Since its implementation in 1979, China's one-child policy has drawn much academic attention and heated political controversy in the international community. Both mainstream Western media and academic publications have focused on the coercive enforcement of the policy and strong resistance against its implementation from the Chinese population. Delivered at the Edwin O. Reischauer lectures at Harvard University, Susan Greenhalgh's insightful account of China's population politics provides new understanding of the complexity of population governance and its recent developments in the world's most populous country. Drawing on governmentality and science and technology studies, she offers a nuanced analysis of the shifts in population governance in China, focusing on the population programme since 2000, which fostered self-governance and self-cultivation of reproductive subjects by the Chinese people themselves. By so doing, Greenhalgh argues, China's new politics of population has been critical to its rise on the global stage.
In the first chapter, “From population to human governance,” Greenhalgh traces the framing of the problem of population in China, focusing on two critical time periods, from 1979 to 1980 and between 2007 and 2008. During the early reform era, excessive population growth was considered a hindrance to economic development by the Chinese state and therefore the aim of population governance was to limit the quantity of people. The early 2000s witnessed a shift to a knowledge-based economy which required strengthening human capital. Population was thus viewed as a social and human problem instead of an economic problem and the goal of population governance was shifted to raising the quality of the population. Greenhalgh continues to examine the rationales behind China's population governance. She discusses how modern science and technology, in particular, the logics of cybernetics and system theory, were applied to understand the problem of population and how this “demographic engineering” (p. 30) became the official model in China's population governance.
In the second chapter, “Creating global persons and a global society,” Greenhalgh offers a new perspective on understanding the enforcement of the population programme. She argues that the state–society tension over the control of reproduction occurred in certain times and places of policy enforcement. Population governance in China involved the creation of individual subjects to facilitate China's global rise. She further discusses several modes of individual subject creation between 1980 and around 2008. During the 1980s when the primary goal of the population programme was to control the quantity of population, in rural areas the policy was enforced mainly through mobilization campaigns, and when these failed, physical coercion. In the cities, policy enforcement was characterized by Maoist “voluntarism” which created “revolutionary-socialist subjects” (p. 41). In the 1990s and the early 2000s, the focus of the population programme was shifted to “human-centered” governance which fostered self-governance of reproduction to create “market-socialist subjects” (p. 41). Furthermore, since the mid-1990s, new self-interested and self-governing reproductive subjects were created, such as the “quality child” and the “good mother” (p. 58). Greenhalgh argues that the making of these new reproductive subjects was through the intensification of globalization and the power of wealth. She concludes by pointing out how the state promotion of reproductive subject creation has resulted in the exclusion of certain categories of “backward” people and the social crises of an imbalanced sex ratio and an ageing population.
The last chapter, “Strengthening China's Party-state and place in the world,” explores how population governance has built up state power and has influenced China's rising world position over the last three decades. In particular, through its population programme, the state has expanded its power by the creation of a network of governmental agencies and organizations, the formation of socialist legality to guide population governance, and improvement of the capacity to govern. Furthermore, Greenhalgh examines the expansion of state power on population governance through party slogans, increasing categories of policy enforcement, and the claim of party legitimacy in solving population problems. While criticizing the scientific framework behind the population program, Greenhalgh reveals an increasing role played by social scientists in shaping China's population policy. She further discusses how the control of population has boosted “comprehensive national power” (p. 108) in China.
In sum, Greenhalgh's Population in the Rise of China sheds new light on the study of China's population politics by examining the most recent shifts in population governance. Like her previous scholarship on China's population politics, this is another highly engaging and insightful study. Scholars who are interested in the new directions of population governance in China three decades after the initiation of the programme will find the book truly informative and thought-provoking.
