“Why do They Want Others to Suffer the Same Pain They Have Endured?” Weibo Debates about Pain Relief during Childbirth in Neo/Non-Liberal China

Abstract

In this article, we examine the cultural and gendered understandings of labor pain and the underlying obstacles that prevent Chinese women from seeking pain relief during labor and exercising their own autonomy. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of 178 posts containing the phrase wutong fenmian (literally “painless labor”) on Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging platform. By situating our analysis in the contemporary context we call “neo/non-liberal China,” where traditional Chinese thought, market socialism, and a therapeutic mode of governance intertwine, we identify four major themes: traditional thinking rooted in Confucianism; health concerns for mother and child; women’s empowerment and control of reproduction; and structural issues within China’s healthcare system. We argue that Weibo discourses reflect young women’s resistance to Chinese traditional gender ideologies and reveal their strong yearning for self-determination and self-care even as their reproductive “choice” is limited by numerous relational and institutional constraints.

Keywords:

• Healthcare
• labor analgesia
• labor pain
• neo/non-liberal China
• Weibo

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Lu Tang at Department of Communication of Texas A&M University, Dr. Joan Wolf at Department of Women’s Studies of Texas A&M University, and two anonymous reviewers for reading an earlier draft of the article and providing invaluable feedback.

Notes

1 The project was launched in 2008 by Lingqun Hu, former associate professor of Anesthesiology at Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. Over a 10-year period, he organized more than 700 American medical staff to go to China to help with the project.

2 Only second-class (and above) general hospitals with OB/GYN and anesthesiology services, maternity and child-care hospitals, and maternity hospitals were selected to participate (Wu et al., 2020).

3 According to Chinese Medical Association statistics, about 44% of people who gave birth for the first time said labor pain brought them anguish (Ding et al., 2010).

4 Greenhalgh and Winkler call this mode of governance “Leninist neoliberalism” (Greenhalgh, 2010, p. 38). See Greenhalgh (2010), pp. 28–29 for an extended discussion.

5 It is telling that Sheryl Sandburg’s Lean In was hugely popular in urban areas after it was translated into Chinese in 2013, with study groups formed and Sandburg invited to give talks at major universities (https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-CJB-18869).

6 For example, users of babytree.com (https://m.babytree.com/?trf=origin) are mostly poor, uneducated young women living in small towns or villages. Instead of pain relief they discuss topics such as how to guess the sex of the fetus based on conception date and ultrasound pictures or how to turn a girl fetus into a boy using folk medicine.