In Absence and from Transference: Adoption, Abandonment, and Uneasy Familial Bonds in the Chinese Tradition
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- 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.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | August 15, 2021 |
| Date modified | August 30, 2021; December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | August 27, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Susman, Lily Amelia |
|---|---|
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Stanford Global Studies, Center for East Asian Studies |
| Thesis advisor | Zhou, Yiqun |
Subjects
| Subject | Stanford Global Studies |
|---|---|
| Subject | East Asian Studies |
| Subject | Asia |
| Subject | China |
| Subject | Abandoned children |
| Subject | Adoption |
| Subject | Adoptees > Family relationships |
| Subject | Adopted children |
| Subject | Adoptive parents |
| Subject | Foundlings |
| Subject | Foundlings > Care |
| Subject | Foundlings > History |
| Subject | Foundlings in literature |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Susman, L. (2021). In Absence and from Transference: Adoption, Abandonment, and Uneasy Familial Bonds in the Chinese Tradition. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/nh719qy2387
Collection
Stanford Center for East Asian Studies Thesis Collection
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- Contact
- lily.susman@gmail.com
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