Between Birth and Death is a critical history of female infanticide in nineteenth-century China, when it was transformed from a moral issue affecting local communities into an emblematic cultural marker of a backwards Chinese civilization.

Michelle T. King is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"This elegantly written, strikingly illustrated book analyzes foreign and domestic perceptions of infanticide in China, with a focus on the years between the First Opium War and the Nanjing Decade. The chapters spiral outward from that intimate moment between birth and death . . . In my reading, their interviews, birth histories, and collations of Chinese sources remain among the best evidence on the frequency and patterns of infanticide in nineteenth-century China; I am grateful to King for restoring these remarkable studies to us."