on to any offspring into the 70s, I wonder how long it lasted in China.
And apparently male homosexuality was considered a stage towards heterosexuality and basically an inversion of it, presented as socially acquired, a bad habit and the concept of inversion contributed to keeping the sexuality firmly linked to procreation: in its representation of the homosexual as a female trapped in a male body. Which explains a lot even stuff from the imperial period. And instead of attributing social prejudice and official hostility towards homosexuals in twentieth-cenrury China to an 'importation of Western intolerance' - a simplistic and naive interpretation put forward by Bret Hinsch - the strong conceptual link beween sex and reproduction was precisely what impeded the recognition that 'homosexuality' was more than a nonprocreative act.
And considering that girls were supposed to marry the moment they hit sexual maturity I would say that if this described change of girls after marriage really occured as claimed it was due to growing up some more and not the woman having semen in her after sex. But then again, that is not the most idiotic stuff here.
So it was no surprise that they had problems with masturbation as well, and I hadn't heard of claims of penis shrivelling up from it yet. And look at that, the lack of interest in female masturbation was because they didn't consider women to have an actual sexuality drive, reminds me of what some earlier authors claimed of catamites.
And hardliners within the national party considered homosexuality a western disease. Interesting. Quite the contrary to what many claim today in regards to alleged tolerance for homosexuality inherent in chinese society,
Unlike so many others, this book had an epilogue. Granted, much stuff was already known but hey, it was a good ending and I learned a few more things.

PS. Apparently there were nationalists who also advocated electric shock therapy "against" homosexuality.

[哲伦 周 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually quite useful, as Dikotter was still probably the first scholar discussing population control in the Republican era, in combination with issues of eugenics and racial improvement. But still, Dikotter’s account feels too sweeping here with less concrete and granular details and analysis.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, if slightly clinical and definitely focused on urban and educated ideas, background to Republican Chinese ideas about sex and sexuality.