China's One Child Policy has rightly drawn worldwide attention. In recent years, there have been some excellent analyses of China's birth planning policies. But Susan Greenhalgh's brilliant Just One Child is different from these; an anthropologist long interested in China's population issues, she focuses on how the policy came about. In particular, she explores the role of science in the making of the policy.

Greenhalgh's analysis is well written, engaging, and detailed. She focuses on the late 1970s and early 1980s, the years when population became an accepted topic of discussion among policy makers, and on the subsequent unveiling and implementation of the policy that changed Chinese social life in fundamental ways. She argues that at that time there were three different strands of thought on how to deal with China's growing population. The members of the “Marxian Statistics” group seemed most likely to shape the policy, given their positions at the first population research center in China, at People's University, but they lost out to a second group of researchers, men whose expertise lay not in population or social sciences but in missile sciences. A third, less central group, the “Marxian humanists,” tried but failed to draw attention to the human suffering that might result from the policy. The bulk of the book is devoted to unearthing this story and making it comprehensible through contextualization. Greenhalgh describes how the role of science, and the privileged position of natural scientists within and after the Maoist regime, made it possible for this group to recast population as an entity that was as controllable as missiles. Using scientific language and images (though there was little demographic data to work with), the scientists successfully argued that China's population was in a crisis, and would derail China's plan to become a powerful, rich, and modern nation; a severe intervention was necessary.

Greenhalgh is well situated to write this work. She draws on expertise developed over two decades of work, first as a researcher at the Population Council, and more generally as someone who has paid careful and constant attention to birth planning and reproduction in China. She utilizes a number of sources, including interviews with people who have been top population specialists in China over the course of the last twenty years, careful analysis of speeches and writings by these and other population policy makers, and a wide-ranging and deep engagement with science and technology studies produced by scholars across disciplines. One of this volume's strengths is the way it uses and tightly weaves these different sources into an exciting and insightful account of what went on in the country. While some may dispute Greenhalgh's interpretation of the outcome, and even some of the processes, she makes a strong and convincing case for her account and her interpretations of its meanings.

This is a story not only of the population policy's origin but also of how science and policy are intertwined in not just China but most societies. This volume will have broad appeal: to China scholars, political scientists, science and technology scholars, and social scientists of many fields. Because Greenhalgh is not only a thorough and convincing researcher, but also an excellent storyteller, this is a book that deserves a wide readership.