In this work, written with compassion, D. E. Mungello aims to tell a “human” story of female infanticide in China. With a focus on the nineteenth century, the author addresses this topic in order to develop an understanding of “the different ways people acted,” and “to present their thinking as meaningful rather than merely irrational or cruel” (pp. xv–xvi). Following an introduction that provides a world history context, the book takes up ancient Chinese views of the child and discusses the forms and causes of infanticide (economic and cultural, namely, poverty and the cost of a dowry), punishment/reward-oriented anti-infanticide popular literature, and elite and government efforts to combat infanticide. In the second part of the book, Mungello shifts the focus from China to the missionaries and to the West, examining the phenomenon of infanticide denial (mainly among Protestants) and describing cases of missionary groups' relief efforts. The book ends with the assertion that the practice of infanticide has yet to be eliminated.

Mungello's account of infanticide in China covers some of the important questions that have engaged historians in recent years, but the book's insights are displayed more clearly in the second part. It argues that, from the beginning, the ways in which infanticide stories were told in the West essentially had to do with a set of feelings, or a sensibility that was shaped by “a Christian culture in a which the Christ child was an object of reverence” (p. 7). It shows how, in what it terms “the European cult of Chinese children,” abandoned Chinese infants were used as the emotional rallying point for mobilizing donation (pp. 80–89). The materials it presents on missionaries' work to aid abandoned children are helpful in vindicating some of their efforts, contradicting the demonized characterizations that missionaries sometimes unfairly received. By dissecting the Protestant skepticism about the prevalence of infanticide (which is characterized as “denial”), the book puts into historical context the conflicting representations of infanticide in China perpetuated by the different missionary groups.

The study is commendable in that it brings to light a long-forgotten work, L'infanticide et L'oeuvre de la Sainte-Enfance in Chine (Infanticide and the Work of the Holy Childhood in China), composed by Father Gabriel Palatre, a French Jesuit missionary. Palatre set out as his goal to respond to “infanticide deniers” by demonstrating the prevalence of the infanticide practice (p. 93). Included in Palatre's work are sixty-six translated Chinese documents. Calling it “the most thorough foreign study of female infanticide in China up to the time (1878)” (p. 13), Mungello draws heavily from this valuable source for his analysis, but readers need to be reminded that Palatre's project was propelled by a special intent. A critical assessment of its nature would help sharpen the analytical edge of the book.

As a work aiming to present a human story of the history of infanticide in China, its limited use of sources in Chinese naturally constrains the scope, depth, and type of questions it is able to address in order to give a systematic and complex account. Morality literature and missionary records can take us only so far in getting to the “human” aspect of the practice. Its provocative views are likely to invite further debate and discussion. Mungello argues that Confucianism “gave some degree of philosophical and moral justification to female infanticide” because it “honor[s] age over youth and males over female” (p. 128). But honoring age over youth and male over female can hardly be seen as giving “justification” to the killing of an infant girl (and in some regions, infanticide targeted baby boys, too). The efforts by the Confucian elite and government to combat the problem also testify to the contrary. The intriguing observation that Mungello raises concerning a so-called ancient practice of “not lift[ing] up” (i.e., not raising a child) and the idea that in ancient China, a child's “existence was not officially recognized until the third day after birth” (p. 5) beg more evidence. The book would also benefit from more broad engagement with recent scholarship on women and the history of childhood in China, which has largely invalidated the assertion that a married woman in imperial times was “cut off from her natal family” (p. 11) and has demonstrated that little girls were profoundly cherished by their parents among the educated whose records are available.

Nevertheless, given the sensitivity of the subject and the relative scarcity of research, in particular in English, Mungello has greatly enriched our knowledge of this topic. Readers will find in it abundantly useful information. Its publication will no doubt pave the way for more inquiries into an important yet difficult topic that has to this date deterred many other historians.