Reframing Female Infanticide
Reframing Female Infanticide
The Emerging Nation
Chapter 5 considers the consequences of external perceptions of female infanticide back on the ground in China. On one hand, most nineteenth-century Chinese audiences staunchly opposed the claims of Catholic missionaries who vied for the right to gather and baptize unwanted Chinese children, accusing them instead of kidnapping and killing children for occult purposes. This attitude evidenced a keen desire to find Chinese, not foreign, solutions to these problems. On the other hand, some in China gradually absorbed Western ideas about science and women’s rights, adapting them to suit the expectations of Chinese audiences. These gradual adaptations found in the pages of new nineteenth-century newspapers eventually paved the way for the widespread acceptance of population as the scientific measure of the nation’s health and strength in the early twentieth century, when the life of each girl child was seen as essential for China’s survival on the international stage.
Keywords: Tianjin Massacre, Catholic, missionaries, infanticide, China, orphanage, Darwinism
Stanford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
