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"The scholarship in this book is superior. Ayo Wahlberg has devoted thousands of hours in the field to collecting and analyzing this fascinating data. His refusal to take up the often-belabored globalization framework for understanding reproductive technologies in China is truly provocative." —Liberty Barnes, author of Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity
"Ayo Wahlberg offers a fascinating analysis of sperm banking in China, situated in the political history of China’s restrictive reproductive policies. A must-read for scholars of medicine and anyone interested in reproductive technologies.” —Rene Almeling, author of Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm
List of contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
List of Abbreviations xv
Introduction: Sperm Crisis 1
1. The Birth of Assisted Reproductive Technology in China 29
2. Improving Population Quality 58
3. Exposed Biologies 77
4. Mobilizing Sperm Donors 100
5. Making Quality Auditable 131
6. Borrowing Sperm 157
Conclusion: Routinization 188
Coda 192
Notes 195
References 205
About the author
Ayo Wahlberg is Professor MSO in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. He is coeditor of Selective Reproduction in the Twenty-First Century and Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making.
Summary
From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even warn of a national ‘sperm crisis’ (jingzi weiji).
Good Quality explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged, shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social configurations that make up China’s restrictive reproductive complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made available to couples who can afford it.
Additional text
"Good Quality offers fresh and engaging data, and a novel analytic approach and set of arguments about a rarely studied subject. The author’s ideas are delivered in clear, lively prose infused with a sly sense of humor and deep empathy for his subjects. Good Quality represents, in short, some of the best that anthropology can offer to the more mainstream fields of population study. It is highly recommended for research and graduate and undergraduate teaching alike.”
