In Cultivating Global Citizens, Greenhalgh presents a timely and comprehensive overview of the relationship between China's population policies and the rise of China as a world power, picking up where her previous books (Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, and Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics, written with Edwin A. Winckler, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) left off. Cultivating Global Citizens explains how, by 2009, Chinese population policies had been transformed by (and helped shape) China's growing economic power and complexity and the increasingly global outlooks of Chinese leaders, bureaucrats, and citizens. Drawing on scholarship in English and Chinese and primary sources from the governments and media of China, the United States, and other countries, Greenhalgh argues that China's population policies have shifted from a focus on internationally denounced, coercive campaigns driven by fears of an overpopulation crisis to a focus on the cultivation of self-disciplined global citizens who voluntarily limit their fertility while developing in themselves and their children the kind of cultural, economic, educational, and physical “high quality” that will enable them to improve their (and China's) standing on the world stage, not only in economic and political terms, but also in terms of cultural influence and prestige. Greenhalgh's book presents a much-needed corrective to dominant English-language narratives about the rise of China that have focused on economic and political issues while treating population policies as a side issue framed by an outdated focus on state coercion.
This book consists of a preface and three essays based on the Edwin O. Reischauer lectures Greenhalgh presented at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies in 2008.
The first essay, “From Population to Human Governance,” looks at how Chinese discourses about population have shifted to a focus on human development that is guided by “a unique assemblage of logics that mixes elements of Confucianism, Leninism, Maoism, and social Darwinism, among others,” as well as by “the reasoning of modern science,” especially “the logics of cybernetics and systems theory, and their practical application, systems engineering” (p. 29). Embedded in these logics are assumptions about overpopulation as a potentially catastrophic threat to China's ability to become a global power. These assumptions have made Chinese leaders reluctant to make big changes to its population policies.
The second essay, “Creating Global Persons and a Global Society,” addresses how Chinese population policies have produced discourses promoting the singleton child with high-quality health, education, and consumption, and the “Good Mother” who sacrifices to invest in that child. At the same time, these policies also produce discourses that marginalize those who are considered “low quality” and backward, such as poor rural residents and migrants and their extra children, who are born without state permission and denied state support. Despite Chinese state efforts to focus on how its population policies can lead to the production and reproduction of “high-quality” citizens, it has also been compelled to acknowledge a concomitant rise in inequalities, a rapidly aging population, and an increasingly skewed gender ratio, all of which could threaten the very modernization and stability that Chinese population policies were intended to promote.
The final chapter, “Strengthening China's Party-State and Place in the World,” looks at how population policies have strengthened the discursive and operational capacity, power, and reach of the Chinese state, how that state reacted with surprised dismay at international condemnation of its coercive population policies, and how that state is now trying to improve its image on the world stage by emphasizing its focus on human development goals. In contrast to earlier decades, when engineers and physical scientists had the greatest influence over population policies, social scientists—particularly those with expertise in economics and management—are becoming increasingly influential, and their attention to social, cultural, and economic factors are tempering the more draconian aspects of Chinese population policies. Chinese leaders increasingly want to increase China's “soft power” and “comprehensive national power” by presenting China as an ethical, responsible country with good human capital, the quality of which has been improved by its population policies. Greenhalgh suggests that abandoning the one-child policy itself could be the next logical step toward the expansion of China's soft power.
Cultivating Global Citizens presents innovative new ways to think about China's population policies, relating them to discourses, science, subjectivities, bodies, and processes of globalization. It presents bold, clearly articulated, and well-supported explanations of how and why Chinese discourses of population governance came to be what they are today, while making a convincing argument for paying greater attention to the ways in which Chinese population policies are intimately related to the rise of China on the world stage. This book will be valuable for anyone interested in understanding the big picture of contemporary population governance, in China and elsewhere.
