| Popis: |
Since the People’s Republic of China opened for international adoption in the early 1990s, a great deal of scholarship has been produced regarding the One-Child Policy and overseas Chinese adoptees. Rather than looking at the contemporary world, this project is concerned with the topics of adoption and child abandonment in premodern Chinese culture and society. It asks: what did it mean to be an adoptee or “rejected” child in “traditional” China? To understand the realities of these two distinct (though at times overlapping) groups, I examine how obtaining and dismissing descendants functioned as a custom intended to protect the family as a unit. Further, the conceptual, ethical, gendered, and symbolic dimensions of these practices are explored: male adoptees occupied an ambiguous and tenuous position in their families, society, and Confucian orthodoxy, while stories of abandoned children were utilized as cultural tropes and for moral instruction. This sociocultural and historical study is also accompanied by an analysis of the development of welfare institutions and programs for needy populations during Ming-Qing China. Created in response to heightened attention on infanticide (particularly female infanticide) as well as specific crises, child relief efforts changed adoption procedures, gave rise to novel "adoptive" relationships, and presented opportunities for domestic and foreign benefactors to impose their own values onto family-less Chinese children. |
