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Bamboo Steamers and Red Flags: Building Discipline and Collegiality among China's Traditional Rural Midwives in the 1950s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2017

Xiaoping Fang
Xiaoping Fang*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This paper explores how the new Communist government developed a political consciousness of discipline and collegiality among traditional rural midwives in Chinese villages during the 1950s. It argues that selected traditional rural midwives were taught to observe discipline by attending meetings and studying, and to develop collegiality with peers through criticism and self-criticism of their birth attendance techniques and personal characters in short training courses from 1951 onwards. A legitimized midwife identity gradually formed in rural communities, but with it came conflicts and rivalry. By keeping these midwives under institutional surveillance and creating a dynamic and constant moulding process, the new government intended to foster professional and political discipline and collegiality within the group based on a normativized notion of selflessness performed within a changing series of indoctrination schemes that demonstrated continuity and complementarity and which I have described as common, preliminary, institutionalized, and dynamic schemes. This article examines how the state attempted to retrain marginalized and derided midwives with appropriate class backgrounds in order to incorporate them into the modern medical world, then still dominated by doctors and nurses with suspect class backgrounds. Ironically, in creating “socialist new people” to intervene in traditional rural birthing practices and introducing fee-for-service professionalism, the CCP accidentally created a degree of petit-capitalist thinking among women whose traditional mode of work may have been more selfless, thus complicating the process of indoctrinating selfless dedication.

摘要

本文旨在探讨 1950 年代新的共产党政府如何塑造中国乡村传统接生婆的纪律观念和同事关系。本文指出, 自 1951 年开始政府陆续挑选接生婆参加短期改造。通过参加会议和学习, 这些接生婆们被教导如何遵守纪律; 通过对接生技术和个人品格的批评和自我批评, 她们开始学习形成同事关系。接生婆们的合法身份随后在乡村社区逐渐形成, 但也导致了她们之间的冲突和竞争。通过建立一系列展现延续性和互补性, 包括常态的、初级的、制度化的、以及功态化的灌输机制, 政府将这些接生婆置于制度性的监控以及动态和持续的塑造机制之中, 从而试图培育这个群体在职业和政治上的以无私为核心的纪律观念和同事关系。本文同时指出, 共产党政府改造了阶级背景清白, 但长期以来被排挤和嘲讽的乡村接生婆群体, 并将她们纳入一个新的现代医疗体系之中, 而这个体系在很大程度上仍然被阶级背景可疑的医生和护士们所主宰。具有讽刺意义的是, 共产党一方面改造了乡村传统生育实践, 另一方面引入了接生收费的职业规则, 它在某种程度上使得这些原本无私的乡村妇女们行为形成了小资产阶级思想, 从而使得灌输接生婆无私观念的过程复杂化。

Keywords

rural midwivesdisciplinecollegialityconsciousnessidentityrural China接生婆纪律观念同事关系意识身份
Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 230 , June 2017 , pp. 420 - 443
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Copyright
Copyright © SOAS University of London 2017 

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