As Susan Greenhalgh notes, in early 1978, the prevailing approach to population policy in the People's Republic of China was to encourage couples to stop at two children and to space their births. By early 1980, however, a draconian one-child policy had been adopted. Indeed, in 1983, the Chinese countryside endured an onslaught of forced abortions and sterilizations. Disturbed by the dramatic policy shift, Greenhalgh asks the following questions: Why was the one-child policy even thinkable? How did it become accepted as the only choice?
Twenty years of meticulous searching for answers led Greenhalgh to the corridors of China's political elite, to scientific research institutes, and to archives in provincial party schools. Drawing on literature from anthropology, political science, policy studies, and science and technology, Greenhalgh assembled a set of transdisciplinary analytical tools to help her tease out compelling answers from her rich data. Anthropology directed her attention to the views and behaviors of key actors operating in a historically contingent cultural environment. Political science illuminated the internal workings of the party-state apparatus. Policy studies cast light on the institutional aspects of policy formulation, as well as how knowledge is appropriated in policy debate and design. Science and technology studies showed that knowledge, and components such as statistics, ocular displays and citations, are humanly devised. Together, these disciplines guided her analysis toward actors, institutions, and knowledge. A governmentality approach cut across all these concepts in that actors positioned inside and outside the party-state apparatus used organizational techniques and knowledge to shape human conduct according to specific norms and in the pursuit of particular ends.
Greenhalgh reveals that the formal adoption of the one-child policy represented the political and epistemic victory of a group of missile scientists headed by a policy entrepreneur named Song Jian. These scientists responded to party calls for help in providing an evidence base to guide its thinking on population. In modeling projections, the Song group was inspired not only by cybernetics but also by Club of Rome demographers, who had calculated necessary reductions to the Dutch and U.K. populations in order to achieve optimal population size. Yet in assuming that population is organic rather than cultural, in ignoring data limitations and the effects of technological and social changes on future population trends, and in translating Western academic musings into recommendations for action, Song and his collaborators were blind to the shortcomings of their research and to the dangers inherent in its application.
Greenhalgh demonstrates that the Song group's ability to secure policy influence was specific to the time and place. During the late 1970s, military science was one of the few academic domains that had remained intact after a decade of political attacks on intellectual endeavor. Further, as the Song group had worked in a field central to national security, its population research became subsumed within this rubric. The group's claim to objectivity was attractive to party leaders who, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, attributed that period's excesses to ideological biases. The group's computer-generated and generally inaccessible mathematical models enhanced the impression of objectivity, while their graphical representations of future demographic scenarios were powerful in alarming key policy makers. Once policy makers had accepted unequivocally that a population crisis was imminent, they accepted, too, that one child for all was the only choice in a situation of no choices.
The ascendancy of cybernetic demography involved sidelining Marxist population studies. Marxist statisticians had incorporated population into the mix of variables that needed to be considered when devising national plans: they paid particular attention to the implications of fertility limitation for imbalances in the future age structure of society. Marxist humanists were concerned about the implications of fertility limitation for the peasantry. As many of these scholars had lived for years in the countryside, they were aware of rural people's need for a son to ensure family integrity and long-term livelihood security. The humanists also favored Mao's bottom-up mass-line approach to policy formulation, which entailed continuously using people's views to revise policy in the process of implementation, so that policy would reflect its social context.
By late 1979, the voices of Marxist statisticians and Marxist humanists had disappeared from the policy arena. The association of their ideas with both the Mao era and the social sciences made them appear out of date compared to the Song group's modern alternative. Furthermore, the Marxist humanists faced the compounding disadvantages of using simple math—often handwritten—and of being based in provincial schools away from the policy elite.
Greenhalgh argues convincingly that if other institutional and epistemic conditions had prevailed during the late 1970s, the Marxist alternatives could well have triumphed and immense suffering could have been avoided. Her findings are sobering when one considers that many of China's current leaders are engineers. Her findings also have relevance beyond China: throughout the world, scientific knowledge and politics coproduce each other, creating an ethical imperative for scholars to interrogate the politicization of science and the scientization of politics across a range of policy domains, including health, child-rearing, pharmaceuticals, energy, and the environment. This engaging and highly original book is recommended for readers interested in China, and in population, policy making, and science more generally.
