168 SCIENCE,MODERNITY,AND CHINA'S ONE-CHILD POLICY of science.Redefining population as a domain of science was to entail con- stituting population as a new,numerically describable,scientifically law-abid- ing domain of governance;and then using science to define the nature and importance of the population problem and determine the optimal solution to that problem.The fledgling field of population studies was internally di- verse,however,made up of competing groups with varying intellectual back- grounds,institutional locations,and views about what should be done-and at what social cost.As the population question began to command the at- tention of a broad spectrum of the top leadership,various small groupings of specialists began to maneuver to bring their policy ideas to the attention of the country's decisionmakers.Along with the top leadership,these experts became the key makers of China's population policy,playing behind-the- scenes roles that have been only partially illuminated (in particular,in Tien 1991).The group that could provide the most compelling definition of the population problem and its optimal solution would gain extraordinary power over population thought and practice in the reform era. In the mid-1970s (1974-78)the emerging field of Chinese population studies was a social science.Population was viewed as part of society-in particular,of the economy.The most prominent group of specialists was a handful of scholars who had been recruited in 1973 to create the official ideo- logical rationale for the nationwide birth planning program in preparation for China's participation in the 1974 International Conference at Bucharest (IF,11/13/85,BJ).Moving to the People's University of China in mid-1978, Liu Zheng and his colleagues Wu Cangping,Lin Fude,and Zha Ruichuan widely popularized the Marxian-theoretic rationale for birth planning (Liu et al.1977,parts of which are translated in Tien 1980).Although largely trained in statistics,these scholars were preoccupied with formulating China's popu- lation issues in terms of the dominant Marxian theory of the "twofold char- acter of production,"that is,the production of material goods and of human beings.As part of this project,they were concerned with developing a Marx- ian formulation of China's population problems as an imbalance between economic and demographic growth,and with fashioning a reasonable policy that took account of its social costs and consequences.When the domain of population was officially removed from the list of "forbidden zones"in 1979 (Chen 1979),scholars from many backgrounds-social science (especially eco- nomics),statistics,genetics,history,medicine,public health,and more-and located at universities and party schools around the country formed an intel- lectually diverse and growing group of specialists interested in the popula- tion question.After 20 years of intellectual isolation and deskilling,however, these more socially oriented scholars entered the contest to shape China's population policy with a serious handicap. Meantime,behind the scenes,a group of three politically well-placed natural scientists and systems engineers,all interested in control theory
SUSAN GREENHALGH 169 got together in 1978 and began to apply their skills to the population ques- tion,one that,they told me,interested them personally (IF,11/16/99,BJ). The leader was Song Jian,control theorist at the Ministry of Aerospace In- dustry (then called the Seventh Ministry of Machine Building [for missile and space development]),with a long and luminous career in missile sci- ence.He was joined by Yu Jingyuan,a colleague,and Li Guangyuan,of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.Yu and Li were systems control engineers trained in cybernetics.The natural scientists,however,had limited under- standing of population dynamics.In the fall of 1979 they recruited Tian Xueyuan,a Marxian economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, to work with them (IF,11/16/99,BJ).In the Maoist era,defense scientists such as Song and Yu had been part of a privileged and protected elite,ac- tively supported when most intellectuals were persecuted (Feigenbaum 2003).As a result,this group entered the Deng era with crucial resources denied to the social scientists:access to Western science,data,computers, prestige,and political connections.It was this group of three natural scien- tists interested in control theory,and one economist,all located close to the centers of power,that gained the dominant position. The scientific revolution at Chengdu The scientific revolution in Chinese population studies occurred on or around 13 December 1979.That was the closing date of the Second National Sym- posium on Population,which was held in Chengdu.The symposium was attended not only by the usual cast of social scientists,but also by members of the Song group,who used mathematical models and newly available com- puter technology to forecast the future growth of the Chinese population (Song and Li 1980).Their work turned heads.Both scholars and,more im- portantly,government officials in charge of population policy emerged from the conference enamored of the natural scientists'contribution(Zha 1980; Wang and Yang 1980). But what was meant by population science?In the Chinese political context,where the "correct"policy could only be determined by political leaders,science certainly could not mean the systematic testing of hypoth- eses and rejection of ones that lacked empirical support.Both published discussions from the Chengdu meeting and interviews I conducted a few years later make clear that science meant quantification and mathematical manipulation of numbers,especially using what were seen as advanced ana- lytic techniques from abroad (IF,11/13/85,BJ;IF,12/3/85,SH;IF,12/3/ 86,XA).The systems engineer Wang Huanchen put the point forcefully,ar- guing that Chinese social science,"because it lacks quantitative things" (dingliang de dongxi),was not up to the task required of the population field, but that quantitative research,especially along the lines of population sys-
170 SCIENCE,MODERNITY,AND CHINA'S ONE-CHILD POLICY tems engineering,could provide the answers to China's critical problems of population policy (Editorial Board 1980:2). Innocuous and even progressive though it must have seemed in 1979, the intervention of the natural scientists in the conversations about popu- lation produced revolutionary effects.In a short time,a Marxian theoreti- cal field belonging to the social sciences had been reinvented as a scien- tific-that is quantitative-discipline.The mathematical science of population that was to revolutionize China's population thought and practice was an unusual amalgam of cybernetics,control theory,systems engineering,and Club of Rome-style limits-to-growth thinking that had been popular among some Western academics and a sizable chunk of the general public in the West in the early to mid-1970s (especially Meadows et al.1974;Mesarovic and Pestel 1974;on the work's public appeal,Wilmoth and Ball 1992).The group's leader,Song Jian,got the idea for this project on a delegation visit to Europe in 1978.Song's description of his encounters with some work inspired by the Club of Rome brings out the excitement his discovery pro- duced.This passage also provides a backward glimpse at the larger intellec- tual climate of the 1970s,when notions of explosions of population growth were prevalent around the world and applications of control theory to ab- stract economies facing such situations were standard fare in Western popu- lation economics:3 After more than ten years'isolation from the outside world,during a visit to Europe in 1978,I happened to learn about the application of systems analy- sis theory by European scientists to the study of population problems with a great success.For instance,in a "Blueprint for Survival"published in 1972, British scientists contended that Britain's population of 56 million had greatly exceeded the sustaining capacity of ecosystem of the Kingdom.They argued Britain's population should be gradually reduced to 30 million,namely,a reduction by nearly 50 percent....I was extremely excited about these docu- ments and determined to try the method of demography.(Song 1986:2-3) Although numerous economic and sociological critiques of the Club of Rome work had appeared in the West by the late 1970s,the critiques were not transported to China (in economics,e.g.,Cole et al.1973; Nordhaus 1973:;an excellent overview is O'Neill 2001;in sociology,sys- tems theory was critically assessed in,inter alia,Lilienfeld 1975;Ludz 1975). Enamored of the mathematics,Song did not bring those more sociological and economic critiques back with him from Europe.Only the crisis men- tality and the top-down,engineering-type control solutions to the crisis made their way to China.That shift from social to natural science as the dominant voice was important,for the mathematicians'equations treated people like numbers to be manipulated from a center of control.In their
SUSAN GREENHALGH 171 work,population was construed as a biological entity belonging to nature (see especially Song 1999 [1980]).Social and cultural factors were explic- itly excluded from their calculations. In the research community,the scientization of population studies would create deep rivalries and antagonisms.Specialists with mathematical skills gained visibility,voice,and influence over population policy.Mean- while,as interviews conducted in the mid-1980s suggest,social scientists in general,and those preferring qualitative methods and offering humanistic insights in particular,found themselves struggling with diminishing success for public voice and policy clout (e.g.,IF,11/18/85,BJ;IF,10/12/87,TY). Science and national salvation The intense appeal of "science"in China in the late 1970s makes sense when one understands the deep yearnings associated with that term in modern Chinese history.Throughout the twentieth century,and especially during the May Fourth period around 1919,"science"or,more accurately, scientism-the idea of science as a totalistic body of thought,the prime source of truth,and an all-powerful solution to China's problems-figured promi- nently in Chinese dreams of modernity,wealth,and power (Kwok 1965; Hua 1995).(Indeed,one of the appeals of Marxism-Leninism lay in its scientistic nature,its claim to be a comprehensive body of thought uniting the human and natural worlds [Miller 1996:51.)In the post-Mao era,mod- ern science and technology have been seen as antidotes to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution,as progressive forces,and as all-powerful cures to China's ills (Hua 1995;Miller 1996).The top leadership actively fostered this science worship-for worship it was.The Deng regime named science and technology the first of China's four modernizations,the key to the achievement of national wealth,power,and glory.In its policy of opening up to the outside world,the regime called on the nation to actively learn from the technologically advanced West.China would rely on Western sci- ence and technology to reach its ambitious national goals for the year 2000 and,ultimately,to catch up with the West itself(Miller 1996).China's leaders and urban elite were not the only ones believing in the religion of science. For the general public too,Western science and technology seemed to prom- ise a quick fix that would bring China prosperity,modernity,and that long- awaited place in the world of nations (e.g.,Suttmeier 1980,1989;Simon and Goldman 1989;Li and White 1991). Given these larger associations of science with progress,truth,and mo- dernity,the embrace of highly quantitative scientific work by population specialists and policymakers alike becomes comprehensible.Yet it was risky. Despite caveats to absorb Western science and technology critically,the at- titude toward foreign techniques was closer to idolatry,with everything for-
172 SCIENCE,MODERNITY,AND CHINA'S ONE-CHILD POLICY eign seen as superior to everything Chinese (e.g.,IF,12/2/85,SH).This was to prove consequential,as we shall see shortly. A virtual crisis is born Despite the often rapid growth of its population,China throughout the 1950s, 1960s,and 1970s officially had no population crisis.As late as mid-1978, Hua Guofeng,Mao's short-lived successor,justified the harsh restrictions on reproduction then in place in terms of the necessity of planning in a socialist society and the benefits to national development and maternal and child health(Hua 1985 [1978]).Using concepts associated with the planned economy,China's social scientists had framed the population problem as one of disproportion between economic and demographic development.By mid-1979,however,around the time the natural scientists joined the de- bate,China suddenly faced a virtual population crisis,one that was ruining the country's chance of achieving the four modernizations by century's end. That crisis could only be virtual because China's official stance,articulated forcefully at Bucharest,was that population explosions were Malthusian concoctions imposed on the third world by the superpowers(Huang 1974). Marxist China could have no population crisis.China's population special- ists seeking to emphasize the perils of population were thus constrained to avoid explicit crisis language,creating instead a virtual crisis--a picture of economic and ecological devastation that was catastrophic in all but name.? The virtual crisis they created bore notable resemblances to the catastrophe constructions of the Club of Rome work,both substantively and rhetori- cally.China's crisis was created out of numbers,the most compelling of which came arranged in tables and graphs.10 With the term scientific inscription-a visual display in a scientific text- the science studies scholar Bruno Latour has drawn attention to the work performed by such mundane tools of the scientist as tables,figures,and charts (Latour 1987:64-70;also Latour and Woolgar 1979;Lynch and Woolgar 1990).Unremarkable though they appear,such pictorial repre- sentations can have powerful intellectual and political effects.In China in the late 1970s,new tabular and graphic pictures of China's population size and growth,and of their impact on economic growth,created a powerful narrative of virtual population crisis that constituted both a new regime of truth about the nature and urgency of the population problem and a scien- tific rationale for the forceful control of population growth.Put another way,these scientific pictures did not simply reflect a preexisting reality;in- stead,they actively constituted a new reality. The textual and pictorial representations that began to come out around 1979 seemed to show two things:that China's population was growing ex- ceedingly rapidly;and that the increase in human numbers was sabotaging