Yan Luo

Recent reports from 2023 and 2024 have brought to light alarming instances of healthcare professionals in China being involved in commercial surrogacy arrangements. These cases reveal the dual roles these professionals play: active facilitation, which includes actions such as selling fraudulent birth certificates that contribute to baby trafficking, and passive involvement, where routine medical care is provided to surrogate mothers without full awareness of the surrogacy context. Current regulations in China broadly prohibit surrogacy-related medical activities but fail to differentiate between healthcare professionals who actively facilitate surrogacy arrangements and those who fulfil their professional obligations to patients. Drawing on professional ethics outlined in the revised 2021 Medical Practitioners Law of the People’s Republic of China and recent developments in modern slavery scholarship that emphasize the critical role of healthcare professionals in identifying and preventing exploitation, this paper argues that China has an opportunity to clarify and broaden the role of healthcare professionals in the context of surrogacy. Healthcare professionals should not be prohibited from providing medical care to surrogate mothers, provided they are not actively facilitating surrogacy arrangements. Simultaneously, they should be empowered to act as gatekeepers against exploitation. This would be an important step toward enhancing the current regulatory framework, ensuring better protections for children and women involved in surrogacy.

Although sarcasm is commonly used worldwide, little is known about the interpretation of sarcasm in intercultural communications. We conducted an experiment investigating the effect of common ground in intercultural communication by manipulating communicators’ cultural background, with high common ground communicators from the same culture and low common ground communicators from different cultures. Specifically, 201 UK participants and 201 Chinese participants read scenarios describing speakers and recipients from the UK or China. The target comment was either literal or sarcastic criticism. Participants rated the critical comment in terms of how sarcastic, aggressive, amusing, and polite they perceived it to be. Results showed that critical comments made between characters who had low common ground (i.e. UK speaker and Chinese recipient, Chinese speaker and UK recipient) were considered as being more aggressive than those with high common ground (i.e. UK speaker and UK recipient, Chinese speaker and Chinese recipient). Sarcastic criticism, specifically, was viewed as being less amusing when characters had low common ground compared to those with high common ground. The findings have implications for theories developed to explain the social functions of sarcasm, specifically, mutual knowledge shared between communicators plays an important role in sarcasm interpretation in intercultural communications.