Drowning girls in China : female infanticide since 1650 / D.E. Mungello.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-139) and index.

List of illustrations -- Maps -- China in the late Qing Dynasty -- Southern Jiangsu province -- Map of Shanghai in 1867 -- Preface -- Female infanticide -- Infanticide in world history -- Infanticide in China -- A subject or a sensibility? -- Female infanticide in nineteenth-century China -- Causes and forms of infanticide -- Buddhism and Daoism in popular morality literature -- Confucianism in popular morality literature -- Popular broadsheets and newspapers -- Official and literati efforts to combat infanticide -- Early official efforts to combat infanticide -- Early Qing literati efforts to assist abandoned children -- Literati foundling hospices -- Confucian arguments against female infanticide -- Nineteenth-century infant protection societies -- Infanticide deniers -- Denial in history -- Protestant missionary infanticide deniers -- Knowledgeable Protestant missionary observers -- The European cult of Chinese children -- Infanticide deniers in Europe -- The holy childhood and the cult of the child -- Creating a foreign island in China -- The Jesuit response to infanticide deniers -- Christian mission efforts to aid foundlings -- Seventeenth-century efforts to save exposed children -- Eighteenth-century Christian foundling hospices -- Catechists and Christian virgins -- Nineteenth-century Catholic efforts -- Female infanticide in modern China -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Notes -- Index -- About the author.

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This groundbreaking book offers the first full analysis of the long-neglected and controversial subject of female infanticide in China. Although infanticide and child abandonment were worldwide phenomena from antiquity down to the nineteenth century whenmassive numbers of children were still being abandoned in Europe, China was unique in targeting girls almost exclusively. Yet despite its persistence for two thousand years, little has been published on a practice that is deeply sensitive within China andlittle understood by outsiders. Drawing on little-known Chinese documents and illustratio.

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