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