Population Governance in the Prc: Political, Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

Since the one-child policy was introduced by the Chinese state almost thirty years ago, it has commonly been seen by Western observers as a disturbing paradox. Just as China was “freeing up” in other ways, following the death of Mao Zedong and the demise of the Gang of Four, it embarked on the most “draconian birth control campaign in history”—a state-led attempt at social engineering as intrusive into peoples’ private lives as anything the Maoist years had witnessed. Yet, until the last few years, the existence of this paradox and its social and political implications have rarely been explained, explored or questioned. Western discourse on the one-child policy has been dominated by sensationalist journalistic reports of its horrors on the one hand, and dry, quantitative studies of its demographic impact on the other. Save for the demographers, few social scientists have made China’s population program their main domain of research.