Ethnologue: Languages of the World

Publishing details for: Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics, Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. xvi + 394 pp.

Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics [Book Review]

Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China

Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China

During the three decades that followed the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), many scholars explored the impact of high fertility on economic development. Nelson (1956) suggested there would be a low-level equilibrium trap for underdeveloped countries, namely a stable equilibrium level of per capita income at or close to subsistence requirements; cycles of poverty could then result due to stagnation of per capita investment as population grew rapidly, even though the capital stock accumulated. Coale and Hoover (1958) pointed out that extra births under high fertility would engulf the total product. A period of two to three decades of reduced fertility would result in fewer dependents and less of the total product assigned to consumers, and thus a higher average economic level. This was treated as a classic theory and a solid foundation for controlling birth control. In order to prevent per capita GNP from declining, three percent of total GNP would have to be invested in fixed capital for each percentage point increase in population (United Nations 1971). Many studies were devoted to the negative correlation between high fertility and economic development. These studies generated interest in the need for a population policy and the optimal design of such a policy (Birdsall 1977). With the publication of The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1968) and The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), a sound population policy received even stronger advocacy. Even though China, the world’s most populous nation, was estranged and cut off from the outside academic community, it experimented remarkably with its fertility. Tyrene White’s 2006 book, China’s Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People’s Republic, 1949–2005, is a very ambitious effort to elucidate the vicissitudes of this experiment with birth planning after the founding of the PRC. Based on reliable documentary evidence and numerous interviews with Chinese citizens, grassroots cadres, and officials, White examines the course of the long campaign that was premised on the radical idea of engineering fertility and rationing children through the use of strict birth limits. She illuminates why and how China could undertake such an unpopular policy of transforming a voluntary birth control program into a mandatory program and, most importantly, describes how such a program could survive and be intensified. The 297-page book includes nine chapters, as well as references and indexes. In the introductory chapter, entitled “The Collectivization of Childbearing,” White presents the focus of the book, namely, why the Deng Xiaoping regime chose population control and such a strict rationing method, as well as the means of enforcement, and the state’s imperviousness to peasant resistance. The author explains her choice of the term “birth planning” rather than other possible terminology. The second chapter explores the origins of birth planning before 1960 under Mao’s regime. In the mid-1950s, even though the anti-natalist policy was adopted, with Zhou Enlai and others instituting a program and plan, it was not strictly implemented without Mao’s personal endorsement. Chapter 3 is devoted to the transition from loose birth control during the Great Leap Forward period and the Cultural Revolution under Mao’s regime to the strict birth planning under Deng’s regime. In chapter 4 the author presents a vivid picture of

China's longest campaign: birth planning in the People's Republic, 1949-2005.

This introductory essay reviews gendered productions, transmissions and practices of Tibetan medicine; it both discusses the representation of women in medical literature and illustrations, and addresses Tibetan medicine’s relations with reproductive healthcare. So far, in the history of Tibetan medicine, called Sowa Rigpa (the 'science of healing', gso ba rig pa), most of its practitioners and authors have been men. Both the learning and practice of Sowa Rigpa and its associated texts have been closely connected to monastic institutions. This however, is only part of the (his)story. Sowa Rigpa was also learnt outside monasteries, within medical lineages, where knowledge and practice was often transmitted from father to son, uncle to nephew, and, as we shall see, from father to daughter, uncle to niece, and mother to daughter and son. Here we suggest the concept of the 'house' that derives from anthropological kinship theory as a useful and encompassing tool for analysing the transmission and practice of Tibetan medicine outside lay and monastic institutions, for it draws out the relations between what in Tibetan are termed medical lineages (sman gyi rgyud) and medical houses (sman grong). Further, we discuss whether, as has been suggested in earlier work by Gyatso and Havnevik (2005), Tibetan medicine has posed a relatively open field for women and, if so, how women’s status in medicine compares to their positions in other domains of Tibetan socio-cultural life and religious institutions.

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Women and Gender in Tibetan Medicine

This article offers the first overview of the recent emergence of Tibetan Sign Language (TibSL) in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), China. Drawing on short anthropological fieldwork, in 2007 and 2014, with people and organisations involved in the formalisation and promotion of TibSL, the author discusses her findings within the nine-fold UNESCO model for assessing linguistic vitality and endangerment. She follows the adaptation of this model to assess signed languages by the Institute of Sign Languages and Deaf Studies (iSLanDS) at the University of Central Lancashire. The appraisal shows that TibSL appears to be between "severely" and "definitely" endangered, adding to the extant studies on the widespread phenomenon of sign language endangerment. Possible future influences and developments regarding the vitality and use of TibSL in Central Tibet and across the Tibetan plateau are then discussed and certain additions, not considered within the existing assessment model, suggested. In concluding, the article places the situation of TibSL within the wider circumstances of minority (sign) languages in China, Chinese Sign Language (CSL), and the post-2008 movement to promote and use "pure Tibetan language".

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Is Lhasa Tibetan Sign Language emerging, endangered, or both?

This article investigates some of the socio-economic dimensions of contemporary Tibetan medical practices in the rural areas of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), China. The article is divided into two parts. Part One, printed in the last issue of the journal, deals with traditional medical practitioners and their medical practices within the governmental health care system in the TAR. It sheds light on the workings and the effects that the commodification of the official health care system have had on its Tibetan medical practitioners, most of whom now work as hybrid practitioners and incorporate Chinesestyle biomedicine into their practice. I argue that several historical, social and political factors have brought about unequal access and availability of Tibetan medicine as compared to Chinese style biomedical care in the rural areas. Special attention is given to the role of the reintroduction of the Cooperative Medical Services (CMS) scheme in the sidelining of Tibetan medical practices in the rural areas. Part Two describes the work of private Tibetan medical practitioners and explores some of the social dynamics and ethical dilemmas that have arisen for them due to the commodification of the official system and the reintroduction of the CMS. Both parts focus on the situation in the Tsang or Shigatse region of the western and central TAR, hence enabling there to be useful comparisons with medical practices in the capital Lhasa, where most of the anthropological literature has focused on so far. Both contributions are based on extensive anthropological fieldwork in Lhasa and the Tsang region of Tibet.

Socio-Economic Dimensions of Tibetan Medicine in the Tibet Autonomous Region, China Part One

The People’s Republic of China is home to over 20 million d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, many among them belonging to ethnic minorities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two minority regions, the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, this article comparatively discusses findings on sign language use, education and state welfare policies. The situation in these domains is analysed through the framework of the ‘civilising project’, coined by Harrell, and its impacts on the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing among ethnic minorities are shown. For instance, through the promotion of Chinese and Chinese Sign Language over and above the use of local sign and written languages as well as through education and the medicalisation of disabilities.

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09687599.2017.1302319

'Civilising' Deaf people in Tibet and Inner Mongolia: governing linguistic, ethnic and bodily difference in China.

Only fifty years ago, Tibetan medicine, now seen in China as a vibrant aspect of Tibetan culture, was considered a feudal vestige to be eliminated through government-led social transformation. Medicine and Memory in Tibet examines medical revivalism on the geographic and sociopolitical margins both of China and of Tibet’s medical establishment in Lhasa, exploring the work of medical practitioners, or amchi, and of Medical Houses in the west-central region of Tsang. Due to difficult research access and the power of state institutions in the writing of history, the perspectives of more marginal amchi have been absent from most accounts of Tibetan medicine. Theresia Hofer breaks new ground both theoretically and ethnographically, in ways that would be impossible in today’s more restrictive political climate that severely limits access for researchers. She illuminates how medical practitioners safeguarded their professional heritage through great adversity and personal hardship.

Theresia Hofer

Papers

Women and Gender in Tibetan Medicine

Is Lhasa Tibetan Sign Language emerging, endangered, or both?

Socio-Economic Dimensions of Tibetan Medicine in the Tibet Autonomous Region, China Part One

'Civilising' Deaf people in Tibet and Inner Mongolia: governing linguistic, ethnic and bodily difference in China.

Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform