残障权利学术文章4-kohrman-why am i not disabled.pdfVIP

MATTHEW KOHRMAN Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology Stanford University Why Am I Not Disabled? Making State Subjects, Making Statistics in Post-Mao China In this article I examine how and why disability was defined and statistically quantified by China’s party-state in the late 1980s. I describe the unfold- ing of a particular epidemiological undertaking—China’s 1987 National Sample Survey of Disabled Persons—as well as the ways the survey was an extension of what Ian Hacking has called modernity’s “avalanche of numbers.” I argue that, to a large degree, what fueled and shaped the 1987 survey’s codification and quantification of disability was how Chinese officials were incited to shape their own identities as they negotiated an array of social, political, and ethical forces, which were at once national and transnational in orientation. [disability, China, epidemiology, bio- power, identity] s Ma Zhun pushed open the doors that chilly morning and shuffled her way Ainto a branch of Beijing’s Xuan Wu district government, her goal was sim- ple: to get a disabled person’s ID card so that she could keep her job. Ma Zhun made this very clear, first in a gentle conversational tone and finally in a loud declaration. Like many people I observed during the spring of 1995 visiting Xuan Wu district’s Canjiren Lianhehui (an agency commonly translated as the “Disabled Persons’ Federation”), Ma Zhun had been sent by her employer. Those in charge of the state-owned enterprise for which she worked, a small money-losing engines factory, told Ma Zhun that her only chance of keeping her job, of not being laid off like 35 percent of the factory’s other employees, was for her to get a disability ID. That spring, the Beijing government had sent out directives demanding of all work units in the capital document that at least 1.7 percent of their full-time staff be offi- cially