Mara Hvistendahl

This book was quite interesting to read, but I just didn't agree with many of Hvistendahl's conclusions. There's too much for me to include here, so I'll just touch on two:

The author's stance on abortion is strange: she believes sex-selective abortion is wrong (because that would be discrimination against the possibility of one sex - namely, the female sex), but she doesn't have a problem with abortion itself. If one doesn't believe a fetus is a baby with a right to life, then this discrimination argument just doesn't hold up. She mentions over and over that this is what pro-choice activists are having a hard time with in their fight against sex-selective abortion - they don't want to "humanize" the unborn.

Also, she seems to hold a very negative view of Christians and the belief in a Creator of the world. On p. 102, she talks about the "West's predominant creation myth" and on p. xiv, she mentions that a natural balance of the sex's populations was deemed by Johann Peter Sussmilch, a German statistician, to be the work of a Creator, but when Charles Darwin looked into the matter, he "intuited" that it "connected somehow to evolution." And apparently Darwin's gut feeling is enough for her on that matter. She didn't need to get into the Creation debate at all, yet she does... and proves nothing.… (mehr)

A brisk and competent look at a case of agricultural industrial espionage which unfolded between the American Midwest and China in the 2010s. Mara Hvistendahl recounts the story of Robert Mo, a Chinese-born scientist whose company tasked him with getting samples of seed grain that had been genetically modified by multinational giants like Monsanto and DuPont in order to reverse engineer them back in China. As spy stories go, this is not the most thrilling—some cars are tailed but there are no shoot-outs or black-tie galas, just lots of dying small towns in Iowa and internal FBI wrangling.

The most engaging part of the book for me—as someone who admittedly doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about seeds—is Hvistendahl's exploration of America's reaction to foreign industrial espionage/entrenched patterns of racist thinking and assumptions in American governmental and judicial institutions. It's interesting/amusing just how many online reviews have interpreted Hvistendahl pointing out the racialised underpinnings of how the FBI thinks about Chinese espionage activities as her somehow trying to argue that Mo was wrongly convicted, when actually what she's doing is showing how unexamined assumptions lead you astray. (Whether that's launching investigations into ethnically Chinese grad students on the basis that they travelled to China, or overlooking some people who may very well be committing espionage for China because "everyone knows" that China only employs ethnically Chinese people.) Quibbling with The Scientist and the Spy for not capeing hard enough for the U.S. government/nominally American multinational corporations is exactly the kind of siloed thinking that Hvistendahl is critiquing here—though honestly not hard enough.… (mehr)

Finished, 5/10/2020

Author Mara Hvistendahl writes about a case of agricultural industrial espionage in her book "The Scientist and the Spy". A representatives of a Chinese seed company, Dr. Robert Mo, living and working in Florida, was tasked with obtaining samples of genetically modified seeds from corn fields in the midwest in order to allow the Chinese to reverse engineer the highly productive and disease resistant seeds produced by U.S. agricultural giants like Monsanto and DuPont. These seeds were developed after years of work, at the cost of millions of dollars, and the Chinese were trying to gain the technology quickly and cheaply.

Suspicion was raised when Chinese scientists, clearly out of place, were noticed crawling through Iowa corn fields. Eventually, the FBI got involved, investigating what appeared to be the theft of intellectual properties and trade secrets, and spent a couple of years tracking the suspects to make a criminal case against them. In addition to learning a few tid-bits about seed breeding, the author also shows how time consuming FBI investigations can become, and how long it can take to obtain an arrest warrant and conviction.

There seemed to be a bit of a disconnect in the book however. After making the case that the Chinese agricultural company worked hard to steal U.S. technology, planting the seed in the reader's mind that this is hardly an unusual practice by the Chinese government and companies, the author goes out of her way to then point out how Chinese scientists working in the U.S. are too often racially profiled and suspected of trying to steal company secrets. I was left with the feeling that the author was questioning whether the arrest and conviction of Chinese scientist Dr. Robert Mo was only made because of his nationality, and not because of his illegal activities. That's certainly not a conclusion I had reached.… (mehr)

While this book is worth reading, it has some fundamental weaknesses that make it dificult to take as definitive. The underlying theory is that sex selection has appeared in culturally disparate areas, increased at a similar rate, and all in a relatively short time frame. This cannot be explained solely by cultural factors. The link is Western techology and family planning programs. Hvistendahl lays responsibility on technology itself, rather than viewing it as an instrument through which underlying values are directed and amplified. She could have made a better, more complex argument about the ways in which technology permits us to turn weak values into stronger ones.

This flaw explains Hvistendahl's own conflicted attitude towards abortion: she is heavily critical of how it is used in this process, but shies away from criticizing it as a technology. Her broadside in the introduction against Americans who don't want to bring domestic politics into the argument is misplaced: It's hugely relevant given the global gag rule and our current role in international family planning.

Her argument about male control being contradicted by the heavy role of women in enforcing sex selection is shallowly constructed. The role of women in upholding patriarchal norms is one that's well explored in feminist analysis.

One of the central theses of the book is Western culpability in sex selection, through governmental/NGO action and through the actions of corporations that seek to promote their products. The analysis feels inadequate. She acknowledges the vast efforts by Mao and Indira Gandhi to control population growth, committing vast human rights abuses in the process, but comes across as sounding like they were puppets of Western influence.

Her suggestions that sex selection be controlled through technological means are incompletely formed. She is correct that it's the lazy option to simply throw up one's hands and say, "we can't stop it," but it's also a reality that must be reckoned with. As she acknowledges, technological advancements will make this even harder to achieve. (If sex can be determined by a simple blood test in the first trimester, abortion becomes even easier.) She recognizes the importance of healthcare professionals in working to stop these practices, but conceives of it in a top down manner rather than as a part of greater social change. She acknowledges that women evade bans in India and China, but blames it on poor enforcement. In one survey in Albania, women admitted they were aborting for sex reasons, but she does not consider that bans could simply make women lie.

She is correct, however, that current campaigns that simply focus on cultural values are ineffective in themselves.

A personal anecdote: When I had my first child in an NHS hospital in 2007, the hospital would not tell you the sex. The official reason was that they could not be sure. The constant rumor was that this was a practice of hospitals in heavily Asian areas to prevent sex selection (either a racist rumor, or racist practice). In any case, if I had wanted to know, there were any number of private clinics offering me a private gender scan. I could then have had an abortion without anyone knowing why.… (mehr)