Abstract,
What does a mother give to her fetus? Does she pass on traces of her own experiences, the fleeting sights and flavors ingested while pregnant, or lessons from past traumas or those of her forebears? Does she have the power to transform the fetus that she carries, or is the child’s basic nature already set at the time of conception?
By the turn of the twentieth century, debates over maternal influence raged globally. August Weismann’s theory of sex equality in heredity and his assertion that the germ plasm hidden within the reproductive cells was safely sealed off from the outside world challenged preexisting folk and medical assumptions about maternal–fetal influence, as well as Lamarckian evolutionary theory about the heritability of acquired characteristics. As arguments raged globally over both the validity and implications (and applications) of Weismann’s theories, Chinese intellectuals brought their own contemporary concerns and medical assumptions into the debate.
As China grappled with imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century, prominent intellectuals such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao called on women to return to the ancient practice of fetal education to save the nation by strengthening the Chinese race in utero. Fetal education, or taijiao, drew upon both the Confucian faith in the perfectibility of human nature and classical Chinese medical theories about the influence of the environment on human health as it called upon pregnant mothers to regulate their body, emotions, behavior, and environment to positively influence the malleable fetus. By the 1910s, Chinese writers who advocated for fetal education combined ideas from Western biology, psychology, and eugenics with East Asian medical principles and Confucian family values. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, American-educated eugenicist Pan Guangdan drew upon Weismann’s biological paradigm of the fetus as sealed in the uterus and separate from its mother to denounce fetal education as superstitious and dysgenic, China's indigenous version of Lamarckism. Through these arguments, Pan challenged longstanding Chinese cultural and medical beliefs about maternal influence and human nature.
