SUSAN GREENHALGH 173 economic development,ruining the environment,and preventing China from achieving its rightful place in the world. Population increase brings economic and environmental peril Writers seeking to emphasize the perils of the rapid rise in human numbers stressed its historically unprecedented nature.Although the numbers were presented as unquestionable facts,those facts were humanly created through the choice of time period-long or short-and the choice of measure of popu- lation growth-aggregate numbers versus,say,natural growth rates.One vivid graph showed China's population remaining low for 3,750 years,ris- ing worryingly in the next 200 years,and then spiking up to I billion in the final few decades before 2000(Figure 1).The tone of the author's com- mentary on these trends conveyed the alarm readers were supposed to feel. He wrote:"Facing the rapid increase in population,countries everywhere are watching developments with grave concern"(Song 1981:25-26).Had the author instead shown trends in population growth in the 1970s,the alarm would have been more muted;indeed,the tone would have been upbeat.According to figures available at the time,the years 1971-79 saw the crude birth rate and natural growth rate fall by a striking 50 percent (from 30.7 to 17.9 per 1,000 and from 23.4 to 11.7 per 1,000,respectively FIGURE 1 Estimated historical trend of Chinese population, 2000BC-AD1980 1.000 900 800 (suoulu)uopeindod 70 500 400 气 200 70 2000BC 1000 500 AD500 1000 1500 2000 SOURCE:Song.Tuan,and Yu 1985:2
174 SCIENCE,MODERNITY,AND CHINA'S ONE-CHILD POLICY [Tian 1985 [1981]:81]).Although the graph helpfully highlighted the large effects of population momentum on population growth in the near future, the very long time frame used told a more gripping story about the urgency of the problems China faced.In shaping their numbers to tell a particular story,the scientists were simply following the practices of ordinary science. What was out of the ordinary was the story they told,what it obscured, and the authoritarian political context into which they introduced it. Articles on population growth deployed a rhetoric of numbers that em- phasized the size of the population figures.One article carried the title:"[We] erroneously criticized one person;Population mistakenly increased three hundred million"(quoted in Tien 1981:688)."Numbers that could only be educated guesses were represented at two decimal points,a technique that was meant to emphasize their precise,scientific character.What was ironic about these representations was that,at the time they were deployed,nei- ther China's newly minted population specialists nor its leaders had any firm idea of the size or internal characteristics of the population.The last population census had been conducted in 1964 and the results kept secret.12 Yet the precise-looking numbers concealed such problems,presenting the figures as objective and exact.The procedures by which the numbers were produced-their source,any adjustments,and so on-remained obscured. This increase in human numbers was worrying to China's population specialists because of its dire effects on economic growth.Articles published in leading newspapers and magazines at the time showed how the rapid increase in China's population was worsening serious problems of employ- ment,accumulation,livelihood,and education,pushing China's modern- ization into the distant future (e.g.,Tian 1985 [1979];Liu 1980;Liu,Wu, and Lin 1980).One author,after laying out the declines in labor productiv- ity in recent years,described the China of the late 1970s as no better off than the China of the Han dynasty 2,000 years earlier (Tian 1985 [1979]: 13).Although the author mentioned problems in investment,by calling population growth "a direct major cause"of China's economic problems and focusing exclusively on it,he made population stand out as the major cause of China's poverty.Population growth was represented as an all-pur- pose villain,responsible for exacerbating if not creating nearly every prob- lem of development.Poor choices in the area of social and economic policy in the 1950s,1960s,and 1970s remained unmentioned. Not only China's economy,but also its environment was said to be collapsing from the weight of the country's excessive population.Painting scenarios of ecological devastation,scenes that echo those in the Club of Rome work,Song Jian warned: As population increases,forests are chopped down.Now forest coverage is about 30 percent worldwide;in China that figure is only 12 percent....In our