Propagating Superior-Quality Singleton Children as Anticipatory Modernization: Contextualizing Western Perspectives on Chinese Transnational Adoption

ABSTRACT

We conducted a relational dialectics analysis of 259 Chinese birth planning policy propaganda. We identified a coalition of five discourses animating the texts. We found the coalition created conditions of monologic wholeness, characterized by simultaneous dialogic expansion and dialogic contraction. Dialogic expansion promised a utopic, future China in exchange for birth parents’ childbirth sacrifices and creation of a generation of superior-quality singleton Chinese children. Dialogic contraction reified superior-quality singletons as irrefutable antecedent for China’s modernization. This study holds both academic and practical significance. Academically, this study accelerates family communication’s critical theoretical turn, highlights complexities of studying monologue, expands the area’s dataset boundaries, and furthers diversity efforts. Practically, this study promises transformation of acontextual Western perspectives on China’s birth planning program. The study’s non-Western perspective is timely, given increasing momentum within the Chinese transnational adoption birth family search and reunion movement.

KEYWORDS:

• critical interpersonal and family communication
• adoption
• China
• propaganda
• birth planning

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Xinyi Liu, Liyang Hou, Carina Weadock, and Martha Yohannes for research assistance and Adam Century, Barry Lewis, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, and Tom Worthington for permission to reprint images.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).