Science,Modernity,and the Making of China's One-Child Policy SUSAN GREENHALGH CHINA'S ONE-CHILD-PER-COUPLE POLICY represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth,power,and global standing by drastically braking population growth.Since its introduction in 1979-80,officials claim,the policy has averted over 300 million births,with profound effects on virtu- ally every aspect of Chinese life.!Outside China the policy has attracted acute attention from a world surprised by the fall in fertility to subreplace- ment levels and troubled by the human costs incurred in the process.2 Yet despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might,its ori- gins remain shrouded in mystery.3 Where did the idea come from of re- stricting all the couples in a country of I billion to one child?What made such a radical idea thinkable?Such questions have rarely been posed,let alone satisfactorily answered. In the absence of scholarly research on these matters,in the United States public discourse about the policy has been shaped by larger strands in American political discourse,in particular anticommunism and the right- to-life position in the abortion debate.Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, powerful media images of coerced abortions,family planning jails,orphan- age dying rooms,and much more gave fresh life to Cold War notions of China as "totalitarian Other,"the foil to the "democratic West."In America China is all too often seen through binaristic East-West lenses that make it different from,and always less than,the United States (poor not rich,back- ward not modern,unfree not free,superstitious not scientific)(e.g.,Zhang 1998).These Othering practices,while worrying in themselves,are also prob- lematic because they have a broad range of political,cultural,and intellec- tual effects that generally go unnoticed.The pervasive discourse on China as intellectually backward and politically repressive,for example,has con- tributed to a view of the one-child policy as a product of China's(restric- tive)politics,not its (weak)science. POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 29(2):163-196 (JUNE 2003) 163
164 SCIENCE,MODERNITY,AND CHINA'S ONE-CHILD POLICY In China itself,however,the one-child policy is not about a strong state or its coercive practices(although the use of coercion has been hotly debated).It is about the nation's dreams for achieving wealth,modernity, and global power through selective absorption of Western science and tech- nology.Scholarship on the making of modern society highlights the con- nections between population,science,and prosperity,posing fresh ques- tions about the scientific origins of modern projects of population governance.In his seminal essay on Western modernity,History of Sexuality, the French philosopher and social critic Michel Foucault drew attention to the role of population science in constructing population as an object of scientific discourse and in working with institutionalized political power to govern population so as to enhance human welfare,order,and utility,es- pecially for the developing capitalist economy (Foucault 1978:91-108).So- cial studies of science and technology have shown that science is humanly constructed in historically contingent contexts(Latour and Woolgar 1979; Latour 1987:Lynch and Woolgar 1990;Pickering 1992,1995).This work emphasizes the human values and biases that shape the practices labeled "science";the active role of scientists in creating their formulations and ad- vancing them through the use of rhetorical devices;and the role of the larger historical and political context in shaping the science that gets made (Latour and Woolgar 1979;Lynch and Woolgar 1990).Work on governmentality- the combination of governing and political rationality-has shed light on the crucial role of governmental rationalities such as problematizations in the formulating of governmental policies and programs (Foucault 1991; Burchell,Gordon,and Miller 1991;Rose 1999;Dean 1999;Rabinow 2002). This work suggests that problematizations-that is,particular formulations of the population problem at hand,together with its solution-do not sim- ply reflect a preexisting reality.Instead,they actively constitute a new de- mographic and policy reality by shaping what is thinkable in the domain of population.4 These bodies of research allow us to ask new questions about the Chinese case.What was the role of Chinese population science in the making of the one-child policy?Where did the particular problems and so- lutions adopted come from?How and how much did the values of the sci- entists and the specificities of the historical context shape the science and policy that got made? In this article and the book in progress on which it draws,I look closely at the role of population science in the making of China's one-child-per- couple policy.5 Drawing on more than 15 years of interviews with Chinese population specialists and policymakers,documentary research on the his- tory of Chinese population science and policy,and ethnographic insights gathered over many years of working with Chinese specialists as research collaborator,coauthor,co-panelist,and so forth,I wed the ethnographic approach of anthropology to the deconstructive approaches of work in sci-
SUSAN GREENHALGH 165 ence and governmentality studies to see how the scientific,and especially numerical,construction of population by population scientists became a new mode of governing population size and growth,and a constitutive feature of Chinese modernity.The project focuses on the years 1978-83.It was then,just after the historic third plenum of the party's Eleventh Central Committee shifted the nation's focus to socialist modernization,that popu- lation became a crucial object of Chinese science and a sustained object of Chinese governance.In those six years,population science was reborn,the one-child policy was created,and that policy was strictly enforced in a mas- sive sterilization campaign whose unanticipated political and bodily effects were so harmful to China's rural people and so intolerable to China's lead- ers that the policy and its enforcement were significantly revamped (Greenhalgh 1986).In this article,I delve into one critical slice of this larger story:the scientific construction of China's population problem and its op- timal policy solution. Some parts of this story have been told by H.Yuan Tien,especially in his blow-by-blow account of the development of population science and policymaking in China's Strategic Demographic Initiative (Tien 1991;also 1981). Tien's work includes many details of the policymaking process during the late 1970s and some speculative insights about the underlying dynamics. With a much longer period of interviewing and a deeper level of involve- ment with Chinese specialists,I am able to fill out the story with informa- tion not available to Tien.More importantly,by writing here from a dual position-as(distanced)participant in the scientific process hoping to shape its thinking,and as observer of Chinese demography reflexively charting its evolution-I present a very different perspective on the nature of popula- tion science and the relationship between science and politics.Tien's ap- proach is the conventional one that sees a sharp divide between science and politics,and views science and numbers as conveyers of "the truth." (He writes,for example,that the "vicissitudes of politics...cannot alter the precepts of knowledge"and that "the demographic education of China's political leaders...was a long-drawn[-out]affair"[Tien 1981:696;1991:851.) Following work in science studies,I maintain that because science is hu- manly made and because population science is closely connected to popu- lation policymaking,Chinese population science-like all population sci- ences-is not detached from,but linked to and in varying degrees shaped by politics.A sharp distinction between the two domains is hard to sustain. I also contend that the numbers of science tell a truth,but it is only one truth.That is because the numbers are created by particular human beings working in specific historical contexts,and both the people and the context leave their imprints on the science that gets made. I will argue that at the heart of China's post-1979 population policy lie two powerful notions:that China faced a population crisis that was sabotag-
166 SCIENCE,MODERNITY,AND CHINA'S ONE-CHILD POLICY ing the nation's modernization,and that the one-child policy was the only solution to it.In China for most of the past 20-plus years,these ideas have had the status of self-evident truth.5 I question those apparent truths by looking at how they were constructed.I show that these ideas about China's popula- tion problem and its ideal solution were actively fabricated by Chinese popu- lation scientists,using numbers,numerical pictures(such as tables and graphs) and numerical techniques(such as projections)to tell a particular story about China.In contrast to the coercion account,which points the finger at "com- munist coercion,"this close look at the actual making of the policy reveals instead that practically all the key ideas on which China's one-child policy was based were borrowed from the West,and from Western science at that.? The borrowers were a handful of natural scientists who defeated the social scientists in a major struggle for policy influence.The natural scientists'ideas got built into official policy,leaving China with a policy that may have re- strained population growth,but did so at great human cost.Those numerical facts about China's population and the rhetorics of science,modernity,and truth in which they came packaged also performed important political work. The numbers masked the sometimes weak scientific procedures and always complicated politics that tied the science to the political center,enclosing ev- erything in a black box that got labeled "science"and then was closed to further inquiry.Even today,interviews with many Chinese scholars suggest, the foundational science that lay behind the one-child policy remains largely unquestioned and unquestionable. Despite the sensitivity of these matters,prying open that black box is a critical and,I believe,constructive project.Doing so will allow us to demystify the science underlying the one-child policy and clear the way for fresh con- sideration of policy alternatives that have lain dormant(at least publicly)for over two decades.Now is a propitious time to undertake this work,for China's population "crisis"has been largely resolved,permitting the gradual emer- gence since the mid-1990s of a new,health-oriented rationale for and ap- proach to population work (Greenhalgh and Winckler 2001;Winckler 2002). Although it is not my aim here to criticize the makers of the one-child policy, this analysis will reveal some highly problematic practices of science-mak- ing.A full evaluation of the science will be presented in the larger project. The rise of population science Because of Mao Zedong's ambivalence about population,both population control and population studies had a checkered history in the Maoist years, 1949-76(Aird 1972;Tien 1973).In the late 1950s population studies was effectively abolished.Over the next 20 years,social scientists of population were actively deskilled,deprived of data to analyze,and cut off from meth- odological and other advances occurring in international population stud-
SUSAN GREENHALGH 167 ies.State birth planning,China's distinctive approach to population con- trol,was interrupted again and again,becoming a political reality nation- wide only in the early 1970s,with the inauguration of the later-longer- fewer(wanxishao)policy promoting later childbirth,longer spacing,and fewer children (Chen and Kols 1982). With the death of Mao and the rise of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, the planned control of population growth became a critical component of China's socialist modernization.Population experts were needed to help the party define and then reach its goals.In the late 1970s and early 1980s, China was home to one of the most rapid institutionalizations of a field of population studies in history (for parts of that story see Tien 1981,1991; Greenhalgh 1990;Zhang 1984).While this is not the place to tell that fasci- nating story,it is important to note here that China's population specialists had particularly close ties to the Chinese state.Like virtually all intellectu- als in China,the population specialists were located within the institutions of the party-state (in particular,universities,social science academies,and government bureaucracies),and they were expected to devote their ener- gies to serving society by serving the state (Goldman 1981,1994).Thus, the mission the new field was assigned was not to build population science for science's sake.It was to develop population science to assist the state in solving the country's population problems,a solution that,in turn,would accelerate the achievement of the four modernizations-in industry,agri- culture,national defense,and science and technology (Chen 1981).Because population control was essential to the achievement of urgent economic goals for the year 2000-per capita income levels of US$800 to $1,000- the political stakes attached to finding a way to slow and then stop popula- tion growth were extraordinarily high. Population scientists,natural and social In the early and mid-1970s,state birth planning had belonged to the realms of party politics (Mao's specialty)and state economic planning(Zhou Enlai's contribution).Population discourse was not about population size,natural growth rates,or trends in the total fertility rate.Indeed,such terms were hardly to be found in the two main types of population texts produced at the national level during 1970-77,official policy statements and popular propaganda materials.Instead,population discourse centered either on the need to plan population in a planned socioeconomy (in staid official texts) or on the Cultural Revolutionary battles against the reactionary fallacies of Lin Biao and Confucius and the crimes against birth planning committed by the Gang of Four(in the more lively popular materials). The overarching contribution of the newly empowered population spe- cialists as a group was to bring population and its control within the realm