CAPTURING KINSHIP: VISUALIZING THE HISTORY OF CHINESE ADOPTION IN CANADA by Emilie J. Lanthier A thesis submitted to the Department of History In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (April 2021) Copyright ©Emilie J. Lanthier, 2021 Abstract The Chinese government enacted the one-child policy during the late 1970s and early 1980s to curb the growth of the country’s swelling population. This extreme form of family planning marked the beginning of a radical social experiment that profoundly affected Canada’s social and familial landscape. In the forty years since China instituted its one-child policy, Western media remains obsessed with narratives about saving girls from China’s draconian state policies. As such, my MA research asks what claims images of needy children have made on Canadian audiences, and to what degree their meanings and interpretations were contoured by broader processes and ideologies. Special attention is paid to how the presence and visibility of the female Chinese adoptee have altered notions of Chinese Canadian identity, international humanitarianism, and interracial kinship, through a visual discursive analysis of the images that have saturated our national retina and animated the practice of Chinese adoption in Canada. I will demonstrate how visual mediums are historically rooted communication structures that act as alternative sites of ideological production and exchange, whereby constructions of needy children are transformed through a complex matrix of image-making and image-consuming practices. In this way, the visual representation of the Chinese adoptee becomes an opening through which to investigate both the historical record of intercountry adoption in Canada and the timeless power of symbolic children. Exploring Chinese adoption in Canada at the intersection of transnational adoption scholarship, visual discourse analysis, and adoptee subjectivities is a novel way of grappling with the history of intercountry adoption. In other words, surveying the visual landscape of adoption and its reciprocal constitutions is a way of getting at the public debates Chinese adoption has engendered, the actions and interests of private actors, and the collective memories and mythologies held by adoptees. ii Table of Contents Abstract ..........................................................................................................................................................ii Chapter 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 Literature Review ........................................................................................................................ 12 Chapter 3 Framing Pity Through the Humanitarian Gaze ........................................................................... 18 Constructing a National Humanitarian Gaze ........................................................................................... 20 How Moving Images Mobilize ................................................................................................................ 25 How Images Individualize ....................................................................................................................... 32 How Images Influence Political Posturing and Policy ............................................................................ 39 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 51 Chapter 4 The Goldilocks Conditions of Chinese Adoption ....................................................................... 54 The Long Shadow of Canada’s “Yellow Peril” ....................................................................................... 58 From “Yellow Peril” to “Yellow Fever” ................................................................................................. 65 The Goldilocks Conditions of Adoption.................................................................................................. 67 Narrating Choices: “Good China”, “Bad China” .................................................................................... 77 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 81 Chapter 5 Kinning Culture and Storied Origins .......................................................................................... 84 Culture Keeping in the Era of Multiculturalism ...................................................................................... 87 Celebration Through Parody and Pastiche .............................................................................................. 94 Consummating Kinship by Consuming Culture ...................................................................................... 97 The Balancing Act of Story Telling ....................................................................................................... 101 Mainstreaming Chinese Adoption in Pop Culture ................................................................................. 105 Somewhere in Between ......................................................................................................................... 107 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 112 Chapter 6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 115 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................................. 120 iii Chapter 1 Introduction The British television documentary, The Dying Rooms, made tidal waves in 1995 when it premiered on Chanel 4 in the United Kingdom, and later in 1996 when it emerged on local television networks in Canada and the United States. By taking audiences into the private spaces of China’s state-run orphanages, undercover filmmakers Brian Woods and Kate Blewett helped to pull back the country’s iron curtain to reveal, in uncomfortable starkness, the gross and systematic neglect of a growing number of abandoned children. Images of severely malnourished bodies and despondent child faces were widely publicized in American and Canadian news media coverage. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag reflects on how harrowing photographs and shocking images of death cling to our modern ethical feelings and strengthen our shared conviction that human suffering is an aberration;1 to many Canadian onlookers what the Dying Rooms had to offer was indeed an aberration. Thus, feelings of care and compassion dovetailed with horror and indignation; pushing some Canadians to pursue adoptions from China. Between 1992 and 2009 adoptions from China soared to over eleven thousand and accounted for over one third of all international adoptions in Canada.2 1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 40. Sontag writes that all images that display the violated and mutilated body are pornographic since they are at once repulsive and alluring. The book’s searing mediations on the spectacle of suffering during times of war is a thoughtful companion and update to her earlier essays on the voyeuristic nature of photography; On Photography (1977). 2 “International Adoption,” The Monitor, October 14, 2003, http://web.archive.org/web/20070420210142/ www.cic.gc.ca/english/monitor/issue03/ 06-feature.html. In 2003, The Monitor – the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ bimonthly magazine – reported that Canadians had adopted 6,245 children from China in the period between 1993 and 2002. Despite representing less than 1% of Canada’s total immigration, data from Statistics Canada indicated that Canadians had adopted nearly 21,000 children from abroad between the years 1999 and 2009. About 8,000 of these international adoptions were from China. 1 Introduced in 1979, China’s one-child policy remains the symbolic cornerstone of a complex and consequential state project bent on modernizing China by controlling the country’s swelling population. Between the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the country’s first official population survey carried out in 1953, China’s population increased a whopping 100 million in four years and stood at over 600 million. According to British-Chinese journalist, Xinran, China’s population continued to grow from 700 million in 1966 to 1.2 billion in 1979.3 As part of a broader birth planning program, the policy varied over time and place until its official dissolution in 2015. From the late 1980s and well into the early 2000s, China’s surplus of abandoned and orphaned Chinese baby girls culminated in a slew of bilateral adoption agreements between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and fourteen Western countries.4 Yet, North American discourses around Chinese adoption has understood the one-child policy as monolithic and absolute, ignoring the complex web of state and local coercion, resistance, evasion, and child concealment in Chinese communities and cities, and among many Chinese families. In contrast to the pervasive narrative of China’s “throwaway daughters,” families in China’s more remote areas