Diplomacy as Health Infrastructure: International Cooperation in Family Planning Between Japan and the People’s Republic of China

This paper examines international cooperation in family planning between Japan and the People’s Republic of China in the early 1980s. By taking up a broader understanding of infrastructure, I consider diplomacy itself as an extension of health infrastructure. I argue that diplomacy as a form of health infrastructure acted as a site of transnational networking and of material production, by showing how different forms of diplomacy generated sometimes overlapping, yet other times distinctive, human networks, and how memorandums as an artifact generated through diplomatic negotiations helped (and did not help) to construct material and social conditions for birth control and related health activities in the PRC. Through the case of China-Japan international cooperation, this article will confirm the importance of Cold War diplomacy for the politics of international health in the mid-twentieth century, but will also suggest that we should explore additional intersectional dynamisms, in particular regional and bilateral politics, which pivoted negotiations for international health.