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
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
