(shengming) and living (shenghuo), is assessed and valued in China today. In a country currently beset by enormous transformations, it is little wonder that questions of what good life is abound (see Kleinman et al., 2011; Zhang, Kleinman, & Tu, 2011). In the pages that follow, we will see how an assemblage ethnography of sperm banking in China can provide insight into the ways in which good life emerges out of a heavy accumulation of patterned knowledges and practices around the problem of male infertility, which are calibrated to constantly assess and intervene into that very vitality.
1 The Birth of Assisted Reproductive Technology in China
It’s about 1978, and the first IVF baby was born in the United Kingdom, but during that time, you know, China had had ten years of Cultural Revolution, so we didn’t hear any news from foreign countries and we couldn’t read any materials from foreign countries. So during that time, we didn’t know this great news until 1979, when my father was able to read some newspapers and magazines from foreign countries. That way he learned that a test-tube baby was born in the U.K. in 1978. So he thought that in China, because of the Qing dynasty Chinese people have suffered a lot not only from the war, but also from drugs, because some of them became addicted to drugs. He said that if you want to change the whole country, you must have a healthy body, so it is also important to have a healthy baby for every Chinese family. At that time, my team was doing prenatal diagnosis for genetic diseases and we found many couples with such diseases, but they could only choose to do an abortion; this was the only option for them. My father thought that maybe if we can find a good way to have a sperm and oocyte cultured in vitro, then we can identify not-good genes and choose the good ones. So his first thought for doing IVF technology was not for infertile couples, but for couples with genetic diseases. But this was a long way off and we also found that it was not easy to do this work. After all our research we decided, then, to also do the treatment for infertile couples. (Lu Guangxiu)
There is an almost precise coincidence of timing in the births of Louise Brown in July 1978 and China’s restrictive family planning policy a few months after in 1979. These two landmark events stand at odds with each other in many ways. For Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, the two doctors who helped Lesley and John Brown give birth to Louise using the technique of in vitro fertilization (IVF), infertility was the problem that needed to be overcome. In contrast, for systems engineer Song Jian, mathematician Li Guangyuan, and other architects of the so-called “one-child-policy,” fertility was the problem that needed to be addressed (Greenhalgh, 2008). The technique of IVF alone has brought an estimated 5 million babies into the world globally (in China, some 200,000),1 while it is said that the one-child policy has prevented some 140 million births in China.
It is worth remembering that, as Martin Johnson and colleagues (2010; see also Johnson, 2011) have shown, Edwards and Steptoe faced numerous setbacks during the early days of their research on IVF in the United Kingdom. They were refused funding by the Medical Research Council in the early 1970s in a scientific climate where research into infertility “was accorded a low priority” (Johnson et al., 2010, p. 2158) when compared to contraception and abortion. Similarly, beginning in the early 1980s, reproductive scientists Lu Guangxiu, Zhang Lizhu, and He Cuihua also faced many setbacks (albeit eventually securing government funding for their research in 1986) in a country where concerns about overpopulation were immediately national rather than global.
What, then, were the conditions that allowed assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to be developed in China during the exact same period that one of the world’s most comprehensive family planning policies aimed at preventing birth was being rolled out? First of all, in what follows, we will see how ARTs would have be molded into a suitable form to fit within China’s restrictive reproductive complex before they could gain formal authorization through national law as late as 2003. In doing so, these technologies eventually settled alongside contraception, sterilization, and abortion as just another technology of birth control. This might seem counterintuitive, seeing as birth control is most often defined as fertile couples’ active efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancies as a matter of (in China, state-stipulated) family planning. Nonetheless, as we will see, for ARTs to be legalized, infertile couples would have to be subject to the same kinds of family planning restrictions as fertile couples. We can say that for increasing numbers of infertile couples in China, birth control can be defined as an active effort to achieve wanted pregnancies using ARTs in order to have one child in strict accordance with family planning policies. Moreover, since China’s reproductive complex came to be configured around the dual objectives of controlling population growth and improving population quality, the medical genetic potentials of reproductive technologies were actively mobilized from the outset in China, as highlighted by Lu Guangxiu in this chapter’s opening quotation.
Secondly, I will show how even if ARTs such as sperm banking or IVF were invented in the United States and United Kingdom, this did not relieve scientists of a need for experimentation in China, and hence we should not view their development and routinization as an “importation of Western reproductive technologies” (Handwerker, 2002, p. 310; cf. Inhorn, 2003). Instead, we need to trace the transformation of such technologies from pioneering to mundane within China (rather than across borders). By tracing the ways in which ARTs came to be accepted in China we gain insights into the particular form—what we might think of as “one-child ART”2—they have taken (cf. Knecht, Beck, and Klotz, 2012).
I begin by looking at how two of the pioneers of reproductive science in China—Lu Guangxiu in Changsha and Zhang Lizhu in Beijing—began experimenting with assisted reproduction, eventually embarking on a collegial yet competitive race to achieve the country’s first test tube baby, culminating in the birth of Zheng Mengzu in March 1988 in Beijing, closely followed by a baby girl in Changhsa three months later. Their recollections, recorded in interviews, are interwoven to capture a sense of the pioneering spirit that carried their efforts forward. I will use Zhang and Lu as narrators of the story of the difficult birth of ARTs in China. As we will see, there is a certain style to nostalgic remembering when legacies have already been consolidated, allowing for playful self-deprecation as a means of emphasizing the hurdles and challenges that had to be overcome. Zhang and Lu’s personal recollections are balanced against additional interviews with some of the other scientists as well as Ministry of Health officials who were active in reproductive research and policy through the 1980s and 1990s; participation in a series of workshops and conferences on assisted reproduction in China held in Beijing, Shanghai, and Changsha, which gave insights into the history of ART in these cities; as well as on secondary archival sources. Accounting for the birth and routinization of sperm banking in China requires accounting for the development of IVF since, as we saw in the introduction, China’s first sperm bank was established by Lu Guangxiu in Changsha to facilitate lab research on in vitro fertilization. Therefore this chapter chronicles the rise of both forms of reproductive technology.
ORIGIN STORIES
Helping You Have a Healthy Little Angel
Our hospital is the first modern large-scale reproductive and genetics hospital in China, and a model for putting technological developments to practical use. . . . From 1980 it was under the direction of Professor Lu Huilin, the founder of the study of medical genetics in China. Professor Lu Guangxiu was the first to begin developing human-assisted reproduction research and clinical medical work in China. In 1980, the Human Reproductive Engineering Research Department, a platform for human-assisted reproductive technology, was founded. . . . [T]his was the first center in China to begin studying human ovum development, external maturation of ovum, and in vitro fertilization. Projects became national key scientific projects of the Seventh Five-Year Plan. There are world-class equipment and a very talented team. The center has made great achievements in the area of assisted reproduction and preimplantation diagnosis in the past twenty years. . . . Founded in 1981, the technological instruction center of the National Sperm Bank of the Ministry of Health was China’s first sperm bank, with a very talented team, advanced quality control equipment, computer-based data management, and the ability to preserve 120,000 frozen sperm samples. (Hospital presentation flyer, CITIC-Xiangya
