was organized by the Family Planning Department of the provincial government in Hunan Province. Participants at the exhibition discussed prenatal screening and both “negative” (abortion) and “positive” ways of improving population quality. Since preimplantation genetic diagnosis was a long way off at that stage, sperm banking was discussed as one possible method of improving population quality. A group of journalists who were attending the exhibition got wind that a sperm bank had in fact been established in Changsha:
They came here for an interview and then they sent out a report saying that in Hunan there is a sperm bank. This was kind of explosive news in China, because every newspaper carried this information and they kept reporting it. And suddenly we got very famous around China! [laughter] And we got hundreds of letters from patients and from other institutes. Although many people praised us, some people criticized us[;] . . . they thought we were treating people like animals, since we are just collecting sperm.
Shortly after news of Changsha’s sperm bank had broken nationally, Zhang Lizhu and Lu Guangxiu began communicating. Together with one of Zhang’s peers in Beijing, He Cuihua from the Peking Union Medical College (who had been introduced to assisted reproduction during a study trip to Singapore), the trio agreed to prepare an application for research funding, which would be sent to the Ministry of Health. After some discussion between them, they agreed to title their application “Yousheng: The Protection, Preservation, and Development of Early Embryos,” a decision that cannot be detached from the restrictive family planning measures that were being rolled out across China in this exact same period, as well as the growing interest in population quality on the part of family planning officials. As Zhang put it: “There were other voices at the time. Some people said: China already has such a huge population, why do you still want to work on test tube babies? They said this went against the national family planning policy” (Interview 3). Similarly, when I asked Lu about the apparent contradictions of carrying out IVF research in China in the 1980s, she replied, “There were many doctors and researchers who asked the same question as you did just now. Under this population policy we are doing this kind of technology, something that is contradictory.” As we saw earlier, Lu Guangxiu’s route to reproductive science had been through medical genetics. Her team at the Human Reproductive Engineering Research Department was as engaged in prenatal genetic testing as it was in IVF research. The medical genetic potentials of reproductive technologies had been at the very core of Lu Huilin’s and Lu Guangxiu’s early engagements with reproductive science. In the way that their research application was framed, reproductive technologies emerged as techniques that could contribute to the improvement of population quality in China (rather than infertility treatment as such), a demographic aim that was beginning to emerge alongside the controlling of population growth as a primary family planning objective (see Greenhalgh, 2008; Jiang, 2015).
Having witnessed the great difficulties that his daughter was facing in trying to get gametes and equipment for fertilization research, Lu Huilin decided in 1984 that she needed to travel outside China for more training. She recalls, “My father said that we can’t go on like this, so he told the university that I need to have some training in foreign countries.” Arrangements were made for Lu Guangxiu and her colleague Xu Lili to travel to Yale University, a long-time partner of the Xiangya Medical College, in 1985. Lu was charged with learning laboratory procedures such as sperm washing, determination of the level of maturity of an egg, culture medium preparation, and embryo morphology assessment, while Xu received training in clinical procedures such as control ovarian hyperstimulation and egg retrieval. Six months later, the pair returned to Changsha, bringing back with them as much equipment as they could carry, including electronic scales, an osmotic pressure tester, and even a bottle of ultrapure water. “I came back in 1986 and established a laboratory immediately with all the equipment. . . . Doctor Xu did egg retrieval here in Changsha. I had learned how to recognize eggs, but Doctor Xu was responsible for the surgery on egg retrieval while another group who were at the Xiangya Hospital did laparoscopy for egg retrieval, so we began the work in 1986.”
Now, one might be tempted to argue that clearly Lu Guangxiu, Zhang Lizhu, and He Cuihua received training and inspiration outside of China; hence perhaps this is after all a story of importing Western technologies into China. However, we know that, for example, Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe interacted with numerous international colleagues, and Steptoe traveled to France to learn laparoscopy from Raoul Palmer (Litynski, 1998), yet it is the United Kingdom that is most often credited as the “birthplace” of IVF. My point is that regardless of where they received training and where IVF was invented, Lu and Zhang had to experiment in order to develop it in China; they were not able to “skip” experimentation and merely set about routinizing IVF. Moreover, in setting out to develop reproductive technologies in China they were responding to local concerns arising out of the clinic (in Zhang’s case) as well as out of a growing interest in population quality on the part of government officials (in Lu’s case). As was the case with Edwards and Steptoe, Zhang and Lu built upon a range of already established procedures, technologies, and lab equipment that were circulating through global flows of technology and knowledge as they developed IVF in China.
It was also in 1986 that the “yousheng” research project received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, which had been established under the auspices of the Four Modernizations program. The foundation awarded RMB 100,000 to be split between the three researchers and their laboratories. The amount was therefore hardly sufficient, although the recognition that came with being awarded such a grant was perhaps of even more importance, as theirs became a so-called key research project of the Seventh Five-Year Plan. Reproductive science had become a part of China’s overall modernization program, just as the race to produce China’s first IVF child was in effect on.
This time, Zhang won. After thirteen attempted cycles with different women, thirty-nine-year-old Zheng Guizhen from Gansu became pregnant and gave birth to Zheng Mengzu on March 10, 1988, in Beijing. “There were three hospitals at the time working on this. . . . We were the first to produce test tube babies” (Zhang, Interview 3). In a television program called Fendou aired on China’s CCTV network in August 2011, Zhang tells of her nerves on the scheduled day of Zheng Mengzu’s birth by caesarean section with the nation’s eyes fixed on her:
When the first test tube baby was born, there were a lot of reporters waiting outside the operating room. So when I was on the way to the operating room I didn’t really want to face them. I passed by with a blank face without even nodding at them, without a word, because I was worried. I was not worried about the operation. What I was worried about was the baby’s being born with some kind of malformation, such as a harelip. So this is what I was worrying about when I performed the surgery. Then I saw the baby and checked her whole body and she was totally fine, crying really loudly. I felt I could relax afterward. They said at this point I looked happy, with a little smile. So I really didn’t know how to cope with the media at the time. I should have talked to them a little bit, which I didn’t do at all. (Zhang, Interview 4)
It is telling that the health of Zheng Mengzu was foremost on Zhang’s mind. Since Zhang, Lu, and He had claimed that IVF was a technique that would contribute to “superior births,” it would have been a major setback had the child not been healthy.
Meanwhile, in Changsha, yet another race was playing out: Lu recalls, “We didn’t succeed for more than one year [after 1986], so I worried much about that. The country had spent so much money on my training and there were a lot of expectations on me from others, especially from my father. He was eighty-eight years old at that time, so I also hoped to succeed as soon as possible. However, I failed for over one year so that I felt a lot of pressure.” Changsha’s first IVF babies were finally born exactly three months after Zheng Mengzu in June of 1988. As it happened, two patients had had their eggs retrieved and fertilized around the same time in the second half of 1987. Once their eggs had been fertilized with their respective husbands’ sperm, one of the patients ended up with very poor quality embryos while the other patient ended up with leftover good-quality embryos. Since “there was no freezing equipment and technology, we usually had to abandon
