in accordance with family planning regulations, only married couples in China with “qualification of pregnancy” certificates can access donor sperm. Single women and lesbian couples (the only real “growth segment” in America and Europe these days, I was told by one sperm bank director from Europe) are barred from using sperm banks, even as sperm banks have their work cut out for them just to meet demand from infertile couples. Chinese regulations prohibit the import and export of sperm, thus restricting the operation of sperm banks. On their part, infertile couples in China have little choice when it comes to sperm donors in the face of chronic shortages. There are no websites that would allow them to click through extended donor profiles. Instead, couples most often wait two to three years before donor sperm becomes available and are then advised by doctors when looking at a list of perhaps four to six different anonymous donors on an Excel sheet with fifteen columns of basic information. And finally, restricting the number of women’s pregnancies per donor to five, as I have pointed out, has resulted in an arduous and costly high throughput style of sperm banking, which bank administrators see as “constraining” for their operations, however much they might agree with the reasons for it. Costs per donor are much higher in China because one qualified donor can be used by only five couples, compared to as many as 30 to 100 offspring from a single donor in Europe or America.
My second overarching objective has been to shift analytical attention away from globalization, exportation, importation, and technology transfer, toward routinization and making when studying reproductive technologies in non-Western parts of the world. Lisa Handwerker (1995), Marcia Inhorn (2003), Aditya Bharadwaj (2003; 2016), Viola Hörbst (2012), and Elizabeth Roberts (2012) have been among the first ethnog-raphers to study the burgeoning use of ARTs outside Europe and America—in China, Egypt, India, Mali, and Ecuador respectively. Com-mon to their studies has been an analytical emphasis on “rapidly globalizing technologies” (Bharadwaj, 2003, p. 1868) through the “wholesale exportation of Western-generated new reproductive technologies into . . . pronatalist developing societies” (Inhorn, 2003, p. 1837). As such, their ethnographies have examined “the importation of Western reproductive technologies” (Handwerker, 2002, p. 310); the “arrival of assisted-reproductive technologies in a developing nation” (Roberts, 2012, p. 39); or the “dissemination of ARTs to Mali” (Hörbst, 2012, p. 194). Although each of these scholars meticulously demonstrates the complex ways in which such a global form as ART becomes recontextualised and reshaped in their specific countries of study, globalization has nevertheless been one of the key ethnographic tropes in studies of reproductive technologies in the so-called Global South. In the case of China (and beyond), I argue that we need to (re-)orient our analyses toward routinization processes, regardless of where sperm banking and insemination treatments were invented.
As will become clear, while global flows and interactions have figured throughout the making of ARTs in China, it would be misleading at best to suggest that they have been imported into, arrived in, or disseminated into the country.11 ARTs are not products; rather, they are assemblages of skills, petri dishes, needles, microscopes, protocols, regulations, patients, donors, clinics, recruitment flyers, advertisements, and more. Hence, accounting for the birth and routinization of ARTs like sperm banking or IVF in China requires a recentering of our analyses. Ethnographic and historical attention is shifted to the ways in which these technologies have followed routes of experimentation, development, and routinization within the nation, in the same way that, for example, Sarah Franklin (1997) and Rayna Rapp (2000) have tracked the routinization of IVF in the United Kingdom or amniocentesis in the United States respectively. It is by focusing on routinization that we can get a sense of how a particular style of sperm banking has emerged in China. As I will show, to the extent that there have been global connections, these have been components rather than drivers of the making of sperm banking in China, just as we know that the development of reproductive technologies in Europe and America have also been facilitated by global connections.
ASSEMBLAGE ETHNOGRAPHY
What follows, then, is not an account of the commodification of bodily substances in China as an inevitable effect of globalization, standardization, and commercialization. Instead, we will ethnographically follow how the “daily grind” of sperm banking is currently unfolding in China. If we are to understand how a medical technology like sperm banking could become routine in China, we must attend to the ways in which sperm banks are used by infertile couples who pursue artificial insemination with donor sperm, the daily micro-practices of sperm banking (from recruitment to quality assessment, storage, and distribution), and the socio-historical processes that mold it. The book is based on eight years (2007–2014) of episodic fieldwork (Whyte, 2013)12 primarily in Changsha but also in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, consisting of ten trips lasting between three months and a couple of weeks. Through this fieldwork I have amassed a rich dataset consisting of field notes, interview transcripts, medical journal articles, media reports, regulations, guidelines, conference reports, “gray literature” in the form of brochures and leaflets, informed consent forms, donor screening criteria, standard operating procedures, and more. My research has involved participant observation, interviews, and the collecting of documents in equal measure and I consider the resulting materials as of equal importance for the task I have set myself, that is, accounting for the routinization of sperm banking in China. Let me describe how I was able to carry out the research for this book.
In January 2007 I was lucky enough to be awarded a research fellowship on a European Commission–funded project called BIONET (2006–2009) based at the BIOS Centre on the tenth floor of Tower 2 at the London School of Economics. The project was a Sino-European collaboration on the ethical governance of biomedical research, which aimed to explore some of the challenges that increasing cross-continental research collaboration in the life sciences had brought in its wake: In which country should ethical review take place in collaborative research? What were some of the differences in how informed consent procedures were carried out and understood? Can researchers from two countries collaborate if their laws conflict? and so on (see Wahlberg et al., 2013). One of the partners in the project was Lu Guangxiu, who guided our work on reproductive technologies and stem cell science through a series of workshops and conferences held in Beijing, Shanghai, and Changsha. It was through this project that I began the research that has culminated in this book. Having developed a productive working relationship with Lu and her team in Changsha, I asked toward the end of the BIONET project whether she would support an ethnographic project that focused specifically on sperm banking carried out by me based at her hospital in Changsha. She agreed enthusiastically and I then prepared a research grant application, which, having failed first time around (my proposed methods were not sufficiently aligned with my research questions) in 2009, was eventually successful in 2010, when I received generous funding from the Danish Council of Independent Research to carry out a three-year ethnographic project on sperm banking in China. The research project was designed as a Sino-Danish collaboration from the outset, and further to my own research costs we had also agreed to budget for two conferences (one in China and one in Denmark)13 as well as researcher exchanges between China and Denmark.
Fieldwork
How then does one carry out an assemblage ethnography of the routinization of sperm banking in China? As site-multiplied research I have carried out in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in China’s largest and oldest sperm bank in Changsha as my primary site while also following connections to sperm banks and fertility clinics in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and indeed Denmark. Fieldwork has comprised observations and participation during recruitment visits to university campuses, reception of potential and qualified donors at the sperm banks, medical screening of potential donors, analysis of sperm quality in the laboratories, cryopreservation of qualified donor sperm, the filing of donor and sperm sample information as well as consultations with infertile couples. My main sites of observation were the donor reception and waiting rooms on the one hand, and on the other, sperm bank laboratories where analysis of sperm samples is carried out and qualified sperm is prepared for cryopreservation. I also joined a mobile sperm bank crew on three of their weekly visits to collect donor sperm in cities outside of Hunan Province’s capital, Changsha. This fieldwork, recorded in my field notes, was essential to get a sense of the
