Mobilizing Vernacular Obstetric Science: The Production of Childbirth and Midwifery Knowledge in Rural Socialist China, 1940s–1970s

This article introduces the concept of “vernacular obstetric science” to explain how the Chinese Communist Party organized obstetric knowledge for rural use from the wartime base areas of the 1940s to the barefoot doctor program of the early 1970s. Drawing on midwifery manuals, training reports, and state publications, it shows how biomedically trained experts translated asepsis into local idioms, prescribed household substitutions under scarcity, and codified midwifery skills into standardized procedures. This hybrid knowledge, the article argues, formed a coherent project that made biomedicine locally legible and actionable while constraining improvisation within referral hierarchies and technocratic oversight. Tracing four phases—wartime reforms, national midwifery campaigns, the Great Leap Forward, and the barefoot doctor program—it reveals a persistent tension between revolutionary self-reliance and technocratic control. Extending accounts of “mass science” and medical pluralism, it highlights a state-orchestrated synthesis that bounded vernacular agency and prefigured the post-Mao technocratic medicalization of childbirth.