Michelle Tien King (2014). Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China.

It seems obvious and trite to discuss female infanticide in China. Female infanticide has long been regarded as a product of backward cultural practices and gender inequities under an authoritarian, patriarchal regime bent on enacting and enforcing a “birth” sub-regime. Along with footbinding, female infanticide becomes a marker of traditional China’s decadent culture and regressive past. This perception of China is reinforced by first a single-child policy and then a prevalent desire to have even smaller, nuclear families in an increasingly affluent society, which have “amplified the effects of a long-standing societal preference for sons, derived from a traditional Confucian value system that still lingers in present form” (p.2).

Sealed with a Doubt

In EC–Seal Products, the WTO Appellate Body (AB) issued a(nother) controversial report. This paper argues that the analysis followed by the AB is wrong. To prove this point, we ask two questions. Would the AB have concluded the same way if it had constructed the EU measure as two separate measures and not one? Did the AB adequately control for the regulatory intent of the EU, indeed the quintessential element for deciding whether the EU was indeed pursuing a societal preference of no commercial character? We responded in the negative to both questions.