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