Just one child: science and policy in Deng's China [1 ed.] 9780520253391, 9780520941267, 9780520253384

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Just One Child

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Just One Child Science and Policy in Deng’s China

Susan Greenhalgh

LA UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley - Los Angeles + London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press , Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

© 2008 by The Regents of the University of California Figures 3 and 5 redrawn with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenhalgh, Susan. Just one child : science and policy in Deng’s China / Susan Greenhalgh.

Pp. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-5§ 20-25 338-4 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-520-25339-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Birth control—China—History—20th century. 2. China—Population policy. 3. Women—Social conditions—20th century. I. Title. HQ766.5.C6G74 2008

363.9'60951—dc22 2.00703 8377

Manufactured in the United States of America

17 16 1§ I4 13 12 II 10 09 08

Io 9 8 7 6 § 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 50, a 100% recycled fiber of which 50% is de-inked post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free. EcoBook 50 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/ASTM

D5634-01 (Permanence of Paper).

To the memory of Cai Wenmet and Wang Wen

whose protests were not in vain

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Contents

Preface xi Acknowledgments XIX List of Illustrations ix

and Policymaking I

1. Introduction: An Anthropology of Science Making

2. History: The “Ideology” Before the “Science” #5 MAKING POPULATION SCIENCE

3. A Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 81

4. A Sinified Cybernetics of Population 125 5. A Chinese Marxian Humanism of Population 169 MAKING POPULATION POLICY

6. The Scientific Revolution in Chengdu 193

7. Ally Recruitment in Beijing ie} 8. Scientific Policymaking in Zhongnanhai 271

Notes 345 List of Interviews 361 References 371 Index 395

9. Conclusion: Why an Epistemic Approach Matters 307

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Illustrations

FIGURES

1. Population sizes, China and six other countries II2 2. Rate of natural increase of population, 1950-1980 114 3. Estimated historical trend of Chinese population, ,

2000 B.C.-A.D. 1980 148.

4. The world model of population, capital, food,

Club of Rome 156

nonrenewable resources, and pollution interrelationships,

5. Model of a large population control system 167 6. Number of births (in 10,000s) under differing fertility

assumptions, Hunan Province 209

The master figure 216

7. Future projected trends of population control:

8. World-in-crisis propaganda image 320

no. 1 (1983) 333

9. Cover of Systems Engineering Theory and Practice,

TABLES

1. Key actors in the making of the one-child policy aT

2. Official policymaking institutions 22 1X

x Illustrations 3. The evolution of the one-child policy 32 4. Per capita grain output and national income, comparison of China with the United States, France, and Japan,

1950-1976 119

5. Liang Zhongtang’s text-table on population aging 182 6. Liang Zhongtang’s two-child-plus-spacing proposal 184 7. Three Chinese “sciences” of population: Intellectual basics 186

1980-2080 241

8. Numerical tables for hundred-year population projections,

9. Population publications by the natural scientists, 1980 e532

PHOTOGRAPHS | Following page 190

r. Chen Yun, party elder and top economic planner 2. Deng Xiaoping, paramount leader after Mao 3. Li Xiannian, party elder and leading economic policy maker

4. Chen Muhua, head of the Birth Planning Leading Group 5. Song Jian, aerospace scientist/engineer, chief architect of the strict one-child policy 6. Yu Jingyuan, aerospace scientist/engineer in the Song group

7. Tian Xueyuan, economist in the Song group | 8. Liu Zheng, statistician and head of the Marxian statisticians 9. Wu Cangping, economist in the Liu group 10. Zha Ruichuan, mathematician in the Liu group

t1. Lin Fude, economist in the Liu group 12. Liang Zhongtang, party researcher and leading Marxian humanist

Preface

China’s one-child-per-couple policy was animated by a beautiful dream.

It was a dream of a once powerful but now downtrodden nation, just emerging from the horrors of Maoism, seeking to create a new generation of healthy, wealthy, smart, and savvy young people to lead the nation’s

. rise to global prominence. I can still remember the frisson of delight that swept through me when, back in 1982, on my first trip to China, I encountered on the streets of Zhangzhou a troupe of Chinese children, decked out in colorful outfits, parading around in a circle singing: One child is the very very best; One child is the very very best! Yige haizi zui zui hao; Yige haizi zui zui hao!

For some—primarily city residents—this appealing dream came true, if at great cost to parents. For most Chinese—those living in the tens of thousands of villages that dot China’s vast countryside—it did not. Never did I imagine, as I watched that sweet performance, that I would spend some twenty years of my life bearing witness to the dark underside of that dream. Initially as policy analyst for the New York-based Population Council and later as anthropologist at the University of California, during the 1980s and 1990s I traveled frequently to China to talk with the people who made the policy, carried it out, and endured its restrictions. As a village fieldworker I came to know in a very immediate way how the effort to hold couples to one child tore families and communi-

ties apart. As population specialist I came to see that the policy’s effect . XI

Xl Preface on fertility was uncertain, but its effects on society were only too clear: accelerated aging and a growing gap between the sexes. As time went by, the one-child policy came to inhabit me. I was gripped by one question: Why? Why did China’s leaders adopt a population policy that was

certain to fail in reaching its demographic goals while producing so much harm in the attempt? Where did the one-child policy come from? In the conventional distribution of scholarly labor, the policy question has belonged to political science and the newer interdisciplinary field of policy studies. In an effort to create a true science of politics, historically these fields have sought to understand public policy by constructing ideal madels of the policy process. In these frameworks, that process is represented as an orderly set of procedures that move linearly from agenda setting to policy formulation, implementation, effects, and

evaluation. Although such stage models of the policy process have heuristic value, real-world policymaking rarely if ever conforms to their specifications, as students of policy in these fields now understand well. Far from following a regular sequence, the policy process is characteris-

tically messy and disorderly: policies often skip stages, loop back around to previous stages, or disappear from view before being implemented. Newer institutional approaches escape some of these difficulties but face other problems, especially in capturing human agency and incorporating the role of ideas and ideologies. A recent overview of policy research portrays an intellectually vibrant field with a wealth of approaches, including new postpositivist ones, but lingering dissatisfaction with its ability to resolve certain persistent problems (Peters and Pierre 2006). Those include a state-centrism despite the importance of nonstate actors; the assumption of rationality in the face of haphazard processes and irrational actors; and difficulty assessing the often diffuse effects of policy. My own very superficial reading of the political science

literature has uncovered other assumptions that will probably seem unproblematic to colleagues in political science but perhaps a bit wor-

rying to anthropologists. That literature assumes that policies are formed of elements belonging to “the political system,” when nonpolitical things often go into policymaking. More broadly, it presumes

that generic features of political structure and/or process are more important determinants of policy outcomes than are ad hoc, contingent features of the local context. Are policies in fact generalizable? I am doubtful; to me it seems that the more closely one examines the

social life of particular policies, the farther one gets from a general model of the policy process.

Preface Xl Might anthropology have fresh ways to think about and study public

policy? Nearly thirty-five years ago, Laura Nader issued her famous manifesto urging anthropologists to abandon their preoccupation with the marginal and powerless of the world to study elites and how they exercise power in contemporary society (Nader 1974). In the past few decades, anthropologists have increasingly answered the call. The field has seen an explosion of interest in topics such as bureaucracies, networks, documents, and the elites—economic, cultural, and scientific— that manage the complex processes of globalization (Ong and Collier

2005; Ong 2006; Riles 2001, 2006; Rabinow and Dan-Cohen 2005; and many, many more). To study this new landscape of power, anthropologists have devised novel methods for defining “the field” and for ethnographically exploring the rapidly changing dynamics of a global-

izing world in which the comfortable distinctions of the past (local/global, ethnographer/informant, and so on) have collapsed (e.g., Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Marcus 1998). Despite this expanding inter-

est in modern power and its elite makers, until very recently one domain—the creation of public policy by political and intellectual elites—has escaped the ethnographic gaze. Although applied anthropologists have worked for policy makers, and public-minded anthropologists have promoted their findings to policy makers, historically academic anthropologists have exhibited little interest in the ethnographic study of policymaking. In the last few years, however, a small but growing number of anthro-

pologists has begun to explore the making, working, and effects of public policy as problems of modern governance. A study of public policy,

these scholars have suggested, is crucial to the discipline’s understanding of issues such as the operations of modern power, the localization of

global processes, and the formation of modern subjects (Shore and Wright 1997; Wedel et al. 2005). With its critical theories, ethical concerns, and ethnographic eye for the ad hoc and the contingent, anthropology would seem especially well equipped to develop a new, more politically and ethically engaged approach that aspires not to be a generalizable science, but to illuminate the characteristic complexity, messiness, and specificity of policy processes. The most humanistic of the social sciences, anthropology is also well placed to bring out the human dimensions of public policy that tend to be neglected by political science. Judging from the enthusiastic response to the new Interest Group on the Anthropology of Public Policy formed within the American Anthropological Association in 2004, interest in policy is strong. The anthropology

XIV Preface of policy is incipient, however; what the field can contribute and how is just now being worked out. The small body of work published so far has focused primarily on how policy is carried out and produces its social effects. How policy gets made is a theoretically and methodologically more challenging question. Today anthropologists are keenly aware of the tight link between knowledge and power, expertise and policy. So far, however, the insights of science and technology studies (STS), the field devoted to understanding how expert knowledge is created and politically advanced, have not been applied to the anthropological study of policy. In this book I seek to empirically expand and theoretically enrich the anthropology of policy by examining the making of public policy and by rethinking the field of policy study through the intellectually productive lens of science studies. As the authoritative knowledge in the modern era, science is funda-

mental to modern governance and its policy instruments. This book brings together two powerful fields of thought—governmentality stud-

ies, which explores governance “beyond the state,” and STS, which examines science in social context—to study the making of public policy by political and scientific elites. Although neither field has systematically addressed the question of policy, together they provide a formida-

ble toolkit of concepts for illuminating the critical role of scientific logics, techniques, cultures, and politics in policymaking today. By greatly expanding the domain of the political, these domains of inquiry

allow us to ask important new questions about how the policies that structure our everyday worlds come into being. This book takes readers to the People’s Republic of China, surely one of the world’s politically most fascinating, complicated, dynamic, and significant nations, to explore policymaking in the highly secretive arena of the party and state Center. Despite growing anthropological interest in the state, recent work has focused on processes unfolding along its

peripheries (e.g., Das and Poole 2004; Gupta and Sharma 2006). To study the making of public policy, we need to observe political elites operating at the center of the state apparatus. Despite very real limits on ethnographic access, by creatively tapping into personal networks or

working with international organizations engaged in policy and program work, anthropologists are finding ways to gain entrée to political elites. It was through employment with such an organization that I got to know some key makers of China’s one-child policy. I develop an epistemic, or knowledge-centered, approach to policy-

making that gives analytic pride of place to policy constructs and the _

Preface XV knowledges, discourses, rhetorics, and visual representations with which they are created and contested. In studying the making of those policy constructs, I extend the insights of STS, which are based largely on observation of laboratory science, to the office science of population studies. Because policy constructs are institutionally crafted, and insti-

tutions shape the constructs that are made, the approach gives due weight to institutions, formal and informal, and the individual actors who populate them. Yet it goes beyond conventional interest in what institutions do to examine more contemporary questions of organizational sense making: how institutions think (Douglas 1986), how states see (Scott 1998), and how laws know (Jasanoff 1995). My central concern here is how regimes reason. To guide the analysis of the making of the one-child policy, I introduce a cluster of three interrelated concepts: policy problematization, policy assemblage, and the micropolitics of science making and policymaking. I hope scholars working on other policies in other settings find these notions helpful as well. I also advance arguments about ethnographic method and ethnographic knowledge. The one-child policy is one of the most sensitive policies of the PRC regime. How it was made is a closed and politically dangerous question. I came to learn the answer through a combination of serendipity and dogged persistence fueled by intellectual curiosity and moral outrage. Institutional good fortune also played a role. My research was crucially enabled by my employment as a policy analyst for the Population Council in the early years of the policy’s existence. As I returned to China again and again to pursue various research projects, I gradually innovated a set of methods for accessing Chinese elites and opening closed subjects without endangering informants. What I know was decisively influenced by how I came to know it. Because the how is

an important part of the story, in telling it here I occasionally insert methodological asides on the politics or techniques of fieldwork. Beyond this analytical point, the research methods I improvised on the ground may also hold lessons for ethnographers interested in studying hard-to-access policy elites and dynamics in other settings.

The study of public policy opens windows on many domains of modern life, inspiring fresh questions about the role of policy in moder-

nity’s making. In this book I seek answers to four sets of questions: First, what are the origins and broad effects of the one-child policy? What can we conclude about its likely future? Second, what are the implications of the novel process of “scientific policymaking” that produced the one-child policy for China’s politics writ large? How did that

XVi : Preface new mode of decision making rearrange the relations among state, science, technology, and society? How has this reordering shaped the rise of China and the character of modern China now emerging on the world

stage? Third, this close study of “scientific policymaking” in the PRC also raises some larger questions of interest to students of modernity generally. Among the most provocative are these: What culture is Chinese science? After the political ascent of science and technology, what now counts as Chinese politics? What practices count as problematic policy science in China and why does it matter? What gives population its vital

significance as a field of politics today? Fourth and finally, what is the anthropology of policy? What theoretical, methodological, and ethical resources can anthropology contribute to the understanding of modern policy, governance, and power? Though trained in anthropology and China studies, my work has always been broadly interdisciplinary, engaging with ideas of colleagues in population studies, women’s studies, and, more recently, STS. Perhaps

foolishly, in this book I seek to reach researchers in all these fields, as well as political scientists intrigued by the notion of an anthropology of policy. I would also like to reach natural scientists curious about how one of their kind happened to become involved in shaping Chinese social policy and, more generally, how science gets made in the PRC. Writing for scholars in fields as different as, say, anthropology and demography (to say nothing of anthropology and natural science) is challenging. Colleagues in different disciplines make different assumptions about how the world works, value different theoretical perspectives, and even speak in different disciplinary tongues. Despite these barriers to communication, by defining my terms clearly and writing in accessible language, I hope to reach some if not all readers interested in my subject.

This book is a close relative of another text, Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics, which I coauthored with the political scientist Edwin A. Winckler (Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005). Empirically, that book (GCP for short) traces the emergence and

transformations of China’s population policies over the half century 1949 to 2004 and their broad effects on China’s society, politics, and international standing. This book treats one subset of policy issues (the origins of the core policy) during one small slice of time (1978-1980). Theoretically, the two projects share the same broad framework, Foucault’s notion of governmentality, but emphasize different constructs.

GCP centers on the concept of governmentalization—the historical process by which population comes within the purview of rationalized

Preface XVI control—and the attending rise of a “biopolitics,” or politics of life.

This book focuses on concepts relevant to the making of a single policy—problematization and assemblage—and it adds the insights of STS that are limned but not theoretically elaborated in GCP. Substantively, this book confirms the arguments about the origins of the onechild policy developed in GCP but goes beyond them to develop a more in-depth explanation of what happened, when, how, and why in those crucial first years of Deng Xiaoping’s rule. Part 1 of GCP, on the making of policy from within institutions of the political Center, is based on the research and analysis of Winckler. Emphasizing a convergence of elite interests, he argues that the one-child policy was adopted because most senior members of Deng’s coalition agreed that drastic limitation of population growth was necessary to achieve core regime goals. This more fine-grained study fully affirms that argument while adding the epistemic dimensions of policy and the policy work of actors beyond the state that in my view are essential to understanding how and why top Communist Party leaders agreed on the necessity of a one-child policy. I argue that the one-child policy was a product of a new kind of scientific sense making within the regime that emerged in a historical context in which the embrace of science was politically essential to the regime’s survival. I also build on some other, smaller-scale arguments from part 1 of GCP. In particular, chapter 2 on the Mao era draws on GCP’s arguments about institutionalization, legitimation, and policymaking in the 1970s, interweaving them with new arguments about the

destruction of population science and its impact on policymaking. Finally, my overview of the social and demographic effects of the onechild policy, offered in chapter 1, finds full elaboration in part 2 of GCP, which I wrote.

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Acknowledgments

During the twenty-plus years this project has been in the making, I have accumulated far too many debts to fully acknowledge. My greatest debt

is to the Chinese population specialists and birth planning officials, some no longer living, who have shared their insiders’ experiences and interpretations of the elite politics of the one-child policy over many years. Particular thanks go to my main interlocutors: Liu Zheng, Wu Cangping, Lin Fude, and Zha Ruichuan (People’s University); Liang Zhongtang (formerly of Shaanxi Academy of Social Sciences, now at the Shanghai Academy of Social Science); Song Jian (formerly of the Beijing Institute of Information and Control, BIIC; later minister-in-

charge of the State Science and Technology Commission; and now retired), Yu Jingyuan (BIIC), and Tian Xueyuan (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences). A word of appreciation also goes to some of their students, especially Qiao Xiaochun and Chen Wel, for their recollections of what their professors said in private. Other senior-generation Chinese demographers at Beijing, Nankai, Nanjing, Sichuan, Fudan, Zhongshan, and East China Normal Universities helped fill in the larger context in which the one-child policy was made. I am especially grateful to members of the first generation of demographers from the PRC trained abroad—especially Gu Baochang (now of People’s

University), Zeng Yi (Beijing and Duke Universities), and Peng Xizhe (Fudan University)—who shared the project of finding alternatives to the one-child policy and gave generously of their time on many occasions. X1X

XX Acknowledgments Officials of the National Population and Family Planning Commission and its subordinate units provided crucial insight into the politics of population policymaking in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I thank Yu Wang, deputy to Li Xiuzhen in the late 1970s; Jiang Zhenghua, former vice minister of the Commission; and Li Honggui, Liang Jimin,

Zhang Hanxiang, Xiao Zhenyu, Chen Shengli, Zhang Mincai, Li Bohua, and Ma Yingtong for frank discussion of these sensitive issues. I much appreciate the efforts of Yu Xuejun, former director of the China Population Information and Research Center (CPIRC), in arranging my

2003 research trip, and of Chen Shengli in making possible my interview with Song Jian.

The Population Research Institute of Xi’an Jiaotong University served as host for my field research in 1988 and 1993. I thank its direc-

tors, Jiang Zhenghua and Zhu Chuzhu, for making those productive collaborations possible, schooling me in the ways of Chinese population research, and providing a supportive base from which to interview demographers elsewhere. This manuscript has benefited greatly from the close reading of David Bachman, Matthew Kohrman, Bill Lavely, and Ed Winckler. As a new and untutored student of the elite politics of the PRC, I have profited immensely from the insights provided by political scientists David Bachman and Ed Winckler into the nature and workings of the apex of the PRC regime. This project has also been shaped by conversations over many years with Ed Winckler. Without his input and encouragement, I would not have dared to write about these things and my analysis would have been much less trenchant.

Other individuals have made valuable contributions as well. I am grateful to Griff Feeney for help in unraveling the cybernetics of population; to Carol Hamrin for insight into the politics of the early Deng years; to Pete Suttmeier and Lynn White for conversations about the

role of science in contemporary Chinese politics; to Bill Lavely and Wang Feng for illuminating discussion of Chinese population matters over many years; to Leo Orleans for sharing with me his invaluable per-

sonal collection of Foreign Broadcast Information Service articles on population going back to the 1950s; and to a Chinese aerospace engineer trained in China and the United States for helping me understand the larger context and content of PRC missile science. Over the years of this book’s making, I have had the opportunity to present work-in-progress to colleagues at a number of institutions and professional meetings. The reactions of colleagues to colloquia at Harvard

Acknowledgments XXI University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and Center for Population and Development Studies; Brown University’s Anthropology Department; the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York; the Population Council; Barnard College’s Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures; George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs; Duke University’s Chinese Studies Center; the University of California at Berkeley’s Departments of Anthropology and Demography; the University of Washington’s Chinese Studies Center; and the Australian National University’s Chinese Studies Center and Department of Demography have helped me sharpen and clarify my arguments. Much of the field research for this book was conducted in the 1980s

and early 1990s, when I was research associate of the Population Council’s Center for Policy Studies (later renamed the Research Division). For inspiring my interest in population and encouraging me to

follow my instincts in China, the Center’s director, Paul Demeny, deserves much indirect credit for this project. By bringing together an extraordinary team of specialists on population, broadly defined, and

by encouraging open and critical inquiry into important issues of public policy, he created a highly congenial environment in which inter-

disciplinary work on population policy could flourish. I also thank Council colleagues Geoff McNicoll, for sharing his great wisdom and wit Over many years and graciously tolerating my repeated requests for help; John Bongaarts, for rewarding collaborations on China’s population policy and illuminating lectures on population mathematics; and Ethel Churchill, for meaningful conversations and encouragement of many kinds.

The Anthropology Department at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) has provided an exceptionally hospitable environment in which to bring this project to intellectual fruition. Special thanks go to Tom Boellstorff, Bill Maurer, and Mei Zhan for incisive commentary on

selected chapters, and for discussion of broad issues of theory and method in the anthropology of modern life. This book was written with the support of a research grant from the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Studies Program (#217508) and a small grant from the Newkirk Center for Science and Society at UCI. An Individual Project Fellowship from the Open Society Institute of New York funded the initial phase of data analysis and a key research trip to China in 1999. The OSI also provided a subsidy for publication of this book. A Distinguished Scholar award from the John D.

XXil Acknowledgments and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1997 offered me protected time to analyze my data while interacting with the extraordinary staff at the Foundation in Chicago. A research grant from the NSF Anthropology Program enabled the field trips to China in the mid- to late 1980s when many of the key interviews were conducted. The generous support of all these institutions is gratefully acknowledged.

CHAPTER I

Introduction: An Anthropology of Science Making and Policymaking

A TROUBLING POLICY, A CLUE, AND A BLACK BOX

China’s one-child-per-couple policy is one of the most troubling social policies of modern times.’ Launched in 1979-1980 to accelerate China’s transformation into a wealthy, modern global power, the policy was out of touch with Chinese reality, especially in the countryside, where at least two children (including one son) were essential to family survival. Carried out in defiance of cultural and political reason, the policy has induced social suffering and human trauma on a vast scale. Although there have been beneficiaries, especially in the cities, from the vantage points of the rural majority and of China’s society as a whole the policy must be judged harshly. In the 1980s and 1990s, coercive enforcement strained relations

between the ruling Communist Party and the peasantry, damaged women’s reproductive health, and exacerbated discrimination and violence against infant girls. By the late 1990s, the rapid reduction in fertility to one or two children had greatly accelerated population aging and severely distorted the nation’s sex structure, threatening China’s continued prosperity and global rise. Today the country faces an imminent crisis of aging without social security and a gender gap among infants that, at 120

boys to roo girls (in 1999), is the highest in the world. Even the fertility effects of the policy are uncertain. Although the number of children per

| woman has fallen from around 2.7 in the late 1970s to 1.55 today, much | of that decline appears to be due to rapid socioeconomic development,

I

2 Introduction which has lowered childbearing desires to the point that today large and growing numbers of couples, rural as well as urban, want only one child. Despite the policy’s worrying effects, today China’s leaders, fearing fertility rebound, hold fast to the one-child rule. Indeed, advocacy of one-child families is now embedded in national law.

How did this sure to be socially damaging and politically costly policy come to seem necessary—or perhaps even good—to the leaders | who embraced it in 1979-1980? Where did the radical idea of restricting all couples in a country of one billion come from? How does it retain its grip on the leaders’ thinking in the 2000s, given social costs that are steep and growing steeper? Despite the voluminous literature on the one-child policy, such questions have rarely been asked, let alone satisfactorily answered.7 “Communist Coercion” or “Western Science”? In the absence of sustained scholarly research on these matters, American understandings of the policy have been shaped by anticommunist strands in American political culture into a narrative of “communist coercion.”

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, powerful media images of coerced abortions, family planning jails, orphanage dying rooms, and much more created an intense interest in the policy among the general public, while giving fresh life to cold war notions of China as “totalitarian Other,” the foil to the “democratic West.” Even after the end of the cold war and the shift

in critical emphasis from anticommunism to human rights, China continues to be seen through binary East-West lenses that make it intrinsically different from, and always “less than,” the United States (poor not rich,

backward not modern, unfree not free, superstitious not scientific) (Madsen 1995; Zhang Longxi 1998). Although China is indeed relatively

poor (although that is fast changing) and its population control program has at times been terribly coercive (though the harshness has diminished since the mid-1990s), these orientalizing discourses impede understanding. For example, the pervasive discourse on China as intellectually backward and politically repressive has contributed to a view of the one-child policy as a product of the PRC’s (restrictive) politics, not its (weak) science. This othering discourse also divides the world into discrete and bounded worlds of we-them, United States—China, closing off inquiry into connections between the two. To its makers in China, the one-child policy is not about a strong state or its coercive practices, it is about Western science. More specifically, it

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 3 is about the nation’s dreams for transforming a poor, downtrodden nation into a prosperous, modern, global power through selective absorption of Western science and technology. Could it be that the troubling one-child policy bears the imprint of science, indeed of Western science? This possibility gains tantalizing support from the one significant clue to the policy’s origins that has come to light: the key role of a set of population projections by Song Jian, control theorist at the Seventh

Ministry of Machine Building. In Western publications in his field of systems science and control theory, Song has even claimed credit for authoring the policy: “[Our 1980] projections for China’s population growth ... shocked the scientific circles and politicians, [leading the government to] follow a policy of ‘one child system’” (Song r999[1995]: 537). Both Chinese insiders and Western scholars have confirmed Song’s

account of the centrality of those projections.’ Yet neither Song nor Western students of Chinese population affairs have shed light on the source of those projections and the larger body of work to which they presumably belonged, the politics by which Song’s policy proposal apparently was transformed into national policy, or the broad significance of the adoption of a control-theoretic solution to China’s popula-

tion problems. The cybernetic projections are thus a clue that led nowhere. This seems surprising because it was a provocative clue. Song’s home institution, the Seventh Machine Building Ministry, was a defense sector ministry in charge of missiles. This readily accessible fact immediately

provokes a stream of questions. Why was a missile scientist studying population? How did a natural scientist specializing in cybernetics—the science of control and communication in complex machine systems— outcompete the social scientists who were the bona fide experts on this topic? Strangely, no one has pursued even these first-order leads. The cybernetic clue has remained cold. Access Denied: Science Black Boxed

To discover the origins of the one-child policy, we need to follow that science clue and look into the cybernetics of population done by Song Jian.* Yet if we attempt to do that—as I have for many years—we find ourselves blocked on all sides. The cybernetic science of population that was made public in 1980 has been black boxed, both by Chinese officials, for whom it is too political, and by Western scholars of Chinese politics, for whom it is too technical.

4 Introduction Long before the international furor erupted over its one-child-percouple policy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had already black boxed the science—and almost everything else—that went into the policy’s making. The reason is not hard to find: the party’s 1980 decision to limit virtually all couples to one child has been one of the most sensitive decisions of the post-Mao era. That decision generated huge conflict and controversy, within the country as well as outside. Precisely because of the policy’s controversial nature, the party has had to work especially hard to restrict public discussion of it. In 1982, two years after the onechild rule became national policy, the Twelfth Party Congress designated birth planning and, by implication, the one-child policy as a “basic state policy” (jiben guoce)—off-limits to criticism on fundamentals.° To preserve the myths of the party’s infallibility and the policy’s “correctness,”

over the years, as ever more problems have cropped up, top birth officials have found it necessary to mark out specific forbidden zones that are off-limits to discussion. One such zone of unspeakability is how the one-child policy was born. When, in the late 1980s, a new minister-incharge of the State Birth Planning Commission discovered that the sci-

ence behind the policy had been flawed, she quickly forbade the population field from further discussing that matter. When I, knowing nothing of this politics, asked Chinese population specialists about this history, they replied: “What’s done is done. We cannot look backward, we can only look forward. Besides, it’s not safe to talk about this.” The written record is equally silent about the origins of the one-child rule. Perhaps because the process that produced it veered perilously close to violating the myth that party policy is made by wise party leaders, the work of population scientists in creating and promoting the one-childfor-all policy has been largely erased from the official histories of the

| birth program. Despite the recent relaxation of tensions over the onechild policy, today as in the past the foundational science that lay behind it remains largely unquestioned and unquestionable. It is not only the Chinese government that has black boxed the entanglements of science and scientists with policy and policy makers. So too have scholars of Chinese politics. As in other modern societies, in contemporary China science and technology are fundamental to the exercise of power and to practices of governing and state making. Embraced as the first of the post-Mao regime’s “Four Modernizations”—of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defense—since the late 1970S, modern science and technology have been embedded in the legitimating ideologies and governing structures of the regime. An important

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 5 body of work on Chinese science illuminates some of the new sciencepolitics connections that emerged under Deng Xiaoping, China’s para-

mount leader after the 1976 death of Mao. Political scientists have traced the development of science policy, exploring the political roots, organization, and application of Chinese science, as well as the implications of the rise of Chinese science for the nation’s fragile democratization (monograph-length works include Baum 1980; Saich 1989; Simon and Goldman 1989; Suttmeier 1980; Y. Wang 1993; and Miller 1996; on science-state relations, Hamrin and Cheek 1986; Goldman 1994, 1999; Goldman with Cheek and Hamrin 1987; and Goldman and MacFarquhar 1999; on particular sciences, Orleans 1980; and Schneider 2003). Some have explored the consequences of the rise of S&T for the regime, revealing how, over the last two decades, the PRC has become a virtual technocracy run largely by engineers (Li and White 1991; Li Cheng 2001). Although they have not studied it in depth, students of the early Deng years have also described the rise of a new mode of “scientific policymaking” in which social scientists and cyberneticists were brought into policymaking for the first time in many years (Hamrin 1990; Halpern 1986, 1988, 1989). This work is highly illuminating, yet the larger implications of the scientization and technocratization of the regime—for how it reasons, makes policy, and governs China—have been little probed. Put another way, existing work has carefully examined the political context for the rise of Chinese science but left its cognitive core essentially untouched.° How is scientific knowledge in China constructed? How do PRC scientists rework the methods and ideas of Western science to fit the context of a Chinese and a late-communist society? How does this sinified science shape public policy and, in turn, society in the PRC? These limitations of the China literature are symptomatic of a larger — conceptual problem that afflicts the social sciences generally. As the

political scientist and science studies scholar Sheila Jasanoff has observed, despite the centrality of science and technology to modern governance, the mainstream disciplines lack the conceptual language (and, one might add, analytic constructs and theoretical frameworks) needed to understand the messy intertanglings of science and technology with politics, policy, and power (Jasanoff 2004b:2). This lack of enabling constructs helps explain why the cybernetic clue remained a clue that.went nowhere, inspiring few questions and generating few insights. How might we link the science to the politics? How might we bring the cybernetic clue to life and make it illuminate the hidden origins

6 Introduction of the one-child policy, the politics by which it was made, and the wider effects of a cybernetic science of population on political reasoning and state making? AN EPISTEMIC APPROACH TO POLICY MAKING: THEORETICAL RESOURCES FOR OPENING THE BLACK BOX

In this book I bring together two bodies of research that can help us forge these conceptual links: governmentality studies and science and technology studies. Governmentality approaches emphasize the fundamental role of knowledges (systematic bodies of thought) in the making of the political. STS highlights the political nature of knowledge making and the porous boundary between science and politics. Both draw inspi-

ration from the influential work of the French social theorist Michel Foucault—who conjoined the two in the term “knowledge/power” (Gordon 1980)—while moving his ideas in fresh directions. The governmentality work also offers a powerful mode of political critique. By drawing attention to neglected elements of political life, these bodies of work expand the domain of the political and allow us to ask new questions about science, politics, and policy. I begin with a broad theoretical overview of the two fields, and then introduce the specific concepts that will guide my analysis of science making and policymaking. Governmentality and Science Studies Perspectives: Conceptual Foundations

In recent years students of politics in the human sciences have been elaborating fresh ways to understand modern governance and power that move beyond the traditional preoccupation with the state. In his seminal essay on Western modernity, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, and in later lectures, Foucault proposed that the modern political era (in Western Europe from the eighteenth century) has seen the rise of a new form of power that is no longer concentrated in governmental institutions of the

state but is increasingly dispersed throughout society in disciplinary institutions of medicine, education, and the law (Foucault 1978, 1980, 1997a-c, 2003). Grounded in modern science and technology, whose claims to authority rest on their apprehension of and mastery over “nature,” this modern power focuses on and works through the biological body. It operates at two interconnected poles, the regulations of the

population as a whole and the disciplines of the individual body.

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 7 Modern power is thus largely power over life—biopower—-and modern governance is the governance of human life. Understanding governance broadly as “the conduct of conduct,” this work focuses on governmental projects, understood here as more or less

rationalized schemes and programs undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seek to shape conduct according to specific norms so as to achieve particular ends, with diverse and mostly unpredicted effects (key theo-

retical texts are Foucault 1991; Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991; Rose 1999; and Dean 1999). This definition seems unduly unwieldy, but every one of its parts (especially “rationalized,” “authorities,” “knowledge,” “norms,” “ends,” and “effects”) will be important to our understanding of policy. Governmentality—a combination of governing and

political rationality—is the particular regime of modern government that takes population, its size, health, welfare, security, and prosperity, as its primary end. Historically the rise of such governmental regimes followed the birth of the new science of political economy and “the development of a whole complex of [related] savoirs” (Foucault 1991: 103).

Projects to govern human life are not concentrated in the state but instead involve a triad of governing authorities: state bureaucracies, professional (knowledge-based) disciplines, and self-governing individuals. Over time, power over life has gradually shifted from the state to these other domains. Perhaps because of their interest in governance beyond the state, few

| students of governmentality have systematically addressed the question of policy, a concept closely associated with the state (some who have are Shore and Wright 1997; Shore 2000; Greenhalgh 2003; and Feldman 2005).’ Yet policies are fundamental elements of modern power and instruments of modern governance. If modern society is a normalizing society, dominated by the modern, science-based norm, then policy can be understood as the crystallization of authoritative norms. Public policies—

those created and carried out by public entities at multiple levels—are ubiquitous if often invisible elements of modern governance. From birth to death, work to play, virtually every domain of modern life is regulated by the norms and dictates of public policy. Since human life itself is a central object of modern power, population policies—specifying the authoritative norms on family size, child education, worker health, and

so on—are the characteristic policies of the modern era. An under- | standing of the politics of these policies—who makes them, with what techniques and logics, through what negotiations and contests, and with

8 | Introduction what intended and unintended effects—is thus central to an understanding of modern governance. The governmentality perspective emphasizes the importance of mentalities or rationalities of governance, especially knowledge- or sciencebased ones. Science is the core logic in modern systems of governance and power. A literature far too large to cite suggests that it is central to the making, workings, and effects of public policy. Science and its lan-

guage of numbers often provide the rationale behind policy and the authoritative norms that policy specifies and promotes. In policies aimed at governing population, science-based logics play an especially critical role because population is a biological entity (displaying “vital events” such as fertility and mortality) and science claims to be the sole authority on “nature,” to which biology belongs. It would be difficult to govern population—or to govern it well—without a science of population. Because of their status as authoritative knowledge producers, scientists (social and natural) are often active participants in the policymaking process. In democratic societies, formally independent experts serve on a host of advisory boards, committees, and panels. In authoritarian systems, too, although scientists may be subordinate to the state, they are often called on to lend their expertise to the making of public policy. Science has broader political effects on the policy process as well. As the authoritative knowledge in modernity, science serves to legitimize both the exercise of power through policy and the authority of the policy makers. Science has powerful depoliticizing effects too. Science is the ultimate arbiter of “truth” in modern societies; when science speaks in the name of nature, it depoliticizes beliefs and practices that are often eminently political, removing them from the arena of contestation. Despite the extraordinary power of scientific logics and techniques in the policymaking arena, few have studied the intimate links between science and modern politics, policy, and power. Most theories of modern politics and policymaking simply leave out the science. The field of sci-

ence and technology studies offers a wealth of concepts, theoretical insights, and research methods that might guide the study of science in the making of public policy. A small but now rapidly growing body of work in STS has examined the relationships among science, technology, and political power in Western democratic societies. This work has illuminated the role of science in policymaking, state-science relations, science and democracy, and the politics of technology (influential early works include Polanyi 1962; and Shapin and Schaffer 1985; more recent

studies are Ezrahi 1990; Jasanoff 1990, 1995, 2004d, 2005; Guston

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 9 2000; Kitcher 2001; and Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001). Another, smaller body of work has traced the rise of “big science” and its connections to defense research and the state (Galison and Hevly 1992). This important research offers penetrating insight into the science-politics connections in (mostly) Western democracies, but those connections

play out very differently in the authoritarian context of China, especially in the early post-Mao years that are the focus here. Also, STS students of the science-politics link have not taken much advantage of the

insights provided by the governmentality framework. In this book I build on some of this work, especially that of Jasanoff, but I borrow more heavily from research on Chinese politics and science, which illuminates the larger context in which the one-child policy was born. In this book I draw together these two bodies of work to develop a new kind of epistemic, or knowledge-centered, approach to the making and effects of policy within and beyond the state. In this approach, the governmentality perspective provides the broad framework for understanding power, policy, and politics and the constitutive role of knowl-

edge in those domains. STS illuminates the micropolitics by which policy-relevant knowledge is formed and politically advanced. The epistemic approach that I develop places particular emphasis on the cognitive and discursive grids through which reality is framed and represented.

Yet it also attends to the actors and institutions that produce and advance those grids, for both leave their imprint on the knowledges and policies that get made. Seeing policies as products of particular histories, the approach acknowledges the specificity and contingency, as well as the complexity and messiness, of policy processes, seeing these as fundamental to, and indeed constitutive of, modern policies and politics. This theoretical effort should be seen as a somewhat experimental

endeavor, since the two frameworks have been developed largely to understand science and governance in Western liberal societies. Yet, suitably adapted, they are remarkably illuminating of the Chinese case as well.

I begin by introducing three interrelated concepts that will guide our inquiry into the making of the one-child policy and the broader effects

of the way it was made. Policy problematization refers to the threepart policy construct (problem, solution, assessment of costs and bene-

fits) that is the center of attention. Policy assemblage names the heterogeneous association of elements—actors, institutions, knowledges, and so forth—that come together for a time to produce a particular policy problematization. The term micropolitics of science making

IO Introduction and policymaking labels a set of knowledge-making and knowledge-

advancing processes by which the elements of an assemblage are brought together to form a public policy. Policy Problematizations

As noted earlier, governmentality approaches shed light on the crucial role of governmental rationalities in the making of policies and pro-

grams.° In the study of policy, the most important rationalities are problematizations, understood here as particular formulations of the problem at hand, together with the policy solution and an assessment of that solution’s costs and benefits (on problematizations, see Dean 1999:

27-28; and Rabinow 2003: 44-56). Problematizations of the population issue are familiar elements of our political landscape. In a wellknown formulation, in the late twentieth century the demographic problem that garnered most attention was located in the third world and framed as high fertility that hampers economic growth. Its solution was the spread of state-managed family planning programs. In the early twenty-first century, the problem of population numbers is increasingly located in parts of the industrialized world (much of Europe, Japan, and Russia, for example), where extremely low fertility is accelerating aging and threatening economic prosperity and social cohesion. The solution, now much debated, often involves a mix of state policies to encourage childbearing, reconcile family life with work, and manage the negative consequences. Population problematizations such as these are powerful things because they do not simply reflect a reality that exists in nature; instead, they may actively constitute a new reality by shaping what is thinkable in the domain of population. A fresh and compelling problematization can radically reorient thinking about the nature and scope of a social problem, making people see the matter in completely new ways. If it gets embedded in public policy and bureaucratically enacted, a powerful problematization can remake the world we live in. This work urges us to pay serious attention to the “upstream” framings of the policy constructs that reach top policy makers for a decision. “Reality” does not exist unproblematically “out there,” but becomes known to us through language and linguistic framings. Such framings can present a single reality in multiple ways. For example, Americans’ growing girth might be construed as a problem of a gluttonous public,

a lazy populace, a greedy fast-food industry, or a built environment designed for inactivity. The governmentality work takes language and

An Anthropology of Science and Policy II its constructions of social reality extremely seriously, encouraging attention to the cognitive content, discursive structure, and rhetorical exposition of governmental problematizations. As noted earlier, in modern

societies such policy constructs are most often crafted with the assistance of scientific experts on the social and natural world. Students of Chinese communist politics have long attended to the epistemic content, discursive structure, and linguistic features of Chinese Marxism, illuminating the profound impact of Marxist constructs on the making of Chinese policy and politics (e.g., Schoenhals 1992; Apter and Saich 1994; Kluver 1996; Ji 2004). Perhaps reflecting the pervasive view of science as not-politics, Chinese science has not been subject to similar scrutiny. In the post-Mao era, when science has supplemented Marxism as the official discourse in which many policy problems and solutions are framed, the scientific formulation of social problems and their policy solutions needs to receive the same critical attention that Chinese Marxism has received. This new work on governmentality urges us to unpack the knowledges and languages of China’s policy sciences, suggesting that in the facts, narratives, and rhetorical products of these sciences we will find clues to the making, working, and effects of the nation’s postMao policies. Policy Assemblages

How do such problematizations, or policy constructs, get made? What elements go into the process and how do they come together? Let us return to the problem of the cybernetic clue that went nowhere. For perhaps two decades, specialists on contemporary China have known that the population projections of Song Jian lay behind the one-child policy. Yet no one has been able or even motivated to do anything with that knowledge. In the absence of a conceptual structure tying it to the policy apparatus, the information has sat there as a lifeless factoid, a curiosity with no evident political significance. The cybernetic clue is indeed an awkward thing: it belongs neither to “the political system” nor even to the realm of the human. How can we connect those projections to the other elements that went into the making of the one-child policy—the leaders, institutions, values, and so on—and then show how all those things interacted to produce the policy? In a series of remarkable intellectual interventions over some twenty years, the French science and technology studies scholar Bruno Latour has broken up the familiar ontologies of modernity—including the great

12 Introduction divide between “science” and “politics”—and reassembled them into new associations or “assemblages” that mix things up in novel but productive ways. To understand the importance of Latour’s ideas for our ~ thinking about science and policy, we need to review, if only briefly, how those ideas have developed. In his early work on laboratory science, Latour introduced the notion of Actor-Network-Theory to suggest that not only humans, but also nonhumans—microbes, scallops, rocks, and ships, for example—belong to networks of things that have agency, that is, that do something and have visible effects on other agents (Latour 1987; Law and Hassard 1999). A few years later, in the pathbreaking essay We Have Never Been Modern (1993), he pushed the argument fur-

ther by suggesting that the conceptual distinctions that have marked modernity—especially nature/culture and science/politics—cannot hold. These separations, he claimed, are artificial, so much so that we moderns

have never actually been modern. More recently Latour has extended these ideas to the realm of society. In Reassembling the Social (2005), he

argues that the familiar terrain we know as “society” does not exist. There is no distinctive domain of reality to which the label “social” or “society” can be attributed. Instead, the social is an assemblage of heterogeneous elements, human and nonhuman, that come together for a period of time. The task of the social scientist is to trace the shifting ties that connect the elements into assemblages that matter. In political science much effort has gone into identifying the fundamental features of “the political system” that interact to produce public policy. As a recent handbook in the field puts it: “Public policy is to a very large extent a political phenomenon and, as such, a field of expertise for political scientists” (Pierre 2006: 483). By drawing the boundary too narrowly, however, such efforts may miss essential elements of the policy process. For if there is no “society,” then by the same logic there is no “polity,” no “political system” whose constituent parts are distinctively “political.” Instead, the domain of politics is made up of

elements that in modernist discourse are allocated to “economics” (think: money, taxes), “culture” (Islam, evangelicals), and “society” ~ (immigrants, baby boomers). It includes, too, nonhuman elements such as, say, hurricanes or homemade bombs. The notion of assemblage captures this real-world heterogeneity of the things that actually go into the making of public policy. In this book I will use the concept of policy assemblage to identify the diverse elements—actors, institutions, knowledges, values, facts, practices, and so forth—that go into the making of policies. More formally,

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 13 by policy assemblage I mean the collection of heterogeneous, often incommensurate elements that come together for a period of time, sometimes quite fleeting, to produce a policy construct that, through | micropolitical processes such as those described in the next section, may become the core of an official policy. Following Latour, to be in the assemblage, items must be connected to other elements and they must be active: they must do things, affect other actors, produce effects (Latour 2005: 63-86). A hurricane, for example, becomes an element in a policy assemblage only when it destroys a city, forcing governments at all levels to respond. A homemade bomb joins a policy assemblage only when it explodes, kills countless civilians, and persuades the government to develop counterterrorism measures. The elements that form a policy assemblage will always include familiar “political” things: elected officials, government agencies, routinized practices of governance, and so forth. The research of political scientists can help us identify such elements and illuminate how they work. But

policy assemblages also include “nonpolitical” things that influence policy outcomes. Of particular interest here is the political work performed by policy scientists, usually as advisors or consultants to formal government agencies, the bodies of knowledge they create, and the specific findings they generate. The assemblage concept readily admits these into consideration and directs us to trace their connections to other elements. Because the components of these assemblages vary from place to

place, time to time, and policy to policy, they can be identified only through ethnographic research with participants in the process. Yet there are some general classes of elements that will be found in most assem-

blages. The most important are political actors and configurations of power, formal and informal institutions, routinized policymaking procedures and practices, knowledges and discourses, and ethics and values. A study of policy assemblages should include all these things. THE MICROPOLITICS OF SCIENCE MAKING

AND POLICYMAKING : How do the elements of policy assemblages work together to produce policies? In particular, how do scientists and their knowledges and writings find their way into policy problematizations? Work in science and technology studies helps us understand how, in modern scientific societies, particular nominally “scientific” problematizations of social issues are cre-

ated, contested, promoted, and eventually adopted by political elites.

14 Introduction Despite the rapid growth of science studies, however, the human sciences that are usually the source of such problematizations have rarely been studied as sciences (some exceptions are Rose 1990, 1996; Hacking 1995; Porter 1995; Daston 2000). Next to the large literature in demography, for example, research on demography and its role in the government of population and the making of modern life remains minuscule.”

Yet population science—my preferred term for this field because it accents the field’s scienceness—is an intriguing arena of study. What makes population science intriguing is its location in the interstices between the natural and the social sciences. Like the natural sciences, its

language is mathematics and its object, the population, with its birth, death, and other “vital” rates, is seen as part of nature. Yet, like the social sciences, the field is eminently social and political. Because it concerns

human beings, the discipline inevitably has a social character. Population science is also political, for everywhere it emerged the field was born

not to understand population in its own right, but to serve the interests of states or other governing authorities in administering and optimizing their subject populations. Because of its dual identity as a natural/social science, many quite different projects can proceed under the label “population science.” The science of population is also an important arena of study because its subject matter, population, is a central object of power in the modern era. In the West, the emergence of population science has been crucial to the rise and spread of that politics of life (an engaging account is Foucault 1978: 91-108). Population science has not only constructed pop_ ulation as an object of science and created a field of knowledge detailing its regularities. It has also created the problematizations sought by states eager to govern population processes (of fertility, mortality, migration, family life, social security, and so on) so as to enhance human welfare, order, and utility for the capitalist economy. In the last few decades, China too has seen the rise of this politics of life. Governing China’s Population documents how, since around 1980, when the PRC began its reentry into global capitalist circuits, population has become a focal object of governance and a vast terrain of biopolitics. In China as in the West, population science has played a crucial role in bringing population within the orbit of state management by, among other things, pro-

viding problematizations to guide its governance. GCP documents science’s importance, but provides few details on how it developed, got

inserted into the policy process, or shaped policymaking. That is the task I undertake here.

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 15 Fact Making, Narrative Construction, and Ally Recruitment: The Work of Population Science How can we understand the policy work of this social/natural science of population? Let us begin with some basics: What is science? Students of

STS long ago set aside the conventional view of science as an autonomous sphere with universal norms constituted independent of other modes of social activity. Instead they see science as a sphere of knowledge that is humanly constructed by particular actors operating in historically specific cultural and political contexts. Clearly, science is

no one thing; instead, there are different practices labeled “science,” | each reflecting the characteristics of its makers and of the historical context in which it is made.!° Observational studies of laboratory science conducted in the 1970s and 1980s illuminated the microprocesses and micropractices by which

science produces and advances its knowledges (Latour 1987; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Knorr-Cetina 1981, 1999). In an ideal fact-making sequence, scientists first constitute a domain of nature as an object of scientific inquiry. Using technical prac-

tices, they proceed to construct scientific facts about that new object. Because those facts are humanly made, the personal and historical circumstances of their making shape the facts that get made. But then, through rhetorical and other practices, the circumstances of the fact’s production are removed from view, leaving the fact to appear “natural,” a reflection of nature that is untouched by human hands. After the fact is created, networks of allies are enrolled as believers and supporters; the number and influence of these allies determine whether a statement becomes an enduring fact—an indisputable assertion about the world. Although this early microsociological work gave little attention to the place of culture and politics in the making of scientific truths, it remains useful, especially if paired with other approaches that address these issues (Hess 1997: esp. 100-111; Martin 1998). By studying these

micropractices of science making and fact making we can trace the political careers of scientific “truths” and discover how science has gained its incredible power in the political realm. We can see, too, how science comes to seem politics- and culture-free, yet is anything but. In this book, I draw on the insights generated by this work, adapting them to the office science of population studies. I pay particular attention to the facts and narratives (sets of facts composed into scientific sto-

ries) that make up population problematizations (the nature of the

16 Introduction population problem, its necessary solution, and the costs and benefits of that solution). In studying the constitution of population as a scientific object and the making of scientific knowledges and problematizations more generally, I highlight the crucial role of numbers, numerical inscriptions (tables, figures, charts, and so forth), and calculative technologies

(equations, projections, and the like). Although, as Ian Hacking has lamented, “the numerical manipulations of the body politic are .. . dusty [and] replete with dried up old books,” when studied closely such quantitative practices are both fascinating and illuminating (Hacking 1982: 279). Numbers are interesting and important not only because they are the language of science in general and of population science in particular, but also because, despite their apparent status as neutral and objec-

tive facts, they are human products that, historians of statistics have shown, have been endowed with facticity (Porter 1995; Poovey 1998). A science studies approach thus suggests that “the population,” “population problems,” and “population policy solutions” are not so much natural categories as categories made natural and taken for granted by the work of population scientists (cf. Horn 1994; Clarke 1998).

Credibility Contests and Boundary Work

Newer work in STS brings in the cultural and political dimensions of science making, helping us link science directly to politics and policymaking. Science studies views science as agonistic, made up of competing groups who vie to get their scientific ideas accepted as “the truth.”

In the case of a policy science such as population science, different groups contend to get their scientific formulations of the policy problem and solution adopted by political elites. How might we understand these contests and struggles for political influence? In his trenchant study Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line, sociologist and STS scholar Thomas E. Gieryn (1999) suggests that the struggles of scientists are fundamentally credibility contests in

which what is at stake is epistemic authority: the legitimate power to define and explain “reality” and “truth.” Rival groups pursue their quest for epistemic authority and, in turn, policy influence through boundary work. In an insightful metaphor, Gieryn suggests that science can be thought of as a space on the cultural map. Science has no essential or universal properties; instead, the properties of science are shaped by what is excluded from the discursively constructed “science” in local, episodic instances of boundary work. Scientists define what science is

An Anthropology of Science and Policy £7 by creating rhetorical boundaries that separate it from other, nonscience domains (religion, politics, ethics, and so on) and elaborating on what makes science different from those other domains (science is rational, objective, disinterested, skeptical, and so forth). Maps of science are

never final; instead, opposing groups are constantly drawing and redrawing the boundaries of science, claiming authority over a particular issue by placing it within their “science.” Boundary work is expansionist when scientists seek jurisdiction over a new ontological domain, and protectionist when they seek to retain authority over a contested issue. Which science wins the credibility contest and claims the policy prize depends on the scientific, political, and cultural capital each group of experts brings to the contest as well as the larger political and cultural context in which the struggles take place. Coproduction: Larger Effects of Scientizing Politics and Politicizing Science

Classic studies of modern governmental projects suggest that schemes

to reorder and optimize human life are always consequential—but rarely in ways their makers intend (Ferguson 1990; Scott 1998). That is, the policies and programs of modern states chronically fail to achieve

] their stated goals, but they produce other things instead. In a typical example, a massive project to develop Lesotho yielded little economic development, but spread bureaucratic state power throughout society (Ferguson 1990). Part of “what goes wrong” with these projects goes wrong early on, in the phase of science-based policymaking that unfolds well before the policy or program gets implemented on the ground. How might we understand what is produced when science and scientists get inserted into the policy process?

A fundamental insight of science studies is that science and the social order are coproduced—that is, constituted in the same moment and in relation to each other (Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Latour 1988). In a series of important studies of the production and use of science in legal and political decision making, Jasanoff has used that idiom of coproduction to make sense of the diverse and mostly unpredictable

effects of science in the policy arena (and in political and social domains more generally) (Jasanoff 2004a—-d; also 1990, 1995). When scientists are involved in policymaking, Jasanoff argues, the science and politics become inseparably intertwined. The result is that science

and the sociopolitical order are co-constituted (Jasanoff 2004c: 17).

18 Introduction For analytic purposes, I separate this intertwining into two analytically distinct but empirically interconnected processes. I call these the scientization of politics and the politicization of science. Each side of

this dynamic has distinct and consequential effects. In suggesting that the two are co-constituted, the coproduction idiom acknowledges that “the social” in social constructionism is very complex and

that in fact neither the social nor the natural is ontologically prior. What happens when science and politics interact is an empirical ques-

tion. The effects of scientific policymaking are always historically contingent, varying with the cultural and political context in which science and policy are made. Two features of the coproductionist framework make it especially

promising for this project on the one-child policy. First, because it encourages dissection of the messy processes by which politics is scientized and science is politicized, the perspective is especially fruitful for understanding times of heightened conflict and change. As the conflicts get resolved, important decisions often are made that get embedded in the © politics and become enduring features of the political scene once things return to normal (Jasanoff 2004a: 278-279). The early Deng era that is the focus here was certainly a time of disruptive upheaval and. transformative change. And the population policy that was made then did indeed get embedded in PRC politics in such a way that it was highly resistant

to change. Another advantage of the co-constitutionist idiom is that it moves beyond early STS questions of fact making to pose new and important questions about sense making: how do states see and institutions think (Jasanoff 2004a: 276-277; Scott 1998; Douglas 1986)? These new questions allow us to see and to study the emergence of a critical new form of scientific sense making in the PRC regime. It was this novel form of reasoning by the regime that made the puzzling policy seem so necessary and so right.

Toward Political Critique

This epistemic approach to public policy is not merely an intellectual exercise. It also supplies tools for political critique and action. The approach proceeds by identifying a particularly troubling or noteworthy policy, often by its poor or disturbing effects, and then tracing it back in time to learn how it came into being—how the underlying prob-

lem and solution became thinkable, who made them so, using what logics and techniques, in what historical context—and how it produced

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 19 those troubling effects. By historically dismantling today’s “truths,” we see that the things we take for granted are not inevitable outcomes of

history’s unfolding. Rather, they are contingent and specific, human products created by particular actors operating in given contexts. These discoveries open the political space for things to be done differently. They may also uncover new framings of and solutions to the world’s ills whose effects may be less unjust or inhumane than the problematizations we now have. AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCIENCE MAKING AND POLICYMAKING IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC

The enthusiastic reception accorded modern science by China’s postMao leaders gives the question of science in the political domain particular significance in the PRC. Students of Chinese politics have viewed the emergence of a new “scientific” way of making policy as part of a

profound shift in political practice that occurred during the transition from Mao to Deng. Under Mao, science was decimated; party policy

was made on other, more political and ideological grounds. That changed markedly with the rise of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. Recognizing the need for expertise to ensure the success of its modernization program, the Deng regime embraced modern science and technology with fervor, reopened scientific fields that had been closed, and called on specialists to lend their talent to the making of social and economic policy for the new era (e.g., Hamrin 1990: esp. 51-53; Halpern 1986, 1988, 1989). First as ad hoc advisors (April 1979 to mid-1980), then as mémbers of institutionalized advisory centers (fall 1980 to early

1982), and later as members of more permanent consultative bodies within the bureaucracy (from 1982 on), over the next few years the Deng party gradually incorporated economists, foreign affairs experts, cyberneticists, and other scientific experts into advisory roles in the regime’s policymaking apparatus (Halpern 1986; Shambaugh 2000: 179-182; Watson 1987; Hsu 1988). The notion of “scientific policymaking,” though used descriptively rather than theoretically in this literature, is helpful because it marks the early Deng era as a crucial, scientizing moment in the evolution of CCP politics when scientists were brought into policymaking and scientific logics and techniques were built into party policy. This is a promising

place to start because the one-child policy, though not yet studied in these terms, appears to be the first major policy of the Deng regime to

20 Introduction be made with the help of scientists. In that first, ad hoc stage of scientific policymaking (spring 1979 to mid-1980), there was much room for policy entrepreneurship on both sides. Students of Chinese politics have stressed the positive contributions of this new style of making policy to the nation’s modernization. In their account, the growing participation of scientific experts in the policy process from around 1980-1981 ushered in a more systematic, realistic, and data-driven process of policymaking that was far superior to the erratic, ideological, vision-driven mode of policymaking that had prevailed under Mao (Halpern 1986, 1988, 1989; Hamrin 1990; Shambaugh 2000).!! In general, this work suggests, the Mao-to-Deng transition was one of ideology to science,

and the scientific mode of policymaking produced a better policy process and better policies than what came before.

The thesis of improvement in policy process and outcome seems incontrovertible on a general level, but when one looks at particular economic and social policies that were shaped by scientists and engineers, a more complex picture emerges. An epistemic approach suggests

that whether expertise is superior to Marxian ideology as a basis for public policy depends very much on the specifics: what type of scientific and/or engineering expertise is applied; how is that policy science made and politically advanced; what scientific logics and techniques get built into the policy that is made?

In the preface I described anthropology’s emergent interest in the study of public policy. The field’s appreciation of governmentality and

STS perspectives, its ethnographic methods, and its ethical commitments make it a uniquely productive disciplinary site from which to pursue these important questions. In this book I draw on the concepts just elaborated and, taking advantage of the unusual institutional setup of the PRC (which gives elite scientists access to the inner world of pol-

icymaking) as well as personal access to elite Chinese informants, develop a distinctively anthropological approach to science making and

policymaking among Chinese elites in the early post-Mao period. Despite its focus on past events, this project is ethnographic in essential ways. It focuses on one relatively bounded slice of life—the making of population science and policy during 1978-1980—and tries to capture and reflect the actor’s point of view. This project is also ethnographic in its efforts to provide holistic, or culturally and historically contextualized, interpretations; its basis in ethnographic field methods (described in a later section); and its ultimate concern with fundamentally ethical issues. In this section I introduce three of the most important elements

An Anthropology of Science and Policy oT TABLE I. KEY ACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE ONE-CHILD POLICY Political Leaders Program Leaders* Population Specialists

. Late Maoera Mao Zedong Li Xiuzheng** People’s University:

(1970-1976) Zhou Enlai Yu Wang** Liu Zheng**

Jiang Qing Wu Cangping** Lin Fude** Zha Ruichuan**

Early Dengera Chen Yun Chen Muhua Missile Ministry:

(1977-1980) Li Xiannian Song fian

Deng Xiaoping Li Guangyuan Wang Zhen Yu Jingyuan Zhao Ziyang Hu Yaobang Shanxi Party School: Hu Qili | Liang Zhongtang

*Program leaders—those in charge of the State Council’s birth planning agencies—are responsible for coordinating the work of the relevant government agencies in developing and implementing birth policy. ** Involved in early Deng era as well.

of the one-child policy assemblage that will feature in the story told in this book: actors, institutions, and knowledges. Actors

In tracing the making of the one-child policy, this book places individual actors center stage, following the political leaders, program leaders, and scientists as they meet, talk, plan, worry, grumble, and generally go about doing the things that produced the one-child policy. Because the

number of leaders and scientists centrally involved was remarkably small—perhaps two dozen in all—an actor-centered approach should be able to capture the main dynamics of the making of this policy. These actors, whom readers will encounter again and again in the pages that follow, are introduced in table 1.

Institutions

Anthropologists sometimes slight formal institutions to focus on “real people,” yet a clear grasp of the nature and work of institutions, both formal and informal, is essential to understanding the making of public policy. In China in the immediate post—Cultural Revolution years, the

apparatus of government was just being reestablished. Yet within a

22 Introduction TABLE 2. OFFICIAL POLICYMAKING

INSTITUTIONS |

(listed in order of political power and importance)

Party elders: Set directional policy, probably make final decisions on specific policies through informal, behind-the-scenes mechanisms Leading bodies of the party (Central Committee and Secretariat) and government (State Council): Formally make policy decisions and make them official by the construction and issuance of documents Government birth planning apparatus (Birth Planning Leading Group; Birth Planning Office, both under the State Council): Manages and coordinates policymaking and enforcement State Planning Commission: Establishes long-term, short-term, and annual population plans and plan targets, whose achievement is the central goal of population policy National People’s Congress: Discusses policy, formally passes policy documents Relevant ministries and mass organizations: Work out details of policy—

policy rules, implementation, management of the social costs. University- and party school—based population studies institutes: Provide Marxian theory, propaganda, and ideology, policy ideas, projections, and other policy elements on request from birth planning agencies

relatively short time, a set of formal institutions and procedures had emerged to handle the processing of population issues and the making of population policy. In the PRC’s tripartite regime (composed of party, government, and military sectors), the institutions charged with making

population policy belonged to the party and government (the “partystate” or simply “state”). Although these party and government bodies were still working out how to do their assigned tasks, they were widely accepted as the legitimate makers of population policy. I call these culturally legitimate policy bodies the official policymaking institutions. These institutions and their main policymaking activities are listed in table 2. Although I do not attempt a full account of all the policy work done by these entities—such a project would require another book—I locate the core actors in their institutional contexts and follow the population issue as it gets processed by each of these institutions. The value of an epistemic approach featuring science and scientists “beyond the state” depends on how big an influence those scientists and their ideas have on policy. Political scientists and others accustomed to more state-centric approaches might well wonder if all these new concepts are really necessary. By paying attention to the official, state-based

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 2 institutions involved in making policy, we can get a handle on how and how much science and stientists influenced policymaking. Close study of the policy work performed by these party and governmental organs enables me to identify a variety of sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing institutional “channels” that influenced the making of the one-child policy. These might be called the elder channel, the planning channel, the legislative channel, the ministerial channel, and the government-authorized expert channel.!* For readers unfamiliar with the

policy process in China, table 2 provides an overview of the ideal process by which policy is made. In the chapters on policymaking that follow, I discuss the work of these various institutional channels in passing. I return to this issue in the book’s conclusion, where I review how scientists operating through illegitimate channels outside the party-state may have constituted themselves as a new channel or somehow penetrated the existing channels to alter their policy thinking and practices. I also highlight the role of informal institutions such as social networks and relationships. The study of social networks is of course a classic concern of political anthropology and it is a concern of anthropologists of policy today (e.g., Wedel et al. 2005). Guanxi—personal connections—are essential to the working of Chinese society and polltics generally (in anthropology, see, e.g., Yang 1994). Such ties were cru-

cial to the making of the one-child policy, serving as bridges between various policy bodies and giving actors located outside the institutions charged with policymaking a means to get their ideas into the central policy organs of the state. Of special importance were three kinds of social ties: personal networks spanning the formal divisions of party, government, and military; patron-client relationships within the science community; and hierarchical relationships within the top leadership that accorded most influence to party elders with extensive revolutionary experience. Sciences/Knowledges

The unusual tangling of science, society, and politics in the People’s Republic makes this an especially interesting—and challenging—arena in which to study scientific policymaking. The literature on Chinese sci-

ence illuminates four features of those intertanglings that bear note.'? First, over most of the history of the PRC, science has been subordinated to the CCP. As a result, many of the practices that go by the name

“science” bear the clear imprint of party politics. Second, in the PRC

24 Introduction the term “science” embraces Marxian social science as well as modern natural science. This broad construction of “science” allows us to do two interesting things. It enables us to view Marxist social science as a science and to study the two sets of knowledges and practices within the same analytic frame. Third, science underwent a tortuous history under

Mao Zedong, who dominated PRC politics for twenty-seven years (1949-1976). In the early 1950s, the social sciences were decimated; some were transformed into Marxian fields while others were eliminated outright. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) most of the natural sciences too were suppressed. Only defense science survived and remained productive. This history left different groups of scientists

differently equipped to create and advance their sciences in the post-

Mao years. Finally, like the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin (Graham 1990), China has an unusually florid culture of scientism. Born in the early twentieth century and intensified under Soviet tutelage

in the 19508, the view of science as a panacea for all the nation’s ills reached extreme heights in the early post-Mao years. Indeed, it was at that time that scientism and its twin, technicism, which values instrumental reasoning and technical efficiency above all, emerged as virtual official ideologies of the Deng regime (Suttmeier 1989). These features of Chinese science and scientism will be central to the story of population science and policy told in this book.

THREE STORIES |

SCIENCE MAKING AND POLICYMAKING UNDER DENG:

This book tells three stories about the making of modern China in the early Deng years: the science story, the politics/policy story, and the cul-

tural story. | The Science Story

The first story is about China’s sciences of population, how they got made, and what political work they performed. Chapter 2 lays out some crucial historical background. Under Mao, it shows, most of the sciences were suppressed. Population was declared a forbidden zone. In

1978-1979, the new reform leadership opened that zone, calling on , specialists to draw on international S&T to create a new science of population to guide the state’s now high-priority project of population con-

trol. The first of the book’s two main parts, “Making Population

An Anthropology of Science and Policy a5 Science,” examines the three distinctively Chinese sciences of population that emerged in response to that call. I call these a Marxian statis-

tics of population (chapter 3), a sinified cybernetics of population (chapter 4), and a Marxian humanism of population (chapter 5). Reflecting the intellectual background, political biography, and institutional location of their makers, each of these bodies of thought offered a different notion of the nature of China’s population problem, its ideal solution, and the social and human costs that were tolerable in the name of rapid demographic modernization. The statisticians drew on Marxian statistics and population thought to frame the population problem as one of imbalance in the state plan; its solution was a rapid elimination of third births and gradual increase in first births. The cyberneticists borrowed ideas from the Western Club of Rome school and from China’s strategic defense science, defining the population problem as a crisis of modernization whose only solution was one child for all. The

Marxian humanists, applying ideas from party thought and practice, emphasized the serious sociopolitical costs of a one-child-for-all policy and proposed a two-child-plus-long-spacing scheme instead. This part also explores the political characteristics and consequences of these new sciences of population. Through close study of the micropractices of population science, we see how the values of the scientists and the historical context got embedded in the policy constructs they created and then how those human fingerprints got erased so that what emerged appeared as pure scientific truths. Those scientific truths did important political work. The Marxian statisticians factified the leaders’ ideas on population, turning political truths into empirical facts. The Marxian humanists massified the leaders’ views, adding the voice of ordinary people that rarely gained expression in China’s population

politics. Finally, the cyberneticists mathematized and scientized the Deng regime’s worries about population, making their own radical narrative of population crisis and its necessary one-child-for-all solution appear as indisputable truths of modern science. Underlying these varying perspectives on population governance were competing visions of

the place of science and the state in the social order. One vision was economistic, another technocratic, the third humanistic. Which of these proposals got embedded in party policy would leave a big imprint on the society and politics of the reform era, helping to locate one science

and its visions of good governance at the center of China’s drive to achieve socialist modernity while displacing the others to the margins.

In telling this particular story about China’s sciences of population,

26 Introduction I also tell a more general story about the nature of “Chinese science” and “Chinese facts.” The Politics/Policy Story The second story is about politics and policymaking. In the nine months between December 1979 and September 1980, the most drastic of these

proposals—the cyberneticists’ plan for every couple to have but one

_ child—would emerge victorious. The book’s second main part, “Making Population Policy,” explains how that happened. This part describes the unusual assemblage of elements that came together for enough time to produce a policy that gained the assent of the party’s top decision-making body. That assemblage included not only the institutional elements described earlier, but also the epistemic and linguistic

elements of population science: a certain cluster of knowledges; the associated policy proposals, values, and visions; and the scientific graphs, tables, and other forms of rhetoric by which the proponents of these sciences sought to persuade others of the truth value of their ideas. This part of the book charts the extraordinary science and party politics by which that maverick group of natural scientists seized the initiative

on population and then, from their location outside the official policy organs, intervened in the policy process, hijacking that process to get their

plan adopted. While interweaving the accounts of China’s leaders and their scientific advisors, I tell much of the story from the vantage point of

| the scientists, who not only were key actors in the process but also, through their contacts with mid- and high-level officials, were able to provide remarkable (though of course partial) insight into the reactions and thinking of China’s top leaders. I tell this story as one of protracted struggle between the three sciences of population for credibility—the right to

tell the truth about China’s population problems—and political/policy influence. As Gieryn and others have suggested, one of the central tactics

in that struggle was rhetorical boundary work. During these crucial — months, the natural scientists worked repeatedly and successfully to expand the boundaries of their science to include “population,” while the social scientists fought to defend their boundaries and retain jurisdiction over what traditionally was their topic. These struggles unfolded over several overlapping phases, each relayed in a separate chapter. Chapter 6 uncovers the “scientific revolution” that occurred at a cru-

cial meeting of scientists and population officials in December 1979. Focusing on the credibility contests by which different groups jockeyed

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 27 for jurisdiction over “population,” the chapter examines the brilliant boundary work by which the natural scientists claimed population policy for themselves, persuading top population officials that they possessed the scientific tools necessary to correctly define the demographic problem and its solution. Their victory in this initial skirmish set the stage for the cyberneticists to promote their ideas more broadly. At that time, however, the natural scientists’ version of demographic truth—that China faced a population crisis warranting a drastic solution—had few adherents. Chapter 7 charts their vigorous efforts to recruit key groups of participants in the policy process—top decision makers, the educated public, and the intellectual community of scientists and engineers—to their cause. It documents too the dismay of the social scientists, who reacted with both quiet complicity and loud complaint to their loss of epistemic authority and policy influence. Chapter 8 turns to policy formulation, documentation, and dissemination within the institutions of the party Center. It shows how political leaders, working with top population experts and officials

throughout the bureaucracy, ironed the wrinkles out of the one-child policy. Then, through a complex blurring of science and politics, the party formalized the one-child-for-all rule as national policy and embodied it in the foundational document on population policy for the new era. During each phase I trace the coproduction of science and politics—the scientization of policymaking within the regime and the politicization of science

making by the regime’s policy advisors—and the larger effects those dynamics produced. This first instance of scientific policymaking produced a policy that was as much scientistic as scientific. We see in the book’s conclusion that it also promoted the rise of a technoscientific state and a highly state-centric biopolitics that embodjed the hierarchical and technicistic values of the scientists and engineers who triumphed.

The Cultural Story In twenty years of conversations with the makers of the one-child policy, one theme that emerged repeatedly was that of boundaries—and their violations. There was a sense that in the making of the one-child policy some-

thing very wrong had happened: fundamental boundaries had been breached, the proper order of things had been disturbed. Some informants

were troubled about the boundary between natural and social science. “Population belongs to social science, not natural science!” Others were disturbed about the line separating politics and science. “No government official asked the scientists for their opinion on population policy!”

28 Introduction Twenty-five years later, one longtime official declared: “Everyone is still

angry about this” (everyone, that is, except those who prevailed). Evidently, the birth of the one-child policy had something to do with territories and borders on the elite cultural map of the PRC.

Reflecting my informants’ concerns, my third story is about the making and remaking of the cultural map of China. By cultural map I mean the conceptual distribution of ideas, issues, ideologies, discourses, and representations at the elite level. The territorial divisions on the cultural map do of course correspond to institutional divisions in the PRC’s complex apparatus of rule: among China’s “systems” (xitong),'* among the government, party, and military sectors of the regime, among divisions of these three sectors, between legitimate and illegitimate insti-

tutions of population policymaking, and so on. In this project, however, I use the map concept loosely to highlight that what ultimately was at stake in these struggles over population was fundamentally cultural: for

the scientists it was the authority to articulate “the truth” on demographic matters, while for party leaders it was the legitimacy to govern the country and its population affairs. On this cultural map of elite politics we are most concerned with three spaces: the land of Marxian ideology/party politics, the territory of natural science and technology, and the region of Marxian social science. Under Mao, the regnant ideology of the CCP was of course MarxistLeninist-Mao Zedong Thought. The social sciences were either abol-

ished or forcefully transformed into fields of Marxian inquiry and annexed by the land of ideology/politics. Natural science, at least defense science and technology, occupied a relatively independent space on the map. Although military science certainly served the regime, in interna-

tional S&T it possessed an independent source of authority that party leaders, most of whom were political generalists, respected and needed in order to achieve their grander schemes of constructing socialism and defending the nation. The defense scientists’ success in building bombs,

missiles, and other critical guarantors and symbols of national might also helped secure for them a special space on that map of elite culture. Our story centers on the migration of topics and the shift of regions ~ on this cultural map that occurred in the early post-Mao years as the Deng party articulated its science policies for the new era and different groups of specialists jockeyed for cultural credibility and political influ-

ence. We see how “population control,” long trapped in the land of Marxian ideology/party politics, where it could not be addressed because of Marx’s antipathy to Malthusian ideas, migrated to the land of natural

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 29 science, where it could be formulated in essentially Malthusian terms and then transformed into concrete party policy. We observe how “the woman question,” because of its sensitivity to a Marxian party that claimed to have liberated women, remained in the land of party politics, to be settled by political, not scientific truths. Finally, we see how in the course of the battles over population, the logics and techniques of natural science and technology gained a huge foothold in the land of party politics, where they acquired great epistemic authority and, in turn, the political capacity to shape party policy. Modern S&T could not displace Marxism as the official ideology of the regime, but it became an important new de facto guiding ideology and source of legitimation.

The Technical Is the Political: On the Primacy of the Ad Hoc, the Tacit, and the Contingent

In telling these stories, I linger over details that to many readers may seem, if not simply trivial, then overly technical. In studying the science, for example, I am keenly interested in questions such as: How reliable

were the input data? How were the tables and figures constructed? In tracking the policy, Iam intrigued by matters such as: How were the _ plan targets created? How was the document announcing the one-child policy to the public prepared? Small details of person and place abound as well: Who telephoned whom to say what? Which ministries were located near one another in Beying? Why this attention to detail? First, following a classic anthropologi- — cal strategy of creating dense layers of descriptive material, I offer these

details as a kind of “thick description” of the people, practices, and places behind the one-child policy (Geertz 1973). In a study of policymaking, the concrete practices of science and politics are the ethnographic observations that matter. The emphasis on the specific and the contingent has analytic significances as well. First, an approach that eschews generalization to focus on the practices of specific actors operating in particular historical contexts is able to capture the disorderliness, variability, and historical contingency that characterize the real-life making of science and policy virtually everywhere. Such a perspective is especially useful in the case of China’s one-child policy, which was created at a time of extraordi-

nary societal and governmental disorganization. With few science making or policymaking institutions functioning according to standardized procedures, everyone had to make everything up as they went

30 Introduction along. An approach that underscores the ad hoc, contingent, and tacit captures the messy reality of late-1970s China. Second, in the governmentality and STS literatures, matters such as data quality, table construction, and target setting, far from being “merely technical,” form the crucial technical basis for knowledge claims and governance practices (e.g., Dean 1999: 31; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Latour 1987).

Close attention to such mundane matters is thus a methodological imperative. This work suggests that the micropractices of science making and policymaking, because they get embedded in governmental projects, provide a crucial key to the large-scale organization of power and politics in modern societies. Our study of the one-child policy will provide a dramatic illustration of that point.

“SLOGANS, “POLICIES,” AND “DOCUMENTS”: UNDERSTANDING THE PRC POLICY PROCESS

In telling these stories, this book will help to make sense of the differing

narratives about the one-child policy in the scholarly literature. Some accounts date its birth to January 1979, others date it to September 1980, while still others fudge the issue by using 1979-1980. Some observers place the key decision on the policy in the summer of 1978, others maintain it occurred in February 1980, while yet others believe it happened in June 1980. Given the importance of this policy, the lack of agreement about something so fundamental as when it came into being is truly surprising. To make sense of these differing interpretations, I need to describe some unusual features of the PRC policy process. Readers unfamiliar with Chinese politics are advised to pay close attention, for a grasp of these details is crucial to understanding the trajectory of the one-child policy mapped out in the chapters that follow.

Documentary Politics and Policy Dynamics

These conflicting accounts reflect the extraordinary complexity of the policy itself and of the process that gave rise to it. One source of confusion is that there was no single one-child policy; rather, there were several variants that differed in their emphasis on single childbearing (was it merely

“best” or was it mandated?) and in the proportion of couples granted exemptions. Another source of confusion can be traced to the PRC’s distinctive policy process. In standard political science models of the policy

process, a policy is formulated, is implemented, and produces effects,

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 31 which then feed back into further policymaking. In the PRC, policy formulation characteristically follows implementation. Generally, when China’s policy makers are working out a new policy, they first put it to the test in a small number of pilot projects (shidian). The experiences of these pilots are used to perfect the policy before it is formalized in a Central doc-

ument (that is, a document of the party Center, which is the center of power in the PRC). In some cases, party leaders may allow a policy to be more widely propagandized while the details are being worked out and the formal document prepared. In both cases, implementation precedes final formulation. Some observers of the one-child policy have used the time of implementation to signal its inauguration, whereas others have used the date of issuance of a formal policy document. In the earlier book, Governing China’s Population, my coauthor and I drew a clear distinction between the enforcement of a set of birth rules and their official codification in a formal document of the Central lead-

ership, treating only the latter as official “policy.” This book follows that practice. This emphasis on the authority of formal documents is based on the “documentary character” of Chinese politics under Deng Xiaoping (G. Wu 1995; Hamrin and Zhao 1995b). Under Deng, the Chinese Communist regime operated largely by directives from the top, which were given expression in a variety of Central documents: num-

bered documents of the Central Committee, speeches by top leaders, and so forth.'> Because it represented the collective will of the ruling leaders, a document that had passed through the appropriate stages and gained formal approval enjoyed symbolic and administrative authority. In population, as in other sectors, a policy became official and authoritative only when it was encoded in a major document of the party Central

Committee and/or governmental State Council. With codification it became a “policy” (zhengce); betore that it was only a “slogan” (Rouhao).

Although slogans may be and often were implemented on the ground, they lacked the authoritative character enjoyed by policies carrying the imprimatur of top party and government bodies. Not One, but Several One-Child Policies When Chinese informants today speak of a “one-child policy,” what they mean is a strict policy of one child for every couple with very, very few exceptions. That strict policy was codified as formal “policy” in September

1980 and was carried out between 1980 and 1984 in the now much denounced process of “one-childization” (yitaihua). The making of this

a3 Introduction TABLE 3. THE EVOLUTION OF THE ONE-CHILD POLICY

Announced by Codified in

Policy Rules Program Leader Central Document [1] Best is one, at most June 1978 (LG); October 1978

two; eliminate January 1979

third births (BP directors)* [2] Best is one December 1979 January 1980 [3] One for all February 1980 September 1980

[4] One child with Early 1984 (on trial April 1984 (on trial exceptions for rural basis); May 1988 basis); March 1988

couples with only (formal policy) (formal policy) a daughter**

*LG = Leading Group; BP directors = birth planning directors (at national meeting) **Known as the daughter-only (dunubu) or 1.5-child policy. NOTE: These rules applied to the Han majority; ethnic minorities have enjoyed more lenient policies.

strict one-child policy is the central focus of this book. To understand that process, we need to make one more distinction introduced in GCP. Directional policy (fangzhen zhengce) is the general statement of policy directions established by the top party leadership. Given legitimacy by the guiding ideology (zhidao sixiang), it provides the overarching framework for the formulation of more specific policies (or simply policies) by

the Central Party Secretariat and/or State Council. To guide readers through this complicated story, I offer here a brief overview of the evolution of the policies that culminated in the strict one-for-all rule. Read-

: ers may wish to refer back to this summary account (especially table 3) as they read through the chapters that follow. Soon after Mao’s death, top leaders in a series of speeches set the direc-

tional policy on population for the new era: the rapid growth of the nation’s population must be brought sharply under control if China was to achieve its central goal of the “Four Modernizations” by century’s end. In

working out specific policies to fit this overarching guideline, actors within | subordinate agencies of the government created a series of population plan targets and birth rules designed to encourage and advocate one-child fam-

ilies.'© Between June 1978 and September 1980, they devised three increas- | ingly restrictive birth rules. In each case, the rule was first announced by the birth planning program leader, initiating trial implementation, and later codified by the national political leadership in a Central document. Technically, the first was a “slogan,” the second a “policy.” These policies and their dates of implementation and codification are given in table 3.

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 32 _ This book traces the evolution of these policies. It asks how a relatively lenient policy encouraging one child but allowing two became a harsh policy demanding one for all immediately. Although that rigid one-for-all rule was abandoned four years later, that policy and the process leading up to its adoption had profound consequences for Chinese politics and state making that are felt even today. The book’s final chapter spells out some of those ramifications. Our story of policy evolution

ends shortly after the strict one-child policy was codified in a major document in September 1980. GCP takes the policy story up to late 2004. It shows how the implementation of “one-childization” in the countryside produced catastrophic effects, leading the party leadership in 1984 to soften the policy to allow rural couples whose first child was a girl to have two children. That one-and-a-half-child policy was formalized in early 1988 and it remains in effect as I write this in 2007. A “NECESSARY POLICY” BECAUSE THERE ARE “TOO MANY CHINESE” ? RETHINKING COMMONSENSE UNDERSTANDINGS

The epistemic approach outlined earlier is very different from widely accepted ways of understanding China’s population affairs. Conversations held over some twenty years suggest that in the United States there

exists a set of everyday assumptions about China and its population problems that is rarely if ever subject to scrutiny. Two are central to this project.

China’s Population “Crisis”: Real and Humanly Constructed

One assumption is that at the end of the Mao era (and, in the view of many, still today) China faced a veritable population crisis that was devastating the economy and environment and fully warranted a muscular

population policy (e.g., Lee and Wang 1999). Behind this enduring image of China as grossly overpeopled is the larger realist view that population problems exist unproblematically as objects in nature that lie in wait of scientific discovery. Although demographic research offers

no support for the idea that a drastic policy of one child for all was demographically or economically mandated (e.g., Banister 1987: 217), the power of the Malthusian myth is such that a great many observers, laypersons and specialists alike, believe that a harsh one-child policy was necessary if regrettable. Popular writings on China’s population

34 Introduction affairs often make this claim. In her book Mao’s War against Nature,

for example, Judith Shapiro depicts the “population explosion” as “China’s great nightmare,” which required “a draconian one-child family policy” (Shapiro 2001: 197, 46, 36). “The Chinese people are still paying a heavy price for Mao’s shortsightedness,” she asserts, in the form of a “devastating population burden of 1.3 billion” (pp. 46, 205). In this book I query these taken-for-granted notions and tell a different story about China’s population problems and their necessary solu-

tions. I certainly agree that China in the late 1970s faced a serious population problem. In contrast to the realist view, however, I present a social constructionist view which holds that population problems are real and they are socially constructed. The chapters that follow show how in the late 1970s the notion that China faced a “population crisis” was humanly created by particular scientists (and politicians) working

in specific contexts, and how the fundamentally political process of crafting this account was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that

presented China’s population problems as numerically describable, objective “facts.” I will argue that China indeed faced a serious population problem, but one that rose to “crisis” level—and thus demanded a one-for-all solution—only under a set of highly particular assumptions. China’s Population Scientists: Inside Politics and Shaped by It A second set of everyday assumptions concerns the work of population science and the relationship between science and politics. If, as the realist account holds, population problems exist as objective facts in nature, the task of population science is to discover those facts and report them to interested parties such as public policy makers. This commonsense account presumes that scientific knowledge about population can be

created outside of, and uninfluenced by, politics. More generally, it assumes that population science is objective and truth-telling, in stark contrast to politics, which is subjective and ideological. Not surprisingly, the small demographic literature on the post-Mao history of China’s population policy embodies these taken-for-granted assumptions. In the demographers’ bare-bones account of the origins of the one-child policy, in the 1970s Chinese population specialists discovered a new demographic truth: given China’s young age structure, the population would keep growing for a very long time. China’s leaders listened to the experts, saw the demographic light, and rationally responded

by devising a tougher (albeit too tough) policy to fix the problem. In this ,

An Anthropology of Science and Policy a5 story, sclence and numbers appear as conveyers of an unproblematic truth about demographic reality. As one scholar has put it: “during 1978 and thereafter, .. . emerging statisticians .. . began briefing top government leaders on the demographic momentum,” producing a “new understanding of demographic reality.”'” The China population literature also posits a sharp divide between science and politics. This divide comes out

in statements such as: “the vicissitudes of politics . . . cannot alter the precepts of knowledge” or “[the cyberneticists| crossed the borderline between demographic analysis and political advice.” !®

Demographers are right to emphasize the centrality of population science to the making of the one-child policy. When we look more closely at the science and how it was made, however, a picture emerges of a science that was more internally diverse and humanly shaped than

their accounts suggest. In this book I suggest that because science is humanly made and because population science is closely connected to population policymaking, Chinese population science—like all population

sciences—is not detached from, but linked to and in varying degrees shaped by politics. I also hold that the numbers of science tell a truth, but it is only one truth. That is because the numbers are created by particu-

lar human beings working in specific historical contexts, and both the people and the context leave their imprint on the science that gets made. This more political view of population science suggests that the decision to adopt a one-child-for-all rule was rooted not so much in “the facts” as in the politics behind the constitution of some numbers as “facts.” AN ANTHROPOLOGIST IN THE WORLD OF POPULATION SCIENCE AND ELITE POLITICS: PROBLEMS OF METHOD

It is with humility that an anthropologist approaches the prospect of doing fieldwork on elite policymaking in the PRC. As political scientists long ago discovered, China is a formidable object of political study. Like other communist regimes, the PRC concentrates power in the hands of a few party leaders who are obsessed with secrecy. In the early Deng era that is our focus, China was run by a couple dozen top party leaders who remained totally inaccessible to Chinese citizens, to say nothing of foreign scholars. Policy was decided on by the top party organ in a process that was cloaked in utmost secrecy to protect the sacred myth of party infallibility. The class of policies created through “scientific policymaking,” however, offers an unusual opportunity to peer into the inner world of CCP

36 Introduction policymaking. That opportunity is provided by the location of China’s scientists inside the regime (though not the state) apparatus. Depending on their institutional affiliation within the party, government, and/or military sector, from their location in the penumbra of the policy process sci-

entists who serve as advisors to the regime may acquire knowledge of, and perhaps even personal access to, those at the center of decisionmaking power. If one can gain access to the scientists, one can use the classic anthropological technique of in-depth interviewing with a small number of “key informants” to learn more than generally is possible about what goes on in the inner sanctum of decision making. From the scientists and their policy science one can also learn how a policy concept that may have been initially proposed by a leader is then “scientifically” shaped and transformed in the hands of experts. In many cases, scientists may know more about the evolution and empirical basis for a policy proposal than the leaders themselves, who may see just the finished product. For the social scientist seeking insight into CCP policymaking, talking to key scientists is likely to be more productive than interviewing top lead-

ers. That is because the culture of science is one of open discussion, whereas the culture of Leninism is one of secrecy. A politician is likely to

give formalistic and formulaic answers to the researcher’s questions, whereas a scientist, even one subject to Leninist restrictions, is likely to speak more openly to a colleague in the scientific enterprise. Unfortunately, as noted earlier, the sensitivity of the one-child policy has led China’s leaders to place severe restrictions on its public discus-

sion. Compounding the difficulties, the rules of the political game in Chinese elite politics work to impose uniformity and harmony on political actors and to silence those with dissenting views. Under the consensus imperative, important decisions at all levels are to be negotiated and consensually agreed on by all relevant parties. Under the loyalty imperative dictated by the principle of democratic centralism, those who disagree with an emerging policy consensus can offer dissenting viewpoints, but only until a policy decision is made by the political Center. Once a decision is rendered and the party line is issued, proponents and opponents alike must get on board and actively support the “correct policy choice” (Hamrin and Zhao 1995b). Defying these rules poses grave political dangers. Such rules and sanctions most definitely applied to the intellectuals involved in making the one-child policy. How does one get through the thicket of secrecy and behind the myth of party infallibility to see how a policy such as the one-child policy was made?

A decade of employment in a prominent nongovernmental organization

An Anthropology of Science and Policy a9 in the population field allowed me to get behind the public face of the onechild policy. In the corridors of China’s population studies institutes (and, to a much lesser extent, policymaking agencies) I discovered that the party’s

restrictions and erasures did not quiet the debate but simply pushed it underground. If all knowledges are situated—that is, contingent on how and why they are acquired—then it is important to convey to readers how

I came to be engaged with these questions and why they matter to me. These hows and whys have profoundly shaped the account presented in this book.

Situated Knowledges: A Brief History of Engagement

My knowledge of the population politics of the PRC is a product of an unusual career history that has spanned two quite different institutional (and intellectual and political) worlds: an international NGO and an American university. For the first ten years (1984-1994), I worked as anthropologist and policy analyst at the Population Council. Based in New York City, the Council is an international, not-for-profit, nongovernmental research organization interested in “population,” very broadly defined. When I joined the Council, I had no training in demography, the statistical study of population, but I had a keen interest in population studies—examination of the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of population processes. Population engaged my attention because projects of population management are so important a part of the world we live in and so little studied from humanistic perspectives such as anthropology. With its concern for population policy in broad social context, the Council was a good place from which to pursue these interests. I had just joined the Council when, in 1984-1985, the media began reporting the use of highly coercive practices in the Chinese birth program and the troubling violation of human rights that ensued. As an anthropologist concerned above all about the people in the population, I was appalled by the party’s adoption of a fertility policy that was so profoundly out of touch with rural reality that it could be enforced only through physical coercion. I was also perplexed by that move. How could the party endorse a policy that was certain to damage women’s bodies, destroy young lives, and ruin party-mass relations? To be sure,

this same party had inflicted the Great Leap Forward on the rural masses. But the Great Leap was the product of the megalomaniac Mao and the institutions of Maoist China. With his promises to reform the

38 Introduction party and bring prosperity to the Chinese people, Deng seemed different. I could not comprehend how harming the “vital interests” of the rural majority, as the party later recognized them to be, served the Deng

party’s goal of building a prosperous socialist nation. What were China’s leaders’ investments in this patently harmful policy? These were the questions I needed to answer.

Deeply concerned by the media stories and sensing a rare opportunity, I became keenly interested in discovering what I, as an anthropologist and China specialist, could contribute to understanding the policy process in China—and, I hoped, also helping in some small way to soften the policy. From my location in a highly regarded international NGO, I had extensive opportunities to travel to China and engage with Chinese population specialists as colleague and collaborator, and with Chinese policy makers as interlocutor. By quickly mastering the arcane lingo of China’s byzantine population politics, working collaboratively with Chinese scholars (in data gathering but not analysis or policy recommendation), and actively promoting U.S.-China scholarly exchange, over time I developed a reputation as a critical yet fair observer who

always speaks her mind, sometimes to the discomfit of her hosts. Despite—or because of—that critical voice, the sense of trust and the personal connections that developed opened doors to top policy makers and arenas of policymaking rarely accessible to foreign scholars in any domain of PRC policy.

I ended up spending twenty years trying to make sense of the onechild policy. The change of professional location altered my perspective in important ways. When I was based at the Population Council, I operated as an insider in the world of international population science and an insider-outsider in the field of Chinese population science. Absorbed into the population field, I did not much notice its scienceness. I rarely wondered where the one-child policy came from; that question was irrelevant to the project of monitoring and changing it. When I moved to a university anthropology department, I relocated to a place far outside the sphere of population science. From that more academic site I encountered critical work that illuminated how, historically in the West, the human sci-

ences such as demography had been central to the making of modern regimes of governance. New work on governmental logics posed fresh and important questions about the Chinese case: how did the bizarre idea of limiting all couples in a country of one billion to one child become thinkable? It was then that I turned my previous world of Chinese pop-

ulation science into an object of ethnographic investigation and began

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 39 systematically studying the work performed by population science in China’s modern project of human governance. This book is the result. Extended Interviews, Participant Observation, Documentary Research The arguments developed in this book draw on three sources of information. The first is a series of in-depth conversations held with China’s population specialists and officials between 1985 and 2006. My first sustained contact was with scholars at the Population Studies Institute at the People’s University of China, the leading center of population research in the country. Although I was primarily interested in current policy developments, I was curious about the history of the policy and asked questions about it on all my trips, duly recording the answers in field notebooks. A political culture of consensus coupled with fear of political reprisals encouraged those I met to stress their agreement on the necessity of the one-child policy and to downplay differences of opinion in the population field. As time went by, however, I came to understand that the field was torn by a great divide between the social and natural scientists. As I learned of the existence of different views on the one-child policy, I sought out people holding divergent perspectives. I particularly sought out opponents of the one-child policy, who had no public voice. In 1987 I made a special trip to Taiyuan to meet with the leading dissident from the one-child orthodoxy. In that same year | also met for the first time with the space scientists and engineers who were the main proponents of a strict one-child-for-all policy. As I put together a mental picture of the field and its fractures and began to identify the principle voices in the policy debates, J started treating these individuals as key informants. I met with them as often as possible to get their accounts of various episodes in the policy’s history and their views of each other’s views. Over time I was able to build networks

throughout the field. Although few scholars based outside Beijing had been involved in the making of the one-child policy, virtually all possessed important information about their colleagues closer to the policy process and about the larger climate in which the policy had been born. In China and at international meetings I was also able to talk with some students of those professors who had been present at the policy’s birth. These students provided important insight into their professors’ private views and the difficulties they faced expressing loyal opposition to a “basic state policy.” In 1994 I joined the University of California and my

interests shifted. In the late 1990s I began developing a much more

40 Introduction focused interest in the origins of that policy, whose harsh enforcement and wrenching effects I had become only too familiar with through rural fieldwork in 1988 and 1993. Equipped with new intellectual frameworks that showed how the science and politics might fit together, in 1999 and 2003 I returned to China to do sustained interviewing on the origins question, filling in pieces of the puzzle that were missing. Between 1985 and 2006, I conducted more than one hundred forty interviews that varied in length from roughly a half-hour to weekendlong marathon discussions. I was able to talk at length with all but one of the scientific principals involved in the policy’s making.'? I also met with

several ministers-in-charge of what was then the State Birth Planning Commission and with top officials at the Commission who were knowledgeable about the policy’s beginnings. Although the ministers were cautious, telling me little I did not already know, the officials in charge of substantive divisions of the Commission were remarkably forthcoming. These officials provided crucial inside information on the policy process within the regime and on the larger political context in which the decision to adopt a strict one-child policy was made. A list of key interviews cited in this book can be found in the back matter. In most cases, I cite these interviews by my interview file, giving date and location. For example, an interview cited as (I[K11/15/87,BJ) took place on November 15, 1987, in Beijing. When there are two interviews in the same city on the same day, I cite them as BJa and BJb. Unlike most anthropological studies, this book deals largely with important people with public identities. To protect my informants from possible political risk, where information they provided might be damaging to them, I use a generic location (such as “U.S.”) or

simply attribute it to a “confidential source.” } The arguments developed here are also informed by participant observation of Chinese population science undertaken while working collaboratively with Chinese specialists in the 1980s and early 1990s. While teaching a month-long course on gender and development and conducting multiyear collaborative research with scholars at Sichuan and X1’an Jiaotong Universities, I gained invaluable firsthand knowledge of the culture, institutions, techniques, and context of Chinese science making. From strategizing with like-minded colleagues to track the internal debates over the one-child policy, I gained a wealth of practical knowledge about how things get done in Chinese politics. The collabo-

rations helped in more specific ways as well, allowing me to discern social networks connecting various actors, identify key research reports that shaped the policy process, and perceive the subtle ways in which

An Anthropology of Science and Policy Al dissent was generally expressed. These cooperations also provided informal opportunities to ask casual questions about sensitive events of the past. These ad hoc knowledges—personal stories about the scien-

tists, gossip about China’s leaders, observations of the interactions between scientists and officials, and so on—form a crucial part of the ethnography of science and policy presented in this book. Finally, this book draws on extensive documentary research on the history of Chinese population science and policy. I acquired, read, and analyzed all the articles and books of the major figures in the debate written during the decade 1976 to 1986. To understand the Westernscientific roots of the winning policy proposal, I studied all the English-

language works cited by the authors, looking for borrowings and adaptations. To get a sense of the larger intellectual and political context in which the policy debates took place, I read widely in Chinese

population journals produced at the time (especially Population Research [Renkou yanjiu, inaugurated in 1977] and Population and Economy [Renkou yu jingji, from 1978]). I also studied biographies and speeches of top leaders as well as histories of the birth program and compendia of documents and “big events” produced by the birth establishment. Four of these sources proved particularly useful: Sun Muhan’s

history (Sun Muhan 1987); Shi Chengli’s chronology (Shi 1988); the birth program’s chronology of key events (Main Events or ME, published in 2001); and an unpublished chronology of important developments put together by a key staff person in the State Council’s Birth Planning Office from original documents he saved from the period. I cite the last as a confidential chronology (ConfidChron, compiled in the

early 2000s). In the 1980s I discovered many such materials, often labeled neibu (for internal consumption only) or even jimi (extremely secret), hiding in plain sight in the libraries of China’s population studies institutes. By the end of the 1990s scientific communications between

China and the United States had opened up so much that I was able to locate a uniquely valuable compendium of the writings of the scientific architect of the one-child policy in the Library of Congress in Washington,

DC. Many party documents, however, remained confidential. Studying a Hypersensitive Policy The political delicacy of the one-child policy had two important effects on my efforts to understand its origins. First, for a host of political reasons— the restrictions just mentioned, the obsessive secrecy on the part of key

42 Introduction specialists, the high political status of the lead scientist, and, most critically perhaps, the fearful knowledge that this story affects the historical

evaluation of the CCP—no one knew the full story of how the strict one-child policy was born. The problem was not just that population intellectuals and officials were reluctant to talk about it; they simply did not know. Different individuals were familiar with parts of the story in which they were involved (or about which they had heard gossip) but they were missing the other pieces of the puzzle. My challenge has been to find as many of the pieces as possible, figure out how they fit together,

and then place them in the larger historical context that makes them make sense. That is what I try to do in this book. At the same time, however (this is the second effect), the behind-thescenes controversy swirling around the policy—a controversy that per-

sists to this day—made people eager to press their viewpoints (and articles and books) on the interested anthropologist. It did not take long to discover that no one in China’s population field was neutral about the one-child policy. Instead, there were ardent proponents and fierce opponents. (The general public, of course, was kept in the dark about the policy debates.) Although the party could restrict public debate of the policy, it could not keep people from talking about it in the privacy of their offices. Both supporters and critics were not only willing but, at least at certain times, anxious to talk about it. As other students of Chinese politics have discovered, there are many things that Chinese can tell a foreigner that they cannot tell another Chinese, who might divulge the secret, Causing any number of political problems. Moreover, there was an incentive to tell this foreigner, who was actively concerned about the direction of Chinese population policy.*° Especially at times when internal debate on the policy was permitted (roughly 1984-1990, 1993 on),

both sides, but especially the critics, used me to get information and ideas out into a broader domain. Although the discussion centered mostly on the current policy situation, some were more than willing to tell me what they knew about the history of the policy, which, after all, affected all later policy developments. Throughout these years one of my most valuable resources has been a reputation as a “friend of China”—a constructive critic, not a hostile one. Despite my persistent criticisms of the one-child policy, and especially of its gender consequences, I was always graciously hosted when I went to China. The welcome I received was in part a product of Chinese cultural norms. It was also rooted in the PRC’s energetic project of “learning from Western S&T.” During the decade that I was with the

An Anthropology of Science and Policy 43 Population Council I was part of the “Western S&T” my colleagues in China sought access to. As a Council researcher I was centrally located at an organization that was perceived as a rich and influential member of the international community of population science and policy specialists. Moreover, during the 1980s and early 1990s I personally played an active role in fostering the internationalization of Chinese population studies.*! Chinese scholars knew about and appreciated my efforts to connect them to that world they sought to join. Lastly, my Chinese colleagues’ tolerance of my critical voice may also have reflected the fact

that many agreed that some of the social consequences of the policy were terrible and needed to be acknowledged and addressed. Some were undoubtedly happy that I was articulating the critique because, at least before the late 1990s, it was too dangerous for them to do that. AIMS AND AUDIENCES

If the origin of the one-child policy is a closed matter in China, why open it now? Why pursue this difficult and perhaps politically dangerous quest? For me the answers are of course intellectual, but they are political and ethical as well. Political and Ethical Stakes

| Despite the continued sensitivity of the one-child policy, prying open the black box of population science is a critical and, I believe, a politically constructive project. Delving into that troubled history should allow us to demystify the science underlying the one-child policy and clear the way for fresh consideration of policy alternatives that have lain dormant (at least publicly) for more than two decades. Now is a propitious time to undertake this work, for China’s population “crisis” has been largely resolved (though officially a potential crisis still lurks), permitting the gradual emergence since the mid-1990s of a new, health-oriented ratio-

nale for and approach to population work (GCP: chaps. 5, 6). Today some Chinese scholars are energetically encouraging the adoption of a variety of two-child alternatives. Although the leadership continues to postpone a decision on a policy change, this book may add weight to the scholars’ arguments, encouraging earlier consideration of alternatives to the one-child policy. The imperative is ethical as well. Whatever its effects on fertility, the harsh enforcement of the one-child policy has produced social suffering

44 Introduction on a monumental scale. The policy has also accelerated the growing gaps in the sex and age structure of China’s population, creating distortions that will complicate the nation’s social and economic development

for decades to come. It has also brought China moral condemnation abroad, reinforcing images of the PRC as an ethically problematic nation ruled by a heartless regime that cares more about its own survival than the well-being of its people. What constellation of histories, politics, and personalities bears responsibility for this? If the policy was made by actors and processes “beyond the state,” what becomes of the

coercion narrative that blames a cruel Communist Party? To what extent can the policy be traced to specific individuals? Did they promote

the one-child rule in full awareness of the individual, familial, and national trauma that would likely result, or did limits on knowledge and action at the time tie their hands? For students of contemporary China—and even more so, for the Chinese themselves—how the policy came into existence is a pressing moral question. Audiences

This analysis of the making of the one-child policy should be of general interest to scholars in several fields. Let me suggest a few of the contributions I hope it will make. For specialists on contemporary China, it unravels many mysteries surrounding China’s most notorious and consequential social policy, and provides the most detailed case study avail-

able of the construction of a single policy by the PRC regime. For demographers, the China story provides a sobering case of mathematical modeling gone awry and social policy missing its mark, concerns demographers themselves have raised both in general and with regard to China. It should also be of interest to women’s studies specialists as a cautionary tale of the dangers of applying certain kinds of scientific logic in a policy arena that deeply affects women’s lives; to political scientists as a model of a new sort of epistemic perspective on policy; to anthropologists as an illustration of why they should and how they can study top-level policymaking; and finally, to STS scholars as a powerful example of why the questions and insights of STS matter in the world we live in. Beyond the social sciences, this study should appeal to scientists curious about the nuts and bolts of science making in the highly polliticized arena of the PRC and to anyone interested in some of the political dynamics behind China’s emergence as a modern global power.

CHAPTER 2

History: The “Ideology” before the “Science”

In the late twentieth century, China’s outsized population meant that managing the quantity and quality of China’s people would be crucial to the success of the Chinese Communist Party’s historic missions of making socialist revolution, fostering socialist construction, and restoring the nation’s greatness on the world stage. Governing the population required framing the problem of human numbers and then defining its best solution. Most Westerners think of “the population problem” in Malthusian terms of population growth outstripping economic growth. Yet Karl Marx, Malthus’s adversary and the intellectual father of the Chinese Communist movement, insisted that the problem of population was not universal or absolute, but relative to the mode of production. Although Marx did not elaborate a theory of popu-

lation and its management, both Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels, as well as Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, had things to say on the population question. In the mid-twentieth century, the leaders of

the new Chinese People’s Republic, the latest entrant to the socialist camp, had to take these views very seriously. As Marx had suggested, the young People’s Republic faced a set of population problems that was distinctive to its socialist mode of production. In the early years after the 1949 liberation, a variety of reproductive

and population problems drew the attention of party leaders. Women cadres began demanding access to birth control so they could devote more time to studying and working for the revolution. The restoration of 45

46 History peace and the promise of collective prosperity stimulated vigorous pop-

ulation growth, raising the question of whether larger numbers were beneficial or detrimental to socialist construction. The problem that soon © came to most exercise party leaders was what Edwin A. Winckler and I

have called China’s “socialist birth problem”: socialist institutions that encouraged more births than they could support (GCP: 60). An overlarge population imposed a great “burden” on the socialist state, which was responsible for employing, educating, feeding, and housing it. The most socialist solution was to include population growth, along with economic and social development, within the overall development plan of the state. Mao Zedong himself was the principle author of this formulation. In one of the most famous speeches of his political career, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,” delivered to the Supreme State Council in February 1957, he defined the population problem as one of anarchy, and its solution as birth planning: Our plans, work, [and] thinking all should start from the [awareness] that we have a population of 600 million. . .. Here [we] need birth control; it would be great [if we] could lower the birth [rate] a bit. [We] need planned births. I think humanity is most inept at managing itself. It has plans for industrial production . . . [but] it does not have plans for the production of humans. This is anarchism, no government, or organization, no rules. If [we] go on this way, I think humanity will prematurely

, fall into strife and hasten toward destruction. (Mao 1989[1957]: 159) Socialist “birth planning” (jihua shengyu) differs from the Western liberal notion of “family planning” in that the role of the party-state is paramount: births are planned by the state to bring the production of human

beings in line with the production of material goods. Under Chinese socialism, population policy breaks population growth down into its demographic determinants—the number of children, their spacing, and

the timing of marriage and childbirth—and subjects each of them to regulation by the socialist state. Indeed, it is only in such a state-managed, social-engineering kind of reproductive system that a one-, two-, or threechild policy becomes thinkable. State birth planning is a unique invention of PRC statecraft.

Like many policies of the early Deng era, the one-child policy was born of the traumas of Maoist China. The damage Mao inflicted on China’s population politics and policy is legendary. This story has been told before. What has not been relayed in a compelling way is the devastation Mao visited on population science and how that shaped the making of population policy in his day and beyond.! It is the contention

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 47 of this book that the treatment of science and the science-politics relationship under Mao—the reordering of the sciences, the redrawing of the boundaries between science and the regime, and finally the decimation of

the human sciences—was fundamental to the creation of the one-child policy in the years following Mao’s death. Leader influences—the traditional preoccupation of China political science—largely determined whether and when China’s population would be subject to management by the state, but science shaped how it would be governed. In the early 1950s, the regime declared population a field of interest and a matter of state. But how would population be governed in the young People’s Republic? What tools and techniques, logics and rationales would guide the making of population policy? From the mid-19 50s, the authoritative formula for governing the population was the state planning of births. In a nation of a half-billion and growing, the planning of

social and economic development, including population growth, was a complicated matter, especially for a new and inexperienced government. Moreover, like other objects of modern governance (“society,” “economy”), “population” was an abstract entity that possessed its own internal laws of operation. The best source of ideas and methods for managing this new object of governance was the social science of population, whose job it was to illuminate the characteristics and dynamics of the population. In the West the field of population studies is known as demography. Because Chinese population studies was constituted quite differently, I

largely avoid the term “demography” and call it simply the social or human science of population. In the first decade of the PRC, China’s population field, though small, possessed a variety of logics (theories, hypotheses, historical cases) and techniques (for data processing, calculation, representation) that could have helped the new government understand the dynamics of population growth, problematize the population issue, and work out the com-

plexities of state planning and policymaking. But China’s experts on population would not be allowed to provide those services. Instead,

they would find their careers and in some cases also their lives destroyed. The decimation of the nation’s scientific capacity was one of

the most misguided and politically consequential moves of the Mao party. (One set of sciences—that involved in national defense—was pre-

served and fortified; I leave this second half of the science story for a later chapter.) In a series of campaigns, the party under Mao subordinated, silenced, and finally decimated the social science of population. In the reordering of higher education movement of the early 1950s, the

48 History party erased the boundary between the social sciences and party politics, making social science part of Marxian ideology/party politics. In

the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s, the party silenced the population field’s most prominent and prescient spokesman, turning the study of population into a dangerous, indeed, forbidden zone of intellectual practice. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, social

scientists who were still doing intellectual work were robbed of any remaining credibility by being dragged into the vicious class politics of the day. The party’s politicization of population knowledge and debase-

ment of population specialists would have profound effects on the making and content of population policy during Mao’s day and beyond.

Despite Mao’s deep ambivalence about population control, in the waning years of Mao’s rule his able premier, Zhou Enlai, managed to get birth planning on the agenda. Zhou’s efforts would be greatly constrained by the difficult environment of late Maoism, however. In China’s tumultuous Maoist history (1949-1976), the Cultural Revolution stands out as the time when radical antimodern ideology most | totally eclipsed reasoned policymaking. For readers unfamiliar with that regressive era in China’s history, when the antiscientific, antirational, anti-Western strands in Maoist political culture had their greatest effect, it is necessary to briefly review its core political struggles since they had a profound impact on the making of China’s population policy, not only

during the Cultural Revolution but after it ended as well. In 1966, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to purge (putative) enemies of his revolution. That year he unleashed the youthful Red Guards, who rampaged through the streets destroying remnants of old culture, attacking all established authorities, and shutting down the government. When in 1969 the nation stood paralyzed and on the verge of fracturing, Mao called in the army to quell the violence. In the spring of that year, a party congress declared the Cultural Revolution over and restored the institutions of government. Yet the relative calm soon gave way to a second phase of the Cultural Revolution that was less violent but equally corrosive. After an aborted coup d’état by Lin Biao, Mao’s heir apparent, in 1971, the nation’s elite politics was dominated by a struggle over succession to Mao. Mao masterminded the contest by allowing development-oriented moderates under Zhou to control the executive organs of the political system while giving

a radical, “ultraleftist” clique led by his wife Jiang Qing (later dubbed , the “Gang of Four”) control of the powerful propaganda and media systems. The years 1973-1976 brought a seesaw between these two

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 49 camps, as the moderates strived to create sound policies and stable insti-

tutions to develop the economy while the radicals launched media attacks and mass campaigns to revolutionize the political climate and undermine the modernizers. Mao intervened in the conflict on occasion to tip the scale in one direction or another, but he never allowed one side to finally prevail.’ It was only in late 1976, when Mao’s death finally enabled the arrest of the Gang of Four, that modernizing projects such as birth planning could move steadily forward. In the midst of these larger political struggles, birth planning, which

had a fragile existence in the 1950s and 1960s, was reborn and struggled to achieve policy formalization, ideological legitimation, and pro-

grammatic institutionalization. Because there was no science of population to inform those efforts, they were guided by logics and tech-

niques rooted in Maoist politics and Marxian ideology. Starting in 1970-1971, Premier Zhou and other development-minded moderates managed to tentatively institutionalize a process of population planning, policymaking, and program building. But because the party Center was unwilling to get involved in this politically dangerous arena and the Gang of Four was successful in implicating it in revolutionary politics, program leaders were constrained to work cautiously and away from the political Center, building policy and program in close consul~ tation with the localities. Following a “mass line” policymaking process

favored by Mao, program leaders created the moderate and flexible “Jater-longer-fewer” policy that allowed two children, well spaced and timed. After Mao’s death, the policymaking process of the mid-1970s

would be labeled “ideological” and soundly rejected. Although the policy process was indeed guided by political rather than scientific logics, and it was slow and messy rather than efficient and precise, both

that process and the policy it produced had important virtues. Even without numbers and science, in the institutional context of the 1970s the later-longer-fewer policy proved remarkably effective in gaining

: peasant compliance and reducing population growth. After Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in late 1976, the policy process became more regularized and the policy was sharpened and tightened, yet it was still subject to leftist campaigns. It was only in early to mid-1978, with the rise of Deng Xiaoping and the shift of the nation’s agenda to rapid modernization, that population control began to receive strong and consistent attention from the top leadership. The Deng party, however, faced serious problems of legitimacy. During the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, people had lost faith

50 , History in the party and the Marxian ideology that justified its right to rule. The

party needed a new basis for its legitimacy, one that sharply distinguished it from Mao’s party. The Deng party would find its salvation in “modern science,” which in the Chinese cultural and political scheme was the very antithesis of “Maoist ideology.” Despite the demographic, ideological, and political accomplishments of later-longer-fewer, the

new leadership would reject that approach in favor of a much more forceful policy based on “modern science.” This chapter elaborates these arguments and provides some histori-

cal details essential for understanding what follows. We begin with Chairman Mao, a virtual dictator whose contradictory stances on population created the strained linguistic context within which population work had to proceed and whose mass campaigns prevented the sustained development of birth work for two full decades. The next section describes how the party subordinated, silenced, and finally abolished

the field of population studies, depriving itself of the best source of advice on population governance. The succeeding four sections highlight the accomplishments of moderates associated with Premier Zhou, who managed to create a policy, plan, and program of population governance, and to ideologically legitimize them, in the politically chal-

lenging environment of the Cultural Revolution. The chapter’s conclusion suggests why the achievements of the 1970s would appear inadequate to the leaders who succeeded Mao. Looking forward to the next part of the book, it explains why “modern science” carried such appeal as a solution to the political, economic, and demographic problems those leaders faced. MAO’S HANDIWORK: A DANGEROUS AND DIFFICULT PROJECT

In a country where every issue was swept up in the political maelstrom that was Maoist China, population control was an especially treacherous matter. Population limitation was an ideological minefield because it seemed neo-Malthusian heresy in a Marxian state.* Soviet orthodoxy was heavily pronatalist. Until Chinese theorists found a way to legitimate the control of population growth in terms of the regnant Marxist-

Leninist theory, any project to restrain population growth would be vulnerable to political attack. Population control was also dangerous because during his quartercentury rule (1949-1976), paramount leader Mao Zedong articulated

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 51 changing and contradictory positions on the subject. Although Mao had no principled views on the population question, on several occasions he was provoked into speaking out on the issue. His initial and belligerent hostility to population restriction, followed by his flip-flops

on the question, created a climate of uncertainty and fear around an already delicate matter, making it extremely difficult for supporters of

population control to secure a fixed place for their project on the nation’s agenda. Without Mao’s personal support, the birth project could not go forward. During most of Mao’s tenure, population growth remained unchecked by any governmental program. The numbers of Chinese grew rapidly, slowing only in the early 1970s when advocates of population control managed to get a birth planning program installed countrywide. In the Speech Space of Chairman Mao

Mao’s often colorful comments on population possessed what one Chinese observer has called “decisive influence” because of the leadercentric politics of language in the PRC (Qu 1987: 37). This leader-centered politics of discourse would shape not only policymaking but also science

making—in Mao’s time and beyond. How did that politics work? Mao’s China was an autocratic system based on personal fiat by a veritable dictator (Hamrin and Zhao 1995b; Yan 1995). In the People’s

Republic, language has been a major domain of power politics. The Chinese political scientist Yan Jiaqi has shown how in this sharply hierarchical system, in which power is concentrated in the hands of a few,

the power of discourse belongs to the dictator or his equivalent, who alone enjoys complete freedom of speech (Yan 1995). Under the “follow-

the-leader imperative,” neither subordinate leaders nor anyone else is | allowed to speak differently or think independently. The rules of the political game require that others always remain within the “speech space” of the top leader, using his words to express their thoughts. They may extract his words from their original context and stretch, rework, or even twist their meaning, but they must express their views in his formulations. In a system in which political formulations are either “correct” or “incorrect”—absolutely right or dead wrong—violation of correct language has been a serious and dangerous political offense. The speechspace rule and the sanctions for violating it were clearly evident in the sphere of population, endowing Mao’s every utterance with extraordi-

nary significance and leaving everyone else, cadre and expert alike,

52 History fearful of making discursive or ideological mistakes. Let us see what those remarks were. Following the rules of Chinese language politics ourselves, we pay only minimal attention to their historical context, simply listing the main utterances that would stamp the politics of population during Mao’s lifetime and beyond. In September 1949, in response to a taunt of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson about new China’s inability to feed its people, Mao loudly proclaimed his opposition to population control, declaring: It is a very good thing that China has a big population. Even if China’s population multiplies many times, [the PRC] is fully capable of finding a solution. .. . [R]evolution plus production can solve the problem of feeding the population. .. . Of all things in the world, people are the most precious. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, as long as there are people, every kind of miracle can be performed. .. . All pessimistic views are utterly groundless. (Mao 1954[1949]: 453-454)

By the mid-1950s, events had changed Mao’s mind. In early 1957, in

the context of a campaign for comprehensive state planning, he introduced the notion of the (state) planning of births in the Contradictions speech mentioned earlier. In October 1957, at the Third Plenum of the party’s Eighth Central Committee, he elaborated this idea: “[As for] grasping the population problem, perhaps [we should carry out] three years of experimental pilots, three years of popularization, and four years of universal implementation. . . . Let’s have a ten-year plan” (ME: 20; GCP: 72). In January 1958, on the eve of the Great Leap Forward, Mao reversed himself again. Celebrating the productive labor power of a large population, he declared to the Supreme State Council: “for now a large population is better” (ME: 22). In August 1958, at a party conference in Beidaihe, Mao was positively optimistic: “[Our] views on population should change.

In the past, I said that [we] could manage with 800 million. Now I think that one billion plus would be no cause for alarm. . . . When [people’s] level of education increases, [they] will really practice birth control” (T.

. White 1994: 273). Mao did not repudiate birth control or birth planning, yet his about-face on the desirability of restricting population growth left his personal support for that project in some doubt. In the 1970s, an aging Mao finally confirmed his (lukewarm) support

for birth planning. In February 1974, he confided in a foreign visitor his worry that “the Chinese people are too numerous” (ME: 52). In December of the same year, Mao wrote in the margins of the State Planning Commission’s “Report on the 1974 National Economic Plan”: “it won't do to not control population [growth]|” (renkou fei Rongzhi buxing)

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 53 (ME: 54). These would be Mao’s last—and most productive—words on population.

On-Again, Off-Again: Birth Planning in Mao’s China Mao’s varying “instructions” on population, combined with the destructive campaigns he launched to propel China into a communist utopia, meant that the creation and implementation of a birth planning policy could be pursued only intermittently (for the details, see GCP: chap. 3).° In the early 1950s Chinese policy was Soviet-influenced and pronatalist. The 1953 census counted more than 580 million Chinese, prompting a decision that “the party approves birth control” (ME: 7, 8). With population growing rapidly, in the mid-1950s the state began to encourage individual birth control. That project was effectively sidelined in early

1957 when Mao proposed the very different approach of state birth planning. Mao’s speech stimulated an upsurge of public discussion and government advocacy of birth control. These efforts were soon halted with the launching of the Great Leap Forward and Mao’s early 1958 declaration that “for now, a large population is better.” In the early 1960s, after the Great Leap collapsed, supporters managed to get population control back on the political agenda by advanc-

ing a limited program that embodied Mao’s concept of state birth planning, by then the only politically feasible framework within which population governance could be organized. Yet birth work was interrupted again, this time by the Cultural Revolution that erupted in 1966. During the early, Red Guard phase of the Cultural Revolution, the country descended into chaos. Virtually all routine functions of government

ceased. In the late 1960s, barefoot doctors continued to purvey birth control to rural women, but the state planning of births ended.° In the early 1970s, after order was restored, Premier Zhou Enlai succeeded in getting birth planning reinstated and, for the first time in the history of the PRC, extending it countrywide. In the mid-1970s, Mao’s last scribbling on population—“it won’t do to not control population” — provided the long-awaited authorization for the full-speed-ahead development of a policy and program. Advocates of birth planning seized on these words as the Great Helmsman’s acknowledgment of the seriousness of China’s population problem and his authorization to expand the birth program and develop a legitimating theory. Although Mao died in 1976, because there were still people around who could use Mao’s words to cause trouble for population controllers, population would continue

54 History to be a dangerous topic. One of the main tasks facing post-Mao population policy makers would be to neutralize that danger, making the control of population growth discussable once again.

A Huge Population Getting Huger Before the institution of nationwide birth planning in the early 1970s, China’s population responded erratically to the turbulent vicissitudes of Chinese socialism. Growth rates rose in good times and fell in bad. With population growth largely ungoverned—“anarchic,” in Mao’s term— the overall numbers of Chinese grew apace. When Mao declared the vic-

tory of the Revolution in 1949, the Chinese mainland was home to 542 million people. By the time he launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958, that number had grown to 660 million. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution the population had risen to 745 million. By 1970, when order was assured, it had climbed to 830 million. Put another way, with every passing decade (from 1949 to 1959 to 1969), the CCP had 135 million more Chinese—the vast majority poor and rural—to govern. Although Mao-era leaders did not have such accurate counts—Mao’s China had neither population science nor reliable population statistics—they knew that China had a gigantic population that was growing more so all the time. What happened to the science and statistics? POPULATION STUDIES IN MAO’S CHINA: FORBIDDEN TERRAIN

Before the Communist liberation of 1949, China had been home to a lively interdisciplinary field of population studies.’ While maintaining the Confucian tradition of the socially responsible scholar, in the early twentieth century China’s university-based scholars carried on energetic debates over the relationships among population, poverty, and national power largely free from political interference by the Nationalist state.® Under the Communists that would change.’ All knowledge producers

were incorporated into the highly centralized Marxian regime (composed of party, government, and military) and subject to the politicization of their work. Although all fields of scholarly endeavor would be subject to extensive political and institutional controls, different fields were placed in somewhat different locations on the elite cultural map of the PRC. While some were located inside the land of “ideology/politics” and subject to constant politicization of their work, at times some fields

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 55 enjoyed relative cartographic autonomy from ideology/politics and thus a degree of freedom to chart their own intellectual course. The social

science of population enjoyed no such freedom. It would be located firmly within the domain of party politics, where it would be first subordinated and then obliterated in the late 1950s. This section traces the political lineaments of that fateful history. Subordinating Social Science

Following Marxist tradition, the Chinese Marxist regime held that in class society there are two kinds of knowledge, one illuminating the forces

of production, the other clarifying the relations of production (Y. Wang 1993: 40). “Natural science” (ziran kexue) studied the natural world, and included science and technology. “Social science” or “human science” (shehui kexue, renwen kexue, wenke) probed the mysteries of the social world, and included social science, history, the humanities (liter-

ature, religion, and so on), the arts, and philosophy, the latter sometimes classified separately because it was deemed the basic science of human knowledge (Braybrooke 1979: 593-594). Because of its links to the forces of production, Marx considered natural science a progressive, liberating, revolutionary force. A century later,

Mao too viewed natural science and modern technology as important means of liberation from nature and traditional culture (Suttmeier 1974: 35; also 1970). Because of their suspect class location as potential allies of the bourgeoisie, however, scientists and technicians would be allowed to make a positive contribution to the nation’s socialist construction only

when party politics allowed.!° Social science met an even worse fate. Social science was deemed largely unnecessary because, it was believed, Marxism already possessed a full and correct understanding of the social world. Social science would have little independent role to play in China’s socialist construction. And because all knowledge of society was deemed inherently class-based, China’s social scientists would be dragged into the interminable class struggles that marked party politics under Mao.!! In the early 1950s, when the new regime adopted the Soviet model in education, top priority was given to the development of the natural sciences and engineering, which were deemed crucial to the rapid creation of an industrial economy. Following the Soviet view of Marxism as a comprehensive theory that covered virtually all the social disciplines, most of China’s social sciences, including sociology, home to many population specialists, as well as political science, anthropology, and legal studies,

56 History were deemed dispensable and abolished. Economics, home to economically oriented population experts, survived, but it was transformed into

a Marxian discipline tasked with developing Marxian-theoretic approaches to finance, trade, law, politics, planning, and statistics (Dernberger 1980; C.C. Lin 1981; Wong 1979: 37-62).'* Contacts with the West effectively ceased. Non-Marxist intellectuals were subject to firm “thought reform” and scholars in all social science fields were put on notice that their role was to serve the regime. Serving the regime meant that social science would have an applied, social problems focus. The bourgeois social science of the West would not be tolerated; instead, Marxist-Leninist theory would guide all their work. Indeed, the role of the social sciences was primarily to rationalize the party line and inculcate political values. To this end, the social sciences were placed under the purview of the Propaganda Department of the party’s Central Com-

mittee (Ogden 1982: 586).'> With these moves the regime redrew the boundaries on the cultural map, making social science part of ideology/politics and radically subordinating social scientists to the party-

state, subject to continuous politicization of their work. Silencing “Anti-Rightists”: The Shameful Matter of Ma

After several years of inattention, in 1953-1954 the leadership spoke out on population, announcing the party’s approval of birth control. In taking a stand on this sensitive issue, the party claimed population as its own, marginalizing the voices of a variety of social forces—public health specialists and women cadres as well as social scientists—who had expressed views on issues such as contraception, abortion, and pop-

ulation control. This was the first step in the displacement of China’s population intellectuals from the public sphere. In the mid-19 50s, social scientists would continue to have a public voice on the population issue, but in sharing their ideas they would have to exercise great caution.

During the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957, when scholars in every field were encouraged to speak their minds, many prominent population specialists complied, only to have their heads chopped off in the Anti-Rightist Campaign against the party’s critics that followed close on its heels (Tien 1973).'* Specialists who advocated population control, even those using the politically correct formulation of “birth planning,” were persecuted and silenced for the ideological crime of Malthusianism. The most noteworthy case was that of Ma Yinchu, the eminent economist and president of Beijing (formally, Peking) University, the nation’s

The “Ideology” before the “Science” | oF premier institution of higher education. In March 1957, less than a month

after Mao had proposed the state planning of births, Ma published his long essay “New Population Theory.” In this treatise, Ma highlighted the detrimental effects of population growth on capital accumulation and thus

industrialization, and called for strong measures to slow the growth of Chinese numbers (Ma 1997[1957]). Although Ma’s essay used the Marxian formulation of “contradictions” between consumption and accumulation, stressed the “errors” and “bankruptcy” of Malthusian theory, and advanced a then-politically correct policy position, it was an ideal target for the anti-

rightist forces. Mao’s about-face on population control in early 1958— *for now a large population is better”’—only encouraged the critics. After

two hundred articles appeared criticizing the essay, in 1960 Ma was removed from his post and silenced. Demography became a “forbidden

| zone” (jingu) and population specialists were muzzled. From then on, any proposal to control population growth could be equated with Malthu-

sianism and its author severely sanctioned (Hou 1981). Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, many social scientists continued to consider population control an urgent priority. Some persisted in researching and writing on population issues, but they were denied access to publication outlets (IK11/18/85,BJa; Banister 1987: 16-20). With the ideological issues unsettled and Mao expressing divergent and conflicting views, population was a dangerous and publicly undiscussable topic.

With the silencing of Ma, the party under Mao not only rejected a concrete proposal that might have effectively controlled population growth; it also arrested the development of population science, depriving the party of the technical support it would need to fully understand and rationally manage population growth. The suppression of population studies also aborted the creation of a Marxian theory of population control, without which birth planning lacked ideological legitimacy. As

long as Mao was alive, population work would have to be guided by | political, not scientific, logics and techniques. The suppression of Ma and his policy ideas would leave a deep scar on the party’s reputation. After Mao’s death, the case of Ma Yinchu would become a powerful symbol of all that was wrong with the Maoist approach to governance. Criticizing “Reactionary Bourgeois Authorities” During the Cultural Revolution, population specialists—indeed, virtually all intellectuals—came under all-out attack (T.H. Chen 1981; Du 1992;

Pepper 1996; Hayhoe 1999).!° The educational and (civilian) science

58 History establishments suffered severe disruption. (Defense science was somewhat protected, as we shall see in chapter 4.) In a clear break from the early 1950s and the early 1960s, when the class location of natural scien-

tists remained ill defined or only ambiguous, Cultural Revolution polemics now placed natural scientists and managerial elites in the super-

structure of ideology/politics. Criticized as “reactionary bourgeois authorities” and the “stinking ninth category” on the “black list of bad types,” intellectuals and managerial elites were targeted for censure, class

struggle, and “reeducation” to the proletarian outlook. Social scientists were placed on the front line of the propaganda battle. Always the first to be vilified, they were made to wage and to endure endless class struggle (Y. Wang 1993). Although natural scientists were subject to attack as well, the aggressions against them appear to have been less vicious and less sustained (Ogden 1982). During the violent, anarchic Red Guard phase of the Cultural Revolution, scientists and university professors were harassed, humiliated, paraded in the streets, and physically abused, sometimes to the point of death. Teaching and research were severely curtailed, publication of professional journals ceased, scholarly manuscripts, files, and libraries were destroyed, and ties with the outside world were completely severed. Universities were closed and virtually all faculty ban-

ished to the countryside, where they spent months to years at “May Seventh Cadre Schools” performing manual labor, engaging in political

study, and “learning from peasants and workers” (T.H. Chen 1981: 100-103; Pepper 1996: 388-389). China’s premier research institute, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was ravaged. During the years of greatest turmoil, roughly sixty of its hundred-plus research institutes and centers were shut down, while 1,900 of its 2,100 social scientists and philosophers stopped working (Miller 1996: 88, 97). Even those who continued to work were forced to spend most of their time on political meetings and political study (Harding 1980). By the end of the upheaval, the nation’s natural and social science had disintegrated. INSTITUTIONALIZING A BIRTH PROGRAM AND PLAN: ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE 1970S

As government premier in charge of provisioning the urban population, Zhou Enlai was keenly aware of the economic difficulties caused by rapid population growth. In the early 1970s, as the chaotic phase of the

Cultural Revolution wound down, Zhou managed to get population work on the party’s agenda. Yet with Mao masterminding a circus in

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 59 the political arena, promoting these ideas would not be easy. While per-

mitting Zhou and other moderates to create a nationwide birth planning program, Mao allowed radicals under his wife Jiang Qing to destabilize this and other modernizing efforts. The radicals used their control over propaganda and the media to foment mass campaigns, sweeping up birth planning, along with everything else, in them. Birth planning was caught up in all the nationwide political campaigns that marked that era, from the Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius to the Campaigns to Learn from Dazhai in Agriculture and Daqing in Industry. Under the slogan “take class struggle as the key link,” the discourse of birth planning during the decade was highly ideological

and militaristic, targeting “old ideas” and noncompliant individuals. According to program historians, leftist ideology obstructed the development of birth work. Jiang Qing claimed that birth planning was a | “feminine triviality” (popo mama de xiaoshi, literally, a mother-in-law’s and mother’s small affair) and that promoting the policy on births was evidence of “bureaucratism, obstructionism, and oppression.” Jiang also opposed using film, a key communicational tool, to propagandize birth planning and educate the public about birth control techniques (Sun Muhan 1987). At the mass level, the use of class struggle techniques to promote birth planning alienated the masses from the party and its birth policies, contributing to the general loss of faith in the leadership and ideology that occurred during the 1970s. Against this background of elite political struggle and growing mass

alienation from the party, birth planning, which had been introduced slowly and partially in the 1950s and 1960s, was revived and extended countrywide. Despite the interference of the Gang, Premier Zhou and other development-minded moderates managed to institute a population plan, program, and policy (for the details, see GCP: chap. 3). Zhou began this initiative in early 1969 and early 1970 when he told participants at successive national planning meetings that during the 1970s the country must pay attention to birth planning (ME: 41-42). At the 1970 meeting, Zhou noted that because birth planning had been relaxed during the Cultural Revolution, young people were marrying early and having more children. Therefore, he instructed, all heavily populated provinces and municipalities must pay special attention to birth planning. While repeating one of Mao’s de rigueur pieces of demographic wisdom, “a large labor force is a good thing,” the premier added a crucial qualification: “but it must be coordinated with economic development” (ME: 42).

60 History In the 1950s and 1960s the issue of birth planning had been closely linked to that of maternal and child health. The planning of births was rationalized primarily in terms of its benefits to the health of mother and child, which in turn would benefit socialist construction. To the premier and other moderate leaders concerned about China’s poverty, that focus on individual health diverted attention from the damaging macroeconomic consequences of unchecked population growth. Drawing on the planning rationale Mao had introduced in his 1957 speech, but now stretching it to emphasize its full economic implications, in

June 1970 Zhou told a Ministry of Health meeting: “Birth planning belongs to the sphere of national planning; it is not a health problem, it is a planning problem. If you can’t even plan population, what kind of state plan is it?” (Sun Muhan 1987: 143). Zhou’s reframing of the population problem would mark the beginning of a decisive turn away from individual health toward national economic construction as the central

rationale for the state planning of births. Although it would take a decade to shift gears on the ground, this reformulation would have broad ramifications for population policy, planning, and program development in the years ahead. In the early 1970s, population planning became a reality for the first

time. In 1971 a population control target was included in the Fourth Five-Year Plan (1971-1975), in 1973 a target was reflected in the annual plan, and in 1975 targets for the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1976-1980) were handed down to lower levels of government for realization on the ground.

From this point on, population planning would be an integral, routine feature of economic planning and birth planning would be a fixed item on the work agendas of cadres at all levels (Wang Hong 1991: 48). To fulfill those plan targets, the State Council authorized the buildup

of a nationwide program of state birth planning. For the first time in PRC history, birth planning was extended to virtually every corner of

the country (sparsely populated minority and other areas were exempted). To manage the development of birth policy, the State Coun-

cil restored the Birth Planning Leading Group, which had first been formed in the mid-1960s.!° Below the Leading Group, it (re)established an administrative office within the Ministry of Health to be responsible

for day-to-day coordination and supervision of birth planning work (Shi 1988: 158). In 1973, that office became the administrative office of the newly formed Leading Group. This important office was the center of birth planning activity, in charge of managing policy, planning, and program development in the late Mao era and beyond.

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 61 In the early 1970s, the State Council named Li Xiuzhen head of these offices and national program leader. (In March 1976, Li was also named deputy head of the Leading Group [ME: 57].) A specialist in women’s health with years of experience in rural work, Li was the longtime head © of the ministry’s Maternal and Child Health Department (sz), and the de

facto head of birth planning work in the 1960s (Shi 1988; Yu Wang 2001: 51)./’ Li would put a distinctive propeasant, prowoman, prohealth stamp on China’s population policy and program until around mid-1978, when Vice Minister Chen Muhua was put in charge of the Leading Group and macroeconomic concerns took precedence.

With these moves, a plan and a program for planned births were implemented throughout the country. Yet, as GCP argues, because of the continued political sensitivity of the population issue, the party Center

declined to put its imprimatur on these developments (pp. 84-90). Instead, policy speeches and statements during the decade were presented as the “personal views” of the program leader—that is, not official party policy. Provincial officials promoted birth planning, but took their authority from vague orders and instructions from above (“the important instructions of Chairman Mao and the party Center,” “the spirit of the Tenth CCP National Congress”).!® During the early to mid-

19708, then, the party Center effectively allowed birth planning to develop at subnational levels, but without clear and formal political authorization. By declining to formally approve the documents and activities of the program, the Center left the birth project vulnerable to interference by the radicals. The machinations of the Gang appear to have

slowed moderates’ efforts to develop a formal rationale for birth planning and frustrated their attempts to convince the full leadership that population control was an important matter. Despite the remarkable success of Zhou and others in instituting a program and plan, this history left the birth work of the 1970s entangled with “Maoist ideology,” an entanglement that would cloud its reception after Mao’s death. “MASS LINE” POLICYMAKING: A NECESSITY WITH SOME VIRTUES

Those responsible for making population policy in the early 1970s faced

daunting challenges. In the late 1960s the government had been shut down, leaving the apparatus of economic planning and policymaking in shambles. Moreover, birth planning was a new function of government. After the depredations of the Cultural Revolution, the government’s

62 History birth planning office, like virtually all organs of government, was short on staff, know-how, and credibility (IK.12/25/03,BJ; Yu Wang 2001).

Technical obstacles abounded. There were no national-level data on China’s population. Techniques for calculating future population growth, crucial for sound policymaking, were nonexistent. Birth plan-

ning was still not formally legitimated in Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong ideology. There was no science of population to provide tech-

nical and theoretical support. With radicals battling moderates for influence over Mao and his policies, the birth project remained highly sensitive and subject to shifts in the political winds. The difficult politics at the Center made it impossible for Li Xiuzhen to develop policy at the national level. She thus focused her efforts at the provincial and subprovincial levels, developing a Maoist “mass line” process of policymaking that used model localities to “lead the way.” After the death of Mao and the shift of the party’s agenda to rapid modernization, the policy process of the early to mid-1970s would be vilified as backward, crude, and ideological (Sun Muhan 1987: 148; Song and Li 1980[1979]). Although it was indeed guided by political rather than scientific logics, both the policy process and the policy it produced

had important virtues. The policy of the 1970s was both politically viable and strikingly effective in lowering population growth rates. A Dearth of Statistics and Calculative Techniques

Effective policymaking requires reliable information on the size and

internal features of the population. Yet the party under Mao had destroyed the system for gathering and processing population statistics. In the early 1970s, solid statistics on China’s population were virtually nonexistent. These data difficulties merit close attention because they had not been resolved by the late 1970s, constraining the more “scientific” policymaking of the early Deng era as well. The problem of no numbers—its rhetorical management and concrete effects—will be a crucial part of the story told in the following chapters. In the 1950s and early 1960s China had made important progress in

building a modern statistical system, but that system had collapsed during the Great Leap Forward and never fully recovered (Banister 1987: 12-49). Two no-frills censuses were conducted—in 1953 and 1964—but only a handful of other special censuses and surveys were carried out (Aird 1981). No census was carried out in the 1970s, leaving everyone—including Mao Zedong—in the dark about the size and

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 63 growth rate of China’s population. Moreover, statistics in general and population statistics in particular were highly politicized and subject to massaging to show conformity with party goals. The data that were collected were treated as state secrets. No statistics could be released without explicit political approval, and such approval was often difficult to secure. Because of their ideological implications, for two decades statistics from the official population registration system went largely unre-

ported. The results of the 1964 census, virtually the only relatively reliable data on the population as a whole, were kept secret for eighteen years. Those charged with making population policy in the 1970s had

to accomplish that task without access to those crucial nationwide numbers.!” In the 1970s, only two sets of data were available: population registration statistics collected by the Public Security Bureau, and program data from some model localities. Both had serious limitations. Since the mid-1950s, when a household registration system was instituted nationwide, all localities had been required to gather and annually report data on total population, births, and deaths. Although the system produced high-quality data from some areas, some units did not report and others passed along figures that were understated or falsified to demonstrate success in fulfilling mandated targets. The population totals compiled from such reports were notoriously incomplete and biased by the disproportionate inclusion of information from model localities (Lin Fude

2002). The Public Security Bureau’s flawed numbers were the only countrywide data available to anyone. At the subnational level, high-quality statistics were available from some birth planning models. From the early 1970s, when party committees at all levels were instructed to put birth planning on their work agendas, some grassroots localities began to develop innovative methods of mass data gathering that won them model status (e.g., Liberation Daily 1973). Delegations of foreign specialists visiting model localities were invariably impressed with these bottom-up data-gathering activi-

ties (Chen Pi-chao 1972; Faundes and Luukkainen 1972; Li and Li 1973). At the county level, national models such as Sichuan’s Shifang County and Jilin’s Huaide County produced data of very high quality (Lavely 1982; Chen and Kols 1982: J-597). At the key provincial level, however, data on population growth were especially scarce, emanating only from a few well-administered localities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Jiangsu. In the vast majority of localities at all levels, the quality of the data was most certainly quite poor.

64 History In the absence of reliable countrywide data, throughout the 1970s national population totals continued to be expressed in the general, impressionistic terms established by Mao in the 1950s. The official formula for the size of China’s population was “about 8co million” (Banister

1987: 19). Although the total from the population register passed 900

million in 1974, China’s leaders reportedly did not believe that the number of Chinese could be so large, and so continued to require use of the lower, severely rounded figure (Sun Muhan 1987). (The actual total, measured only with the advent of scientific censusing in the early 1980s,

was 852 million in 1971, when population control was restored, and 937 million in 1976, the year Mao died.) Meanwhile, reflecting the politicization of statistics, government bureaucracies advancing different agendas offered figures ranging from 750 million (the planning department) to 830 million (the commerce ministry) (Rida 1971: A8). It

was only in mid-1979 that a newly revived State Statistical Bureau would issue the first authoritative figure of the decade: a population of 975.2 million at the end of 1978 (Sun Muhan 1987: 378). Policy makers also lacked data on the internal characteristics of the population. The most crucial were its age and sex structure. From casual observation, political and program leaders knew that the suspension of birth planning during the early phase of the Cultural Revolution had produced spikes in the number of births (IK12/25/03,BJ). The rise in marriages and births during the years of chaos was first mentioned by

Premier Zhou in 1970 and later framed as a “problem of peaks” (gaofeng de wenti) by program leaders. With no national data on age structure, however, birth planners had only a rough idea of how high

| the peaks were and how much they would affect future population growth. These data difficulties would greatly hamper their efforts to create a realistic and effective policy for the country as a whole. In China’s planned birth system, population policymaking and plan-

| ning were intimately related. Ideally, the policy rules on number of births were designed to ensure achievement of the targets in the population plan. Creating feasible plan targets required the ability to calculate future population growth. Techniques for population projection were thus crucial to both target setting and policymaking. Yet statistical techniques such as those for population projection had disappeared with the decimation of the statistical system and the elimination of population studies.

Facing demands to reach population targets, local cadres began to

improvise techniques of projecting population within their areas.

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 65 Encouraged by Li Xiuzhen, statistical workers in model localities began

inventing some ingenious methods (Yu Wang 2001). These methods appear to have been the only projection techniques available at any level of government in the early to mid-1970s. In November 1974, the State Council’s Birth Planning Office convened a National Population Statistics Study Session to discuss and disseminate the more promising methods. Among those attending were Liu Zheng and Lin Fude of People’s University, who had recently been recalled from the countryside to Beijing to advise the government on population theory (for the details, see the discussion in the next chapter; Shi 1988: 168; ME: 54). Despite the ingenuity of statistical workers from advanced localities such as Jiangsu’s Rudong County, their seat-of-the-pants methods had lim-

itations. Most important, they were not transferable to the national level and so “could not meet the demand of the time for macro-population control” (Lin Fude 2002: 80). Back in Beijing, Lin and Liu improved those methods and then, experimenting with Beijing data, developed another projection method that used a standardized fertility technique. Although this method could be used for larger-scale units and worked

well for projecting population growth under the policy of the mid19708, even its creators considered it relatively crude. The limited abil-

ity of the government and of social scientists such as Liu and Lin to forecast future population growth would hamper population planning and policymaking in Mao’s day and beyond. Mass-Oriented Policymaking: Making Later-Longer-Fewer

Lacking both the technical resources and the political support needed for scientific policymaking at the national level, in the early 1970s program leaders devised an essentially political process of making policy in close interaction with the local level that closely approximated a stan-

dard method of party policymaking under Mao. To highlight the con-

trast with later policymaking procedures, I tag this a “mass line” process of making policy. Described by Mao as “from the masses, to the masses,” ideally in the mass line process “the scattered and unsystem-

atic views of the masses are... collected by Party organizations, carefully studied and coordinated, and then turned into statements of Party policy” (Townsend 1967: 73). Because of its leading role in society, however, the Party makes the actual policy decision. Once a decision is rendered, it is promoted among the masses by identifying model localities,

66 History summing up their experiences, and propagating them for emulation elsewhere. Unlike the classic mass line process, in which the party leadership ultimately decides policy on the basis of its purportedly superior theoretical knowledge and practical experience, in birth planning at this

time it appears to have been health officials, probably in consultation with moderate development-minded leaders associated with Zhou, who made the decisions on population policy. The result was a policy that reflected popular interests perhaps better than most party policies. Although some of the details remain vague, the later-longer-fewer (wanxishao) policy that was adopted for nationwide enforcement in the 1970S appears to have been made by a version of this top-down—bottom-up

process. As documented in GCP (esp. pp. 73, 76, 81), the origins of later-longer-fewer stretch back to the late 1950s. In the 1950s, national reproductive guidelines called for late marriage and few births. A late

| 1950s Ministry of Health directive went further, advocating later marriage, longer spacing, and fewer births to protect the health of mother and child. In December 1962, the China Youth Daily propagated this idea among young readers. Around 1963, the policy was tested for

acceptability and implementability in several localities, including Shandong’s Wendeng County. Two years later, national program leaders propagated the results at a national on-the-spot conference in Wen-

deng. After the chaos of the late 1960s subsided, in the early 1970s program leaders revived this policy idea. Following standard practice, Li and others worked to identify successful birth planning localities, “summed up” their experiences, and then promoted them as models for

emulation elsewhere (Li Xiuzhen 1972; Sun Muhan 1987: 145; Yu Wang 2001). Li adopted a low-key, highly personal work style that seems to have facilitated this process of working closely with rural localities. Her deputy Yu Wang describes how, unlike most officials, Li rode

public buses to attend meetings and visit remote villages to learn the concerns of the rural people (Yu Wang 2001). In the early 19708, wanxishao was tried out in several localities, most notably Shanghai’s Qian-

wei Commune, Hebei’s Leting County, and Jiangsu’s Rudong and Taicang Counties. After extensive trials and local adaptations, in December 1973 later-longer-fewer was formally announced as national guideline at the first official national work conference of the decade. To facilitate enforcement, program leaders attached specific numbers to each component. “Later” meant marriage at age 23 and 25 for rural women and men, respectively, and 25 and 27 for those in the cities (Li Xiuzhen 1972: 297). “Later” also specified childbirth at age 24 or older,

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 67 with a slightly higher age in the cities. “Longer” was defined as spacing

of at least three years in the countryside and four years in the cities. Under the slogan “one is not few, two is just right, three are too many,”

initially “fewer” signified two births for urban couples and three for rural couples. The new wanxishao policy was not a national policy in the sense of having the imprimatur of the Central Committee or being part of formal legislation. Instead, it took the form of an ad hoc regulation. Nevertheless, it would be energetically promoted nationwide until late 1978, when the rules were tightened, this time by the authority of the party’s Central Committee. After Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, birth planning rose rapidly on the party’s agenda. The tightening of policy began in December 1976, when Li Xiuzhen reaffirmed wanxishao for achieving the targets of the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1976-1980), adding that in order to avoid future birth peaks it might be necessary to make appropriate adjustments (EBP: 299). And indeed, an adjustment was soon made. At a September 1977 birth meeting, Li made an important speech. Stretching Mao’s words, she declared that birth planning was now a matter of

party line and propaganda must be forcefully strengthened (GCP: 90-91). She also announced a highly significant “shift in emphasis” from timing to number of children, with the central work task now preventing

third and higher births. “Fewer” now meant two children for rural as well as urban couples (Li Xiuzhen 1997[1977]). These developments presaged a toughening of policy thinking that would take place as a new leadership impatient for change consolidated its power in 1978. A Politically Viable and Demographically Effective Policy With the shift of the party’s agenda to rapid modernization, the policy of the early to mid-1970s would be criticized as inadequate, and the policy process that gave rise to it would be castigated as backward and nonscientific (Sun Muhan 1987: 148; Song and Li 1980[1979]). Compared to

the strict one-child policy that would succeed it, however, the laterlonger-fewer policy had important political and demographic advan-

tages.“° Although it is important not to romanticize the 1970s, compared to the 1980s the policy of that still-Maoist decade seems salutary indeed. Formulated close to the point of implementation in consul-

tation with those whose behavior it sought to change, the mass line process produced an indigenous Chinese policy that fit the realities of

peasant life. The policy took account of the needs of the peasantry,

68 History working them into a moderate and flexible set of rules that was acceptable to the rural majority. Instead of riding roughshod over peasant culture, the policy sought to temporarily accommodate village values while slowly modernizing them through propaganda and education. Unlike its successor, the one-child policy, which was created at the top by specialists who were distant from the rural scene, the top-down—bottom-up policy created by political generalists earlier in the decade was enforceable on the ground and had fewer wrenching side effects. In part because the policy influenced three determinants of fertility (marriage age, spacing, and number of children), and in part because

the collective institutional environment of the early 1970s lowered childbearing desires and eased policy enforcement, later-longer-fewer

was extraordinarily effective in achieving its demographic ends.?! Indeed, the policy produced one of the fastest fertility declines in modern history. During the 1970s, the average number of children per woman fell from under six to under three. Between 1971 and 1978, the crude birth rate was halved (from 30.7 to 19.3 births per 1,000 population), as was the rate of population growth (from 23.4 to 12.0) (Tian 1985[1981]|: 36-37). Even without numbers and science, later-longerfewer was remarkably effective in reducing population growth.

IDEOLOGICAL LEGITIMATION: CREATING A

MARXIAN THEORY OF BIRTH PLANNING | At the beginning of the decade, Premier Zhou had underscored the importance of birth planning to the success of national economic planning, yet the state planning of births continued to lack a basis in Marxian theory.

Without such a rationale, the birth project that was rapidly unfolding on the ground had dubious legitimacy. This was an urgent problem (Lin Fude 2002). Cadres asked to promote birth planning confronted a series of fundamental questions. Why must China plan births? Is birth plan-

ning Marxist? How does it differ from neo-Malthusian population control? The lack of answers left them confused and fearful of making

ideological mistakes. Mao’s ambivalence about population control meant that for many years these basic issues could not be addressed. Only in the mid-1970s, when he issued his last and most famous instruc-

tion—fei renkou kongzhi buxing—did it become safe for theoretical work to proceed. Despite the theoretical hurdles, a rationale was found and, after Mao’s death, made public. Transmitted to cadres around the

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 69 country, this rationale provided the birth program’s first ideological legitimation, securing its place on the nation’s agenda. Theoretical Challenges

Because of the sensitivity of the population issue, initially the develop-

ment of theory and training of cadres were undertaken by provincial party schools (Shi 1988: 168). At the same time, however, the State Council began to quietly authorize a more centralized process of theory construction. In late 1973 it asked Liu Zheng, head of the Planning Statistics Department of the People’s University of China, to create a Marxian theory of birth planning. Liu responded enthusiastically to the state’s call, eventually becoming the nation’s leading Marxian theorist of population. I introduce Liu and his colleagues in the next chapter. In the mid-1970s there were burning issues that had to be resolved in order to secure the ideological foundations of the state’s new project of

planning births. The main task, of course, was to find a rationale for birth planning in the corpus of Marxian texts. Beyond this, there was a host of larger questions needing resolution, many touching on sensitive issues of national identity and correct ideology. Is there a Marxian pop-

ulation theory? Do population problems exist in a socialist society? What are the laws of population under socialism? What is the relationship between population growth and economic development? Is man primarily a producer, as the prevalent “theory of hands” held, or is man also a consumer, as given by the “theory of mouths”? Should Malthusianism be rejected in its entirety? What are the advantages of socialism over capitalism in solving the problem of population? The project of creating a Marxian theory of population control was a challenging one. Marx had said little about population except that its development was determined by the mode of production. In his view, under capitalism population was likely to outstrip resources, but under socialism population was a valued resource. The orthodox Soviet position, as interpreted by Chinese theorists, held that “as the population grows constantly and rapidly, the labor force will also grow rapidly and will contribute to the well-being of the society” (Wang Hong 1991: 62). The authoritative voice belonged to Joseph Stalin, who maintained that

population growth was the law of population under socialism. From the vantage point of Soviet orthodoxy, the notion that the socialist state | might control population growth was thus heretical and incorrect. Clearly, any theory of state birth planning would have to draw on

79° History indigenous Chinese ideas. In the Chinese ideological repertoire, however, there was little on which to draw. An Engelsian Solution: Grasping Production and Reproduction Together In 1974, some Marxian theorists discovered a promising passage in the work of Friedrich Engels on the twofold character of production—of material goods and of human beings (Engels 1972[1884]). Drawing on

this notion, as well as indigenous Chinese framings based on the planned economy and, of course, Mao’s population thought, Liu Zheng and his colleagues defined China’s population problem as one of serious imbalance or “contradictions” between population growth, on the one hand, and social and economic development, on the other. The solution

was to bring the production of material goods and of human beings together within the unified socialist plan, adjusting each to the other. Such a project would demonstrate the demographic superiority of socialism, something Engels had underscored in a letter to Karl Kautsky a century earlier: “If communist society should one day be compelled to regulate the production of human beings, as it regulates the production

of goods, then it and it alone will be able to do this without any diffculty” (quoted in Liu 1981). With several years of concrete experience in population planning to draw upon, Chinese writers were able to elaborate on Engels’s point. Unlike capitalism, which leaves reproduction anarchic, socialism is able to bring economic and population growth within the unified state plan. Under the comprehensive state plan, every-

thing can be planned and coordinated for the benefit of society as a whole, and plan targets can be achieved through the use of an integrated package of economic, educational, and legal measures (e.g., Liu 1981: 18-19). The planned control of population was thus crucial not just to China’s socialist development, but also to the larger socialist mis-

sion of outcompeting capitalism on the world stage. , During the mid-1970s, Mao’s continued presence on the scene kept

these theoretical advances out of the public domain. That changed abruptly after his death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in the fall of

1976. Two months later, the Leading Group issued the population

thoughts of the great Marxian thinkers as well as the instructions of Mao, Zhou, and other Chinese leaders on birth planning work (Shi 1988: 171; also ME: 60 ). In 1977, Mao’s 1957 encouragement of state birth planning was made public for the first time (Tien 1991: 85). In late

The “Ideology” before the “Science” FT 1977, the Marxian scholars published the results of their labors anonymously in the short book Population Theory (Renkou lilun) (Liu et al. 1977, parts translated in Tien 1980). Their ideas became the basis for

nationwide discussion seminars and study classes to train the cadres who would lead the birth planning effort on the ground. Although the book’s measured tone was soon to become obsolete, this theoretical handbook successfully refuted Soviet orthodoxy by demonstrating that population growth was not an inevitable law of socialist development. By providing the first systematic Marxian articulation of the planning rationale for the state’s ongoing birth project, this book gave that project its first ideological justification, finally guaranteeing it a place on the political agenda. ANTI-MALTHUSIAN MANIFESTOS FOR THE OUTSIDE WORLD

The elaboration of a Marxian theory of birth planning for domestic audiences was accompanied by a refutation of Malthusian or “bourgeois” views for the benefit of international audiences. These efforts took on exceptional importance in the early 1970s, when China began to rejoin the world community after decades of self-imposed isolation. The international population community was at once fascinated by the PRC’s new, apparently successful program of population control and

puzzled by the contradictions between the party’s anti-Malthusian stance and its seemingly Malthusian practices. China needed to make the world understand that its birth program was resolutely Marxian and that its anti-Malthusian standpoint remained unswerving. In 1971, after the PRC regained its seat in the United Nations, the regime sent delegations to a handful of important international meetings on population (Y.C. Yu 1974). The official statements of the Chinese delegations were often highly ideological, extending the class struggle

between proletariat and bourgeoisie that was unfolding in the stillCultural Revolutionary 1970s to the domain of international politics, where the larger third-world struggle against imperialism was being played out in a Marx-versus-Malthus contest over the definition of the population problem and its proper solution.** Reflecting the PRC’s long-

standing identification with the oppressed nations of the world, and the mid-1970s turmoil in foreign policy as the power struggles of rival coalitions within the regime led to stagnation in China’s rapprochement with the West, these statements were stridently anti-imperialist,

re History anti-Western, anti-Malthusian, and even antiscientific (on mid-1970s foreign policy, see Pollack 1991). The most significant statement of the 1970s was the speech delivered to the United Nations Population Conference held in Bucharest in 1974,

the most important international meeting of the decade. This speech was reviewed by Premier Zhou Enlai himself, suggesting its status as the official party line on the population thought and practices of the major

powers in the PRC’s international environment (GCP: 84). In it, the head of the Chinese delegation sharply challenged the two superpowers’ neo-Malthusian claim that the third world was suffering a “population explosion” that was threatening the welfare of mankind: One superpower asserts outright that there is a “population explosion” in Asia, Africa and Latin America and that a “catastrophe to mankind” is imminent. ... The superpowers raise the false alarm of a “population explosion” and paint a depressing picture of the future of mankind. This reminds us of the notorious Malthus, who, more than 170 years ago, when the population of the world was less than 1 billion, raised a hue and cry about “over-population” and the impossibility for the growth of production ever to catch up with that of the population. . . . The condition of the population of a country is determined by its social system and the political and economic conditions prevailing at home and internationally. Is it owing to overpopulation that unemployment and poverty exist in many countries of the world today? No, absolutely not. It is mainly due to aggression, plunder and exploitation by the imperialists, particularly the superpowers. (Huang Shu-tse 1974: 7)

The statement was particularly scathing in its criticism of the reams of statistics—on the destruction of the food supply, the natural environment, and so on—the neo-Malthusians had marshaled to prove the existence of such a crisis: What a mass of figures the [superpowers] have calculated in order to prove that population is too large, the food supply too small, and natural resources insufficient! But they never calculate the amount of natural resources they have plundered, the social wealth they have grabbed and the super-profits they have extorted from Asia, Africa and Latin America. (Huang Shu-tse 1974: 8)

What the delegation head was excoriating was the body of work associated with a group of Western scientists and global modelers who called themselves the “Club of Rome.” Based on statistics of all kinds, Club researchers argued forcefully that the third world was suffering a population crisis that was threatening the whole world. The necessary solution was immediate and drastic population control. Popularized by

The “Ideology” before the “Science” 73 figures such as Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the best-selling alarmist tract The Population Bomb, these ideas were highly popular in the West at the time, at least among the general public (many population specialists had doubts) (Ehrlich 1968). The PRC roundly rejected this reasoning, claiming that behind the science lay imperialist plots and power politics. If third-world poverty was due to external exploitation rather than internal overpopulation, the speech continued, the solution was for third-world countries to unite to battle imperialism and superpower hegemonism while developing their own national economies. As a “developing socialist country belonging to the third world,” China was ready to lead the fight against the imperialist powers and their Malthusian distortions of the nature of and solution

to the population problem (Huang Shu-tse 1974: 9). While treating efforts to combat imperialism and develop the national economy as the primary means of solving the population problem, the People’s Republic also plans the growth of its population by means of a domestic population policy. This policy, the statement continued testily, is fully in accord with socialist principles and is a matter of China’s internal affairs in any case (Huang Shu-tse 1974: 9). Criticism will not be tolerated. Within a few years, the People’s Republic would reverse, though not

publicly repudiate, all the positions staked out so forcefully at Bucharest. It would downplay its status as the leader of the third world, remaking itself as a determined aspirant to great-power status. A new regime would stop criticizing the first world and start seeking selectively to use its resources to speed China’s own development. The nation’s leaders would abandon their antiscience, antistatistics stance, embracing modern science and statistics with a vengeance. And, on the population question, the PRC would cease criticizing the crisis-crackdown formulation, instead making that very construct the cornerstone of its own policy requiring one child for all. How this still-Marxist regime and its newly revitalized population scientists would manage the ideo-

logical contradictions and discursive challenges these about-faces entailed is a fascinating and crucially important part of the story of science making and policymaking told in this book. MAO TO DENG: FROM “IDEOLOGY” TO “SCIENCE” The later-longer-fewer policy and program of the 1970s offered the modernizing regime that came to power after Mao’s death a strong founda-

~ tion on which to build. Demographically, the policy had dramatically

74 History lowered birth and population growth rates. Institutionally, the program had established a nationwide network of party and government organi-

| zations with years of experience in managing this new project of governance. Politically, at the elite level Marxian theorists had rationalized population control in terms of the regnant ideology, finally legitimizing it as a party function. At the mass level, implementation of the policy had spread a more modern reproductive culture and accustomed peasants to the idea of state intervention in their reproductive lives.

Yet to post-Mao leaders who saw a clear connection between the nation’s rapid population growth and its stubbornly persistent backwardness, later-longer-fewer would be too weak and too politically tainted a policy tool. Its inadequacies were demographic, ideological, and political. First, in the late 1970s China faced a population problem of considerable magnitude. Despite the demographic achievements of later-longer-fewer, because of the impact of population momentum— continued growth due to the large cohorts born in the past—the numbers of Chinese continued to rise, reaching almost a billion by decade’s end. Although the links between population and the economy were not well understood, many leaders realized that the continued rapid growth of the population contributed in some fundamental way to the nation’s enduring poverty. To make matters worse, the population was not only too large, but also its age structure was unbalanced. Post-Mao leaders

faced a birth peak forecast to last from the mid-1980s to the early to mid-1990s. The limit of two children for all adopted in 1977 not only could not solve this problem, it would result in more peaks down the road. Because Mao’s revolution had effectively suppressed birth work for two decades, post-Mao policy makers would have to impose sharper

limits to cope with the accelerated growth of the population. Mao’s demographic obtuseness did not impose any particular policy, however; how sharp those limits would have to be would be a matter of debate. The second problem was the absence of a compelling formulation of the population problem to justify the strong control of population numbers. The later-longer-fewer rationale—the necessity of population planning in a socialist society—was ideologically correct but it did not dictate strong population control. Certainly, it was too weak to justify intensifying fertility limitation beyond the fairly demanding two-child limit that was already in place. The decimation of science and the destruction of the nation’s statistics-gathering capacity had prevented the development of more sophisticated, quantified formulations of the population problem. As a result, as the Cultural Revolution drew to a close many top

The “Ideology” before the “Science” as leaders remained unpersuaded of the urgency of the population problem. In 2003, Wu Cangping, one of the few population specialists active in the mid- to late 1970s, described the situation this way: Around 1978, at the time of the first population studies conference, the government had no clear or systematic view of the nature and scope of the population problem. It knew only that the population was large and growing rapidly. Most officials were not very concerned about the population question. Few knew anything about it. Mao did not fully realize its significance. He had said that population growth should be controlled only when the population reached 800 million. [As a result] in the late 1970s population control was only a verbal slogan (koutou shuo); there were no policy documents making it official. Because of the huge influence of Stalinist population theory insisting that a large population is good, Chinese economists and philosophers believed that population had but a modest effect on economic development and that therefore there was no need to sharply control population growth. (IK12/16/03,BJa; comments paraphrased, emphasis added)

Given this general lack of knowledge and concern about the damaging effects of population growth on China’s development, those seeking to strengthen birth policy at decade’s end would have to find a new rationale that went far beyond the tired logic of the late Mao era. Beyond these difficulties specific to the population issue lay a more overarching problem faced by the CCP. Mao’s Cultural Revolution

had not only destroyed the social order, it had also undermined the party’s legitimacy. Although the birth project had been able to move forward, birth planning too had gotten swept up in that cataclysm. The population question also evoked painful memories of Ma, whose scandalous treatment in the late 1950s had left a black mark on the party’s reputation. To restore its right to rule, the party had to soundly reject the Cultural Revolution and everything associated with it. In the population area, however, it overreacted. When, in the aftermath of that national trauma, population policy makers in revulsion rejected the past, instead of selectively preserving the best features of the laterlonger-fewer policy, they would reject that policy and the process that produced it in toto, throwing out the good with the bad. Li Xiuzhen’s consultative mass line policy process, which had produced a peasant-

centered, politically viable, and demographically effective policy, would be abandoned in favor of a process and policy that were its antitheses: exclusively top-down rather than top-down-bottom-up, “scientific” rather than political and ideological, precise rather than

crude, based on foreign models rather than indigenous, and “in the |

76 History interests of the nation as a whole” rather than centered on the needs of those most affected, peasants and women. If the Maoist approach to policymaking and the closely associated ideology of Marxism-Leninism—Mao Zedong Thought were now deemed

fundamentally problematic (though politically unabandonable, given their centrality to the CCP’s identity), what would replace them as the keys to solving China’s problems? After the ideological fervor of the Cultural Revolution, which in its Gang-inspired extremes was rabidly antiscientific, antirational, antimodern, and anti-Western, modern (natural)

science—widely perceived to be rational, objective, progressive, and international—would appear as the very opposite of the politics and ideology that had turned that decade into a national disaster of epic proportion. After the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, modern science

appeared as the way out, a deus ex machina that would guide China into the modern world. In the population arena, the post-Mao years would thus give rise to the rapid development not only of science, but also of scientism, the belief in science as a panacea that could solve all the nation’s human problems. Since the early twentieth century, Western-oriented Chinese intellectuals had embraced modern science with fervor, seeing the adoption of science (and democracy) as a powerful means to critique China’s traditional culture and to put the nation on the road to modern civilization (Chow 1960; Kwok 1965; Schwarcz 1986). From that time, “science” was associated with modernity and national salvation and was imbued

with almost omniscient and omnipotent powers. Far from withering under the Communists, scientism emerged victorious with the victory of

the CCP, whose Marxist philosophy was scientistic in the extreme (Kwok 1965; I return to this in chapter 3). After the havoc Mao had wreaked on the nation’s science and social science establishments, the energetic restoration of science was an obvious and wise response to the problems of governing the country. But the Deng regime’s adoption of sclence—including population science—was shadowed by an intensely scientistic culture in which the exaggerated enthusiasm for the powers of science was coupled with a worrying lack of understanding of it. In the post—Cultural Revolution context, population science pos-

sessed extraordinary practical, political, ideological, and symbolic value. Indeed, it promised to solve all the problems left by the Mao era.

Practically, it offered rationalities, logics, techniques, and tools with which to bring population into being as an object of science and governance; frame the population problem and solution; and rationalize the

The “Ideology” before the “Science” | es process of planning and policymaking. Politically, with its powerful language of numbers and mathematics, science had the persuasive power to convince China’s leaders of the urgency of population control and to

persuade cadres and masses of the legitimacy of that project. Science was perhaps uniquely capable of neutralizing the danger that had surrounded the population question since Mao had declared that “of all

things in the world, people are the most precious.” Ideologically, modern science offered the Deng regime a potent new legitimating ide- | ology to supplement the now exhausted Marxism-Leninism—Mao Zedong Thought. For the Deng regime, the claim to be a scientific modernizer would decisively separate it from the Mao leadership, which had

attempted to modernize while hobbling modern science. And finally, symbolically, the embrace of modern science would serve as a fitting symbol of the dramatic rejection not only of the horrors of the Cultural

Revolution, but also of the whole Maoist approach to governing. Modern science had been a potent marker of Chinese modernity since the early twentieth century. A better symbol for rejecting the dark past and moving into the bright modern future could hardly be imagined.

The adoption of population “science” would be anything but straightforward, however. After decades of suppressing science generally and population science specifically, many fundamental issues would need to be resolved: Who was a “scientist”? What counted as “population science”? The next part of the book explores these questions, tracing the emergence in the immediate post—Cultural Revolutionary years of three different “sciences” of population, all competing to shape the population policy for the new era.

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MAKING POPULATION SCIENCE

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CHAPTER 3

A Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population

After the death of Mao, the Deng regime rewrote the script for China’s future, abandoning class struggle in favor of a new agenda of modernizing the economy and restoring the nation’s standing in the world. Popu-

lation control was an essential part of that new program, crucial not only to the nation’s modernization and global rise but also to the legitimacy of the post-Mao party that promised to achieve those goals. But what level of population control was needed? In 1978, new data on the

demographic legacy of the Cultural Revolution—a huge baby boom looming on the horizon—made it clear that without a drastic policy, rapid population growth would sabotage the party’s larger projects. What that policy should be, however, remained unclear and, because of the history just relayed, a politically sensitive matter that only “science,”

with its ostensibly objective, apolitical nature, could resolve. In 1978-1979, China’s leaders opened the “forbidden zone” of population and called on specialists to selectively borrow from international science and technology to help the party define and reach its population goals. Chinese scholars responded energetically to the party’s call to create a science of population to guide the state’s newly prioritized project of population governance. During 1979, population study developed from scattered pockets of research into a national conversation about the country’s population problems and their proper solution. That conversation took place at year’s end at a nationwide meeting of scholars and officials at which proponents of differing population sciences and policies met and 81

82 Making Population Science debated one another face to face for the first time. As in other fields, these debates over intellectual and policy issues masked raw competition among groups of scholars for influence and political power (on intellectual politics more generally, see Hamrin 1987). In those crucial months of 1979, scholars from different backgrounds and institutional locations worked feverishly to create the science that

would shape the new national policy. Three very different sciences of population would emerge to contend for influence. In the order in which

they historically arose, these are what I call a Marxian statistics of population, a sinified cybernetics of population, and a Marxian humanism of population. The first and third were social sciences, the second a nat-

ural (and physical) science of population. Based on distinct sciencemaking practices, each offered a different view of the nature of China’s

population problem and its best solution. Behind these varying approaches to population governance lay radically different understandings of the nature of population itself, divergent political values, and competing visions of the place of the state and science in the social order. These science-making dynamics carry political import, for scientific con-

structions of social issues do not simply reflect a preexisting reality; instead, they actively constitute a new reality. Those scientific formulations that would win the struggle for influence would become the bases

of a new population policy that would be carried out countrywide. Equally important, the winning scientists’ larger political vision of the role of science in society would get embedded in the thought and practice of population, to shape population governance for decades to come. The population science that was created in 1979 would have profound

effects on the political and social make-up of post-Mao China. , The chapters in this part of the book trace the making of these three bodies of population thought, focusing on the crucial months leading up to the historic December 1979 conference. The next part begins with that groundbreaking meeting and charts the politics by which, over the next nine months, one of these sciences won the battle to define China’s population policy. Drawing on science studies research on the workings of laboratory science, I analyze the formation of these three scientific

approaches to population governance as cases of fact making and narrative construction by the office science of population studies. Although population specialists occasionally conduct social surveys, most of their work is performed in their offices, where they engage primarily in the machine-assisted manipulation of numbers and the presentation of the results in textual and visual representations. These are

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 83 the kinds of practices that will occupy us here. Our focus is on the con-

struction of a three-part policy construct specifying the nature of China’s population problem, its best solution, and the importance of attending to the social consequences and human costs of that solution. Creating this problematization involved both the making of scientific facts (specifying the characteristics of and trends in China’s population) and the construction of scientific narratives (about the nature and scope of China’s population problem and its optimal solution). The case of Chinese population science illustrates the general point, discussed in chapter 1, that science is no one thing; science is simply what specific actors, with particular intellectual backgrounds, institutional locations, and personal histories, and working in specific historical contexts, make it to be. In the pages that follow, I will show how each of these sciences of population was humanly created by particular actors, and how both the practices and the products of science making bore the traces of recent Chinese history and of their makers’ disciplinary backgrounds, political histories, and institutional affiliations. The most important part of that recent history involved the unequal treatment of the sciences by Mao (and, before him, Marx). As we saw in chapter 2, following Marxist theory and Soviet practice, under Mao the social sciences were eviscerated and radically subordinated to party control. Although most of the natural and physical sciences (known in China simply as “natural science,” ziran kexue) would eventually be

subject to similar treatment, one cluster of natural sciences—those involved in strategic defense—was supported with extraordinary party and state largesse. The creation of these scientific divides in the Mao era (social versus natural and military versus other natural sciences) had two crucial effects on the making of post-Mao population science. First, while leaving the social scientists largely bereft of the intellectual, political, and cultural resources needed to create a social science of population, that history gave one group of self-made population specialists with backgrounds in military science the capital with which to create a compelling new natural science of population governance. This resource gap will be crucial to the story told in this book. Second, that history placed the two classes of population science, social and natural/military, in different locations on the cultural map of the PRC. In this still-communist society, the social sciences were located firmly in the land of Marxian ideology/party politics, where the leadercentric politics of language discussed in chapter 2 operated in full force. Just as, during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, commentators on

84 Making Population Science population could not exceed the speech space of Chairman Mao, in the late 1970s population specialists had to remain within the speech space of the new collective leadership headed by Deng Xiaoping (Yan 1995). That follow-the-leaders rule applied with special force to China’s social scientists of population, who were perforce part of “party politics” and vulnerable to shifts in the political winds. Constrained to take MarxismLeninism—Mao Zedong Thought as their guide and to respect the party’s historic sensitivities on population, the social scientists of population practiced a follow-the-leaders demography in which they refrained from going beyond the statements on population made by China’s top leaders. Their role was not to draw on academic theories to develop independent ideas about China’s population problems; their job rather was to use their skills to empirically illustrate the ideas about the population problem already articulated by China’s leaders and to craft policy solutions that would resolve that problem in a way that respected the social and political realities of post-Mao China. While staying safely within the leaders’ speech space, they nevertheless managed to make important contributions to population thought by creatively developing a set of science-

making practices that served to illustrate, elaborate, and somewhat extend the leaders’ statements on the population question. The natural scientists and engineers, by contrast, were located outside Marxian ideology/party politics in the intellectually relatively independent kingdom of “defense science and technology.” Although they

too were expected to serve the regime and they could not violate the tenets of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought, they had an independent and authoritative body of thought and ideology—the reasoning of modern science and mathematics—to use as their guide. These analytic _ resources had demonstrated their worth by contributing fundamental

elements of national reputation and power: bombs, missiles, and nuclear submarines. Imbued with both pragmatic and symbolic value, these intellectual tools gave the natural scientists more freedom to create a novel science of population, one that commanded attention precisely because it was based on “science, not ideology/politics.” In their work on the role of technoscience in the making of modern power and politics, Jasanoff (2004b, 2004d) and her colleagues have used the STS idiom of coproduction to highlight the entanglement in

modern societies of knowledge and governance, technoscience and power. This perspective suggests that in modern knowledge societies,

neither technoscientific knowledge nor political power is primary. Instead, the two are produced together in culturally and temporally

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 85 situated instances of science and power making. Such a framework seems especially apposite in the Chinese case, for our central concern is a policy science, by definition both political and scientific, whose main

product, the nexus population problem-solution-costs, is neither strictly scientific nor strictly political but rather a hybrid formation that combines science and politics in varying mixes at various times. By direct-

ing our attention to the ambiguous, contingent, and locally situated aspects of science making and policymaking, the coproductionist perspective enables us to see and to make some sense of the complexity of the relations of science and politics. Parts 1 and 2 of this book explore differ-

ent aspects of these interminglings. In the analysis of science making in

part 1, I examine how the creators of population science inevitably imported political assumptions from the larger environment into the scientific facts and narratives they made, and then how their sciencemaking practices worked to depoliticize those facts and narratives, presenting them as objective, scientific, universal truths. Through practices of science making, politics was imported into the science and then rendered invisible, producing an ostensibly “scientific” policy construct that was political through and through. When in 1978-1979 the state issued the call to create a policy science of population, a small group of Marxian statisticians and economists under the leadership of Liu Zheng was already busy doing just that. As we saw in chapter 2, in the mid-1970s the Liu group had developed the Marxian-theoretic rationale for the state’s project of nationwide birth

planning. In the late 1970s, they redirected their research to address more central questions of population governance. Defining the problem

as one of excessive population grawth keeping China economically backward, they proposed a policy that would prevent third births while actively encouraging couples to have only one. This go-slow one-child policy, which acknowledged the social and political constraints on the

-PRC’s ambitions to bring population growth rapidly under control, would be the leading scholarly proposal from the time of its formal presentation in March-April 1979 to around December 1979. This chapter tells the Liu group’s story. Because all roads to policymaking in the PRC start (and end) in Zhongnanhai, the leaders’ com-

pound in Beijing, I begin with the senior generation of leaders who assumed power in the early post-Mao years and their views on the population question. I turn then to the rocky history of population studies in the Maoist years, when the social science of population was radically

subordinated to the state and then abolished before being revived

86 Making Population Science twenty years later and placed firmly in the land of “ideology/politics.” This unfortunate history would decisively shape both the science and the politics that produced the one-child policy. The next section introduces Liu Zheng and his colleagues at People’s University, showing how their training in Soviet planning statistics and their necessary grounding in Maoist Marxian theory provided the conceptual foundations for a distinctive Marxian statistics of population. The chapter’s final three sections trace the making of the problem-solution-costs construct. They show how specific practices of science making—especially quantification, visualization, and categorization and comparison—worked to sta-

tisticalize and factify the leaders’ ideas, transforming them from political truths into empirically demonstrable facts. The result was to make population the single most important cause of China’s backwardness and to make the strong but socially and politically sensitive control

of population growth a necessary component of the new program of

socialist modernization. |

THE POLICY CONTEXT: SENIOR LEADERS “ON THE ONE-CHILD ROAD”

Since early 1978, China’s top leaders and population policy makers had been moving toward adoption of a policy encouraging one-child fami-

lies. In March of that year, a new constitution made birth planning a constitutional obligation, signaling a heightened commitment to controlling population growth. Around the same time, the State Council reconstituted the Birth Planning Leading Group, placing Chen Muhua, a vice premier with an economic portfolio, in charge. At its first meeting in

, June 1978, the Leading Group clarified that “because of the interference of the Gang of Four,” birth planning had been in a state of “anarchy” during the Cultural Revolution (Sun Muhan 1987: 161). In early 1978, official projections had indicated that China could effectively control population growth with a two-child policy. But age structure data made available at the June meeting showed the imminent arrival of a huge baby boom from parents born during the decade of “anarchy,” a boom that would begin in the mid-1980s and last at least ten years. Out of these numbers was born the idea of widely promoting one-child families. This new information led the Leading Group to abandon the later-longer-

fewer policy and call instead for “one is best, two at most.” This new policy—the first ever to encourage one-child families—was endorsed by the Central Committee in its Document 69 of October 1978.

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 87 Policy developed rapidly during 1979, but the policymaking tools available were inadequate for the resolution of key issues. Crucial for the evolution of policy, in early 1979 three of China’s most senior revolutionary leaders began marching down the one-child road, as one informant put it.

As targets grew tighter, national policy began to drift from “one is best, two at most” to “encourage one, prohibit three.” Provinces adopted trial one-child regulations, but these were local policies, not national policy. By the end of the year there was widespread agreement on the necessity of at least encouraging one-child families, but the key issues of the speed and universality of a one-child rule remained unsettled. The political tools for

policymaking left over from the 1970s were unable to resolve the outstanding questions. Scientific experts were needed to settle those issues. Leaders Demand Strong Population Control and Encourage One-Child Families The coalition of leaders assembled around Deng was strongly in favor

of a muscular approach to population control. To these economic reformers, the rapid growth of an already overly large population was eating up economic gains and delaying the achievement of the Four Modernizations, the party’s central task for the rest of the century. In their view, the failure to stanch population growth was one of Mao’s greatest mistakes. As the creators, with Mao, of the PRC’s socialist revolution, they now had not just an opportunity but also a moral obligation to correct that grievous error. Deng Xiaoping, who had consolidated his position as paramount leader at the historic third plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in December 1978, spoke often and forcefully about the burdens imposed on China’s modernization by excessive population growth. Although Deng was not a specialist in economics or economic policy, he was a committed modernizer and nationalist who wanted to transform China into a global power and believed that China’s huge population was keeping it backward (Bachman 1986; Pye 1993; Shambaugh 1993¢). In his important speech “Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles,” delivered on March 30, 1979, toa Theory Work Conference of the CCP, Deng named

China’s large and largely rural population a fundamental factor in China’s poverty and ordered a major expansion of birth planning work: To achieve the Four Modernizations and make China a powerful socialist country before the end of this century will be a gigantic task... . At least two important features of our situation must be taken into account... .

88 Making Population Science First, we are starting from a weak base. . . . China is still one of the world’s poor countries. Our scientific and technological forces are far from adequate. .. . Second, we have a large population but not enough arable land. Of China’s population of more than 900 million, 80 percent are peasants. While there are advantages to having a large population, there are disadvantages as well. When production is insufficiently developed, [a large population] poses serious problems with regard to food, education, and employment. We must greatly increase our efforts in [birth] planning. (Deng 1984[1979]: 171-172)

At a Central (Party) Work Conference in the same month, Deng stressed the onerous burden imposed by the large population and introduced an

ambitious population control target: “We must control population growth and strive to lower the growth rate to 5-6 per 1,000 by 1985. It

[simply] won’t do to fail to lower the growth rate to that level; the nation can’t support the burden” (Shi 1988: 178). At another Central Work Conference in early May, Deng repeated the 5 per 1,000 goal, instructing subordinates to “use administrative or economic methods— whatever brings population growth down—{[for] reducing population growth would be the greatest victory” (Shi 1988: 180). Although Deng clearly supported strong population control, he did not openly favor a policy of one child for all. Indeed, he never publicly committed himself to any population policy, making it impossible to know what he really thought about a one-child rule. In early March, Chen Yun became the first top leader to quietly advocate a policy limiting all couples to one child. A conservative economic planner preoccupied with balance, stability, and strong central control, Chen was a party elder (vice chairman of the CCP and member of the Politburo Standing Committee), vice premier of the State Council, and the nation’s top authority on economic matters (Bachman 1985, 1986). As

chairman of the Finance and Economics Commission established in early 1979, Chen was in charge of the readjustment of China’s economy. On economic matters, Chen’s voice outweighed that of Deng, especially in late 1978 and early 1979 when his power and influence were at their zenith (Bachman 1985; Naughton 1993; J. Huang 2000). Chen’s longstanding authority on economic matters, which stretched intermittently back to the 1950s, was probably a key factor in his emergence between early 1979 and mid-1980 as the main political force behind the one-child

policy. Characteristically, Chen kept his public comments to a minimum, promoting his views on population largely behind the scenes. On an inspection tour of Jiangsu and Zhejiang on March 8, Chen proposed the

formulation of a law limiting couples to one child and the provision of

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 89 benefits for couples having just one (Chen Muhua 1981; Shi 1988: 178). Those remarks, which would play a crucial role in the eventual adoption of a one-child-for-all policy, were not made public until the spring of 1981. Chen’s proposal appears to have stemmed from his concerns about raising living standards, which had been central to his economic thinking for decades (Bachman 1985). His endorsement of the state planning

of one-child families was also consistent with his preference for topdown state planning of economic and social development. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chen was top economic advisor to Zhou Enlai (Bachman 1985: 74). Perhaps it was Chen speaking when Zhou famously said, “If you can’t plan population growth, what good is economic planning?” (see chapter 2). Chen sounded that same theme of concern for the welfare of the masses in his March 21, 1979, speech “Readjust the National

Economy, Maintain Proportionate Development”: | Ours is a huge country of more than nine hundred million people, 80 percent of whom are rural. The revolution has been victorious for thirty years now, and the people are demanding improvements in their living standards. Has there been improvement? Yes, but in not a few places poverty still exists. This is a huge problem. On the one hand, we are very poor; on other hand, we must achieve the Four Modernizations within twenty years or by century’s end: this is a contradiction. If the population is large, it is difficult to raise living standards; in modernizing, the number of people used [i.e., employed] is few, [so ensuring full] employment will be difficult. It is amidst this contradiction that we must pursue the Four Modernizations. This is the present real situation, and it is the point of departure for our blueprints for construction. (Shi 1988: 178)

In April 1979, senior vice premier and party vice chairman Li Xiannian

became the first leader to openly support encouraging that one child was best. As a longtime minister of finance, a close associate of Chen Yun, and vice chairman of the Finance and Economics Commission, Li was a major economic policy maker, perhaps second only to Chen Yun in influence in that domain. As Chairman of the Central Patriotic Health Campaign Committee and husband of Lin Jiamei, a key figure associated with the Birth Planning Leading Group, Li had a special interest in birth planning (Bartke and Schier 1985: 139-140; IK12/15/03,BJa). In

any case, according to informants, he was the leader effectively in charge of birth planning. In that capacity he served as the major public spokesman on population, giving speeches at virtually all the important meetings on birth planning and announcing the party’s changing targets and decisions on population control. Not surprisingly, Li’s views were similar to those of Chen Yun. His speeches focused on the economic

90 Making Population Science damage caused by population growth and the necessity of bringing it rapidly under control. In his April 1979 comments, delivered to a Central

Work Conference, Li stipulated that one child was best but remained silent about the other part of the October 1978 slogan—“at most two”— suggesting that two were no longer desirable: We must truly control population growth. If the population growth rate doesn’t gradually fall, by the end of the century the population will exceed 1.2 billion. Therefore, carrying out birth planning and lowering the population growth rate are strategic problems facing our country. We definitely must earnestly do a good job of propaganda and ideology work and establish truly effective methods, including legal and economic methods, to encourage that it is best for couples to have only one child. ... In sum, socioeconomic policies must be beneficial to the development of birth planning, and we must make every effort to rapidly reduce population growth. (Shi 1988: 180)

By late 1979, then, three of China’s most powerful senior-generation leaders, including the two who dominated economic policy in the early reform era, supported a strong policy on population control. In a meeting with a foreigner in October, Deng reported party policy this way: “We advocate one child per couple; those promising to have but one will be materially rewarded” (ME: 72). With Deng’s remark, all three top leaders were on record as at least encouraging one-child families. These comments may not all have been available to China’s population

' researchers, but the message they picked up from the country’s highest leaders—what they called the “guiding ideology” (zhidao sixiang)—was

that population growth should fall as rapidly as possible and that the way to do that was to promote one-child families. “They did not say this directly,” the scholars reported, “but it was obvious” (IF,12/21/03, BJ; 12/19-20/03, TY). Yet while there may have been substantial agree-

ment within the senior leadership that encouraging one-child families would accelerate economic construction, a host of important questions remained unresolved. Vexing issues included whether to “encourage,” “advocate,” or “demand” one-child families, for which segments of the population, and on what timetable. These were big matters that required careful consideration. National Policy Drifts from “One Is Best, Two at Most” to “Encourage One, Prohibit Three”

Meantime, within the institutions of the government, during 1979 a tightening of population targets led to a subtle but apparently important

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 91 shift in policy emphasis from “one is best, two at most” to “encourage one, prohibit three.”! In his Government Work Report delivered to the second session of the Fifth National People’s Congress in June, Premier Hua Guofeng called on the nation to strive to lower population growth to Io per 1,000 in 1979 and about 5 per 1,000 in 1985. As in the earlier part of the decade, these new goals were aspirational targets based on the successes of some advanced municipalities and provinces (in this case, Shanghai and Sichuan). Following the suggestions of Chen Yun and Li Xiannian, Hua issued the first set of publicly available instructions to

cadres to reward couples having only one child (Government Work Report 1985[1979|; ME: 70-71; this is the policy Deng announced in October 1979). Although Hua did not promote Chen Yun’s radical proposal of one for all, some National People’s Congress deputies called openly for the adoption of such a policy (Xinhua 1979b). Among the

most prominent was Minister of Health Qian Xinzhong. Apparently drawing on the projections of some population experts, Qian announced

that if population continued to grow at its current rate, the population would reach 1.3 billion by the end of century, slowing the progress of the

Four Modernizations. Even if all newlywed couples had two children, he said, the population would still rise to 1.2 billion. Therefore, he insisted, each family should have only one child. A few other deputies agreed (though many expressed reservations [Xinhua 1979a, 1979b]). Clearly, talk of one-child families was in the air and gaining political weight. In August 1979, top population leader Chen Muhua publicized this new thinking in a major article in the party organ, the People’s Daily. In “The Realization of the Four Modernizations Hinges on the Planned

Control of Population Growth,” Chen announced a new two-stage target of lowering population growth from the current level of 12 per 1,000 tO § per 1,000 in 1985 and then to zero growth by the end of the century.” To reach 5 per 1,000 by 1985, Chen called for eliminating third and higher-order births while promoting one-child families, the main method advocated by the Liu group. The primary method of reaching zero population growth, she wrote, is to energetically or even forcefully (da li) advocate and promote the one-child family (Chen Muhua 1979: 2). Key questions about the universality of a one-child policy and the speed at which it had to be carried out remained unaddressed. Trial One-Child Policies in the Provinces: Local, not National, Policies

~ While the complexities of national policy were being worked out, following the trial-and-error policymaking practices of the 1970s central

92 Making Population Science authorities began to promote the experimental implementation of new birth planning rules and practices at the provincial level. As 1979 began, the official policy on number of children, outlined in Document 69 of October 1978, was “one is best, two at most.” At a major birth planning directors’ meeting in January 1979, Chen Muhua encouraged the adoption countrywide of an incentive scheme of rewarding couples with one child while penalizing those with third births that had been developed by Guangdong and Tianjin. In that same month, the extraordinary idea of devising a birth planning law to legislate the number of children couples could have emerged at a meeting of the Birth Planning Leading Group. The adoption of such a law would entail a whole new level of state intrusion into citizens’ lives. Within a few months, Deng, Chen, and Li had signaled their approval (Deng’s words were “formulate some policies to limit population growth, it seems this is necessary”). From that point on, provinces were required to develop written rules promoting the new policy and instituting incentives to encourage it (ConfidChron). By the end of the year, twenty-seven of twenty-nine provincial-level units had adopted some form of trial regulations on birth planning (Scharping 2003: 50). Although all included incentives for first and disincentives for third births, they varied in their rules on number of births. Some advocated “best is one, two at most,” while others actively promoted or even “universally advocated” one child for all.’ These regulations appear to have been modeled on an early draft of that national law, which, amidst continued controversy and debate, went through four drafts during 1979 (IE12/22/03,BJ; 12/24/03,BJb).

Although the proliferation of provincial regulations promoting and rewarding one-child families seems to suggest rapid movement toward a national one-child policy, provincial policies were local policies that did not and could not add up to central policy. The decision on national policy was a big and sensitive matter, one that concerned the interests of the nation and its place in the world as well as the historic evaluation of Mao, Deng, and the CCP. The making of central policy would be a difficult and protracted process. Because the population issue was so politically and ideologically sensitive, because China’s leaders believed the party had made a terrible mistake in the past, and because a consensual decision was mandated by China’s political culture, in order to move forward the Center needed a very firm, unshakeable basis for choosing one policy over another. The essentially political tools for policymaking that program leaders had inherited from the early to mid-1970s—local experiments, policy models, ad hoc surveys—were not up to that task. Scientific experts were needed to supply the answers.

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 93 OPENING THE FORBIDDEN ZONE

With the rise of population on the post-Mao agenda, a science of population was needed to support the urgent new project of restraining population growth. The regime quickly brought those scientific experts to

life. From late 1976, the state started authorizing the establishment of | population studies institutes in leading universities around the country

(ME: 61; Shi 1988: 171). In late 1977, program leader Li Xiuzhen announced a mass movement of science and technology modernization within the birth program involving, among other things, the expansion of birth work to include research-based population plans for incorpora-

tion into the national economic plan (Li Xiuzhen 1997[1977]). Ina major policy move, in September 1979 the Central Committee reversed the verdict on Ma Yinchu (ME: 71). Signaling its commitment to strong

population control, the Committee announced that the viewpoint of Ma’s “New Population Theory” was “correct” and authorized its publication later that fall (Shi 1988: 83, 84). Fearful of making the same mistake they had made twenty years earlier, beginning in late 1978 and continuing into the summer and fall of 1979, China’s leaders opened the forbidden zone of population and authorized the buildup of a corps of specialists to help them scientifically formulate and legitimate a new policy to slow population growth (IE5/1/03,MN; Chen Muhua 1979; Sun Muhan 1987: 167). The rehabilitation of Ma finally eliminated the worries of population specialists that their ideas might meet the same fate as Ma’s (Shi 1988: 183). Scholars cheered the thaw. Interviewed a few years later, informants in the field remembered 1979 as the crucial turning point in the political climate. After decades of being silenced,

they were now allowed to debate the issues among themselves, dis-

creetly publicize their views, and even patriotically discuss China’s pop- | ulation problems with foreign scholars (IK,11/22/85,TJa). Although political restraints remained, an important liberation had taken place. A Scientific Discipline

Since population studies did not exist at the time, the form it would take would be up for grabs. Population policy makers and education planners

sought to direct the development of the new field along two vitally important lines (RK YJ Editorial Board 1980, 198r). First, the new discipline was to be scientific. Marxism, of course, represented a “scientific” analysis of societal development, but the new enthusiasm surrounded a different kind of science: the modern science and technology that had

94 Making Population Science given the advanced nations their global advantage. Although Mao had largely thwarted the development of modern science and technology, especially during the Cultural Revolution, the Deng regime quickly restored their reputation.* Deng himself personally volunteered to take charge of science and education work. At the historic National Science Conference in March 1978—the first since 1956—Deng underscored the significance of the global scientific and technological revolution. Stressing the importance of advances in computer technology and cyber-

: netics to the rising productivity of the West, Deng called on the PRC to learn advanced S&T from other countries so as to reach world scientific and technological levels at the earliest possible moment: Modern science and technology are now undergoing a great revolution. .. . [P]rofound changes have taken place and new leaps have been made in almost all areas. ... Contemporary natural science is being applied to production on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented speed. . . . In particular, the development of electronic computers, cybernetics and automation technology is rapidly raising the degree of automation in

production. ... What has brought about the tremendous advances in the productive forces and the vast increase in labor productivity? Mainly the power of science, the power of technology. . . . [OJur ancestors’ achievements ... should strengthen our resolve to catch up with and surpass the countries that are most advanced in science and technology (Deng 1984[1978]: 103, 106)

Deng named S&T the first of China’s Four Modernizations, the key to | the achievement of the other three and the attainment of national wealth, power, and glory. Science and technology were heralded as routes out of the obscurantism of the Mao era and as panaceas for the nation’s developmental ills. Deng’s uncritical enthusiasm for the virtues of modern S&T provides an early statement of the official scientism and technicism that would come to shape the politics of population.° To promote their development, Deng moved science and technology

from the superstructure to the economic base of the Marxist model of society (Deng 1984[1978]). Now science and technology were revolutionary productive forces that would promote human progress. In a clear

departure from the early 1950s and early 1960s, when scientists and technicians possessed an ambiguous class character, now they were placed in the privileged working class. Because of the centrality of science to the achievement of the Four Modernizations, scientists and technicians were now to be given greater freedom from political duties so that they could “concentrate their energies on their professional work” (p. 109).

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 95 In this watershed speech, Deng also redefined the boundaries between politics and science. In an effort to curtail the politicization of S&T that had marked the Mao era, Deng sought to place modern (natural) science and technology in a relatively independent zone on the cultural map, one

possessing a knowledge-based authority that leading party comrades must respect. Acknowledging that party leaders are but “laymen in science and technology,” “prisoners of our ignorance of the work concerned” (1984[1978]: 115), Deng instructed party committees to leave technical matters to the technicians and to listen closely to the experts: The leadership given by Party committees should be primarily political. . . . As far as leadership over scientific and technical work is concerned, we should give the directors and deputy directors of the research organizations a free hand... . Party committees should be acquainted with their work and check up on it, but should not attempt to take it over. We

must... trust... the judgment of the scientists and technicians in such matters as the evaluation of scientific papers, the assessment of the competence of professional personnel, the elaboration of plans for scientific research and the evaluation of research results. . . . In scientific and technical work, we must listen closely to the opinions of the experts. (Deng 1984[1978]: 113-114)

This did not mean that scientists would be fully autonomous—indeed,

the party retained extensive influence and control over scientific research°—but it did mean that party leadership over political and ideological matters would be supplemented by the use of professional norms to guide the evaluation of scientific research. In the post—Cultural

Revolution context, this was an important emancipation. This official hands-off attitude toward the sciences would serve a group of natural

scientists of population well. |

While partially freeing natural science from political interference, however, the post-Mao regime left social science in the superstructure, consigned to remain in the realm of Marxian politics. Whereas party leaders were instructed to listen to the natural scientists, the social scientists were told to listen to party leaders. Yet because economic modernization lay at the heart of the Four Modernizations, and pressing social problems had to be ameliorated for the modernization program to succeed, the social and especially economic sciences were given impor-

tant new roles as advisors to the government on development policy (e.g., Hu 1978; Thurston and Parker 1980; Krug 1984; Watson 1987; Hsu 1988). At the first session of the Fifth National People’s Congress in February 1978, Premier Hua Guofeng called for a “national development

96 Making Population Science plan for philosophy and the social sciences” and charged the latter with studying past and present, China and the world, and developing Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought (Braybrooke 1979; Kelly 1979; T. H. Chen 1981: 176-185). Although the social scientists enjoyed some flexibility in developing approaches to their particular subjects, their work was subject to broad political restraints. Social scientists were instructed to proceed under the overarching guidance of Marxism, seek truth from facts, relate theory to practice (both key Deng-era slogans), and direct

their energies to projects related to the Four Modernizations (Braybrooke 1979). In other words, they were supposed-to follow party policy, justifying and explaining it, not provide independent frameworks within which policy decisions could be made (Ogden 1982: 601). In this critically important move, the new regime would formalize and widen the divide between the two sciences, freeing the “modern” natural sciences and technologies to develop according to intellectual criteria and in conversation with international science, while requiring the social sciences to remain local scientific formations that used Chinese Marxian - theory as their guide.’ This privileging of one and impeding of the other will be crucial to the story told here.

Although most of the energies being poured into “science” were directed at the natural sciences, the social sciences were given a science project too, one that was politically essential to the regime in a different way. Fundamental to the party’s historic right to rule was its claim that

in Marxism-Leninism it possessed a scientific understanding of the human world. Marxism-Leninism was deemed scientific on the grounds that societal development was guided by a set of immutable, objective

laws whose main outlines had been discovered by Karl Marx and the

| other founders of historical materialism. By this reasoning, Marxism is the only valid and scientific theory of society (e.g., Wong 1979: 66). Of course, as many have pointed out, Marxist theory of society is scientistic rather than scientific because the true test of an empirical science, falsifiability, is missing. Illustrations of the laws are confused with proofs (Kwok 1965; Baum 1981: 21). But this did not trouble China’s leaders. To the Marxian notion of objective socioeconomic laws Mao had added a practical empiricism: whatever is verified by “practice”—trying out an idea in a few cases and then summing up the results—is scientific (Lieberthal 1995: 71-72).

In the late 1970s, in the wake of the failed project of Maoism, the party and its ideology suffered a serious “crisis of confidence” (Baum 1994: 90-92; Miller 1996: 42-46). In 1978, Deng sought to restore

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 97 faith in the party and its guiding thought (and at the same time derail Mao’s immediate successor, Hua Guofeng) by reestablishing the scientific character of Chinese Marxism.® Cleverly emphasizing a well-known phrase from the early Mao, “seek truth from facts” (shishi giushi), Deng suggested that while Mao had weakened the scientific basis of Chinese

Marxism with his utopian adventures, the scientific character of Chinese Marxism could be restored by defining the Marxist agenda as “seeking truth from facts” and, in Deng’s new phrase, “taking practice as the sole criterion of the truth.” With the scientific character of Marx-

ism-Leninism now politically defined as adherence to Mao’s own method of “seeking truth from facts,” empiricism, pragmatism, “realism,” and “respect for objective laws” would replace pure ideology as the basis for political and policy decisions. This move would resecure the legitimacy of the party on the basis of its claim that its policies were now empirically based and “realistic.” This new pragmatic-not-dogmatic, facts-not-ideology guide to action permitted the leadership to probe the country’s “real” conditions, discover the “objective laws” of socialist development, and suggest innovative solutions to problems they uncovered.

The party’s emphasis on pragmatism and realism also provided a crucial new job for the social scientists, who were charged with doing much of that research and advising the government on social and economic policy. In a major policy speech in July 1978, Hu Qiaomu, pres-

ident of the newly established Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), urged the rapid development of an empirical science of economics. That new science would assist the state by clarifying the “objective economic laws” that must be followed if China was to achieve its goal of quickly reaching the Four Modernizations and catching up with

the advanced world (Hu 1978). By heeding those laws, Hu argued, China could avoid relying on the arbitrary orders of authorities, which invariably produce economic stagnation. In November 1978, at the first scientific symposium on population theory (the first since the founding of the PRC), Chen Muhua opened the political space for population specialists to pursue this new agenda by observing that “in the past, no one dared to calculate the economic accounts (suan fingji zhang) for fear of being labeled Malthusian.” “Now,” she continued, “we are cal-

culating those accounts and we’re not saying that it’s Malthusian, because it objectively exists. To not acknowledge what is in front of our eyes will not do” (Sun Muhan 1987: 167; emphasis added). In a March

1979 speech, Deng instructed researchers to “seek truth from facts,”

98 Making Population Science identifying the “special characteristics” of China’s population and economy so as to create a “Chinese path to modernization” (Deng 1984[1979]:

172, 171). This was a major programmatic statement that made the analysis of Chinese realities a crucial part of the analytic work of China’s policy advisors in the social sciences. With this the human sciences were given a “scientific” mandate and important political roles in achieving the Four Modernizations and reestablishing the party’s right to rule. A Transnational Discipline

The new field of population studies was also to be transnational. Enshrined in Deng’s policy of “opening to the outside world” (kaifang), China’s post-Mao drive to modernize was based on energetic incorporation into the global capitalist economy and active learning from the scientifically and technologically advanced West. Reversing Mao’s policy of self-reliance and alignment with the third world, the PRC would now rely on Western science and technology in order to reach its ambitious

national goals for the year 2000 and, ultimately, to catch up with the West itself (Hu 1978; Deng 1984[1978]). Unlike India, which challenged the global narrative of the West’s scientific and technological superiority by emphasizing the achievements of an indigenous Indian science, Deng’s China actively embraced the global narrative of the West’s scientific and technological superiority and sought to selectively adopt Western science _ and technology to achieve its own nationalistic goals. Of course there were limits to the opening and borrowing that could occur. In his Four Cardinal Principles speech of March 1979, Deng stated

emphatically that all future policies must be in accord with MarxistLeninist-Mao Zedong Thought, the leadership of the CCP, the socialist road, and the dictatorship of the proletariat (Deng 1984[1979]: 172). Regardless of their cartographic location relative to politics, all groups of specialists had to respect these fundamentals. In my meetings with Chinese population professionals around the country a few years later, many scholars affirmed the necessity of respecting Marxist thought on population. “People are interested in Western techniques,” one young social scientist confided, “because we cannot use non-Marxist theory” ([K11/19/85,BJ). A prominent natural scientist put it succinctly: “Theory is a dead end. It’s best to develop technical demography” (IK,12/3/86,XA). Asked about official calls to “let one hundred flowers bloom,” the social scientist said that they were superficial: “Any buds would be clipped off.”

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population } 99 He added that he could talk about these things only with foreigners; in conversations with Chinese colleagues he could only say, “Yes, yes, Marxism is good” (IK,11/19/85,B)). Despite these restraints, in the late 1970s there was a palpable sense of

excitement in China’s emerging population field, as scholars who had lived an isolated and barren intellectual existence for almost twenty years

set about rejoining the world community of population scientists. The excitement was just as strong on the side of the international demographic

community (e.g., Lapham and Bulatao 1981). Western demographers, eager to fill in this long-missing piece of the world demographic puzzle, were glad to assist China in its modernizing efforts, especially those, such as a projected census, that were directed at gathering high-quality data on

the size and structure of its population (contributions in Li Chengrui 1987).” Although Western ideas and techniques would come to shape China’s population policy, those ideas would be introduced into Chinese policymaking circles by Chinese scientists. With the possible exception of a few Chinese American demographers, foreigners were not privy to any

of the internal deliberations behind the making of China’s population policy in 1978-1980 and had no direct influence on that process. The key actors in this story of the making of modern China were all Chinese. Institutionalizing Social Science within Ideology/Politics

Although the political climate surrounding population study remained fraught with danger, population studies’ time had finally arrived. With pressing work to do and little time in which to do it, the new field was cobbled together and put to work virtually overnight. Because the PRC had only a handful of practicing population experts in the late 19703, education planners had to create a field of population research by inviting scholars with various backgrounds to lend their talents to the new high-priority field. Although economics and statistics predominated, the intellectual roots of the new field were sundry and diverse, embracing the social sciences (political economy, geography, sociology, psychology), the humanities (Chinese literature, foreign languages), and even the natural and medical sciences (especially biology) (Greenhalgh 1988b, 1990).

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, China was home to what surely was one of the most rapid institutionalizations of a field of population studies in history. From around 1976-1977, population research offices began to open in scattered universities around the country (Greenhalgh 1988b; Sun Muhan 1987: 242-243). With financial support from the

inele) Making Population Science United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), which opened an office in Beijing in 1979, the Ministry of Education began setting up

a nationwide system of population teaching and research institutes, designating the unit at People’s University the national center (RK YJ Editorial Board 1980, 1981; ME: 77). Substantial technical and financial

support from the United Nations would not be available until a little later, however. In 1979 and early 1980, when China’s new policy on population was being worked out, China’s social scientists would have to rely primarily on domestic scientific resources (data, data-processing equipment, publications, and so forth) to do their work. Centers of population research were located not only in universities, but also in national and provincial social science academies and party schools.!? All were part of the party-dominated, state-managed sector. Population research was also initiated in some medical universities and in selected government organs such as the State Planning Commission, the State Statistical Bureau, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Council’s Census Office. The result was a sprawling and diverse field in which scholars and government officials mingled freely and the boundaries between (social) science and politics were routinely effaced. Brought to life by the party-state and located within party and government institutions, the new social scientists of population clearly had to mind the rules of the political game. The constraints were especially clear at the nation’s leading center for population research at People’s University. Normally, Chinese universities make the decision to establish new academic units. In this case, the State Council placed the population studies institute at the university. The government located the

institute within this keypoint university because the government urgently needed its best scholars to support and legitimate its new project of strong population control. The arrangement would be mutually advantageous for the State Council and the scholars (IFK,11/28/o1,USb).

For the scholars, however, the advantages would be ambiguous, for

even as this state support gave them an important role in making national policy, it meant that they would have to do the government’s bidding, sometimes subordinating academic concerns to political ones. The political, indeed, statist nature of Chinese population research was also evident in the broader institutions of the field. For example, the Population Association of China (Zhongguo Renkou Xuehui), created to facilitate communication among the varying research bodies and government agencies involved in population work, would be established

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population IOI under the guidance of the State Council’s Birth Planning Leading Group and its successor (Tien 1981: 684). The new journals created to facili-

tate communication and exchange among various sectors of the field exhibited the same porous boundary between “science” and “the state,” “scholarship” and “politics.” In 1977, Liu Zheng and his colleagues inaugurated the nation’s first demography journal, Population Research (Renkou yanjiu), issuing it first for internal circulation and later, in 1980, as an “open” journal. It was open not in the sense that any opinion could be freely expressed—indeed, putting things on paper was still

, quite risky, limiting scholars to the expression of orthodox views in print—but rather in the sense that anyone could now subscribe. Other journals soon followed (Greenhalgh 1990: 366). Reflecting the political nature of population science—and the scientific nature of population politics—the journals featured articles publicizing official policy and the birth planning experiences of various localities, along with more scholarly analyses of demographic trends, population theory, and other matters. Official policy statements and speeches by top leaders, when they appeared, occupied the first slot, replicating on paper the hierarchy of formal power that existed in practice. China’s new specialists on population had some wiggle room—but not much. THE RISE OF LIU ZHENG AND THE MARXIAN STATISTICIANS

This unusual history threw up three groups of scholars who claimed the mantle of population policy specialist. The first to emerge was a team of “Marxian statisticians” under the leadership of Liu Zheng. Liu Zheng: A Politically and Intellectually Apt Leader The rise of the Marxian statisticians was rooted in the regime’s need for Marxian theorists to legitimate its unorthodox (officially “non-Malthusian”) project of state birth planning—to Chinese and foreigners alike. In late 1973, the State Council’s Birth Planning Leading Group began casting about for a prominent scholar to advise the government as it prepared the Chinese statement for the United Nations World Population Conference to be held in Bucharest in August 1974 ([F,11/13/85,BJa; for discussion of that statement, see chapter 2). For these important assignments the Leading Group tapped Liu Zheng, the head of the Department of

102 Making Population Science Planning Statistics at People’s University of China. The choice of institution and individual made eminent sense. Founded in 1950, People’s University was a new revolutionary uni-

versity created to develop the authoritative Marxist-Leninist-Maoist canon for the social sciences. The ideological core of a completely reorganized system of higher education, in which intellectuals were placed in direct service to the regime, Ren Da was given the responsibility for training cadres for the socialist party-state and teachers of social science and political theory (Hayhoe 1999: 75-90). The Beijing-based institution was of course influential in government circles and enjoyed close ties to the State Planning Commission, which handled social as well as economic planning (IF,12/16/03,BJa). During the Cultural Revolution, the university was closed for eight years (1970-1978). Many of its faculty were sent to a May Seventh Cadre School in Jiangxi to till the soil. Liu Zheng’s wife recalls how in the fall of 1973 Liu’s career was forever changed by a notification from Beijing that he had been appointed direc-

tor of a new population research organization (Population Awards 2003: 273-275). The new population office was to be temporarily housed in the Economics Institute of the Beijing College of Economics. Liu was to become deputy director of the Economics Institute and head of the new Population Research Office. Liu Zheng (1930-1993) was a good choice to head this challenging and sensitive science project. A prominent statistician, Liu had been a member of the Ren Da Planning Statistics Department since 19 50, rising to become its chair. Although little is known about his early life (even his closest colleagues could not tell me his father’s occupation), pub-

lished biographies indicate that Liu was born in Liaoning’s Xinmin County (PAC and PI 1994: 407). He took a degree in mathematics at the National Changbai Teacher’s College in Changchun, and then stud-

ied briefly at the University of North China (Huabei, forerunner of People’s) before joining the teaching staff at Ren Da.!! During his twenty-three years at People’s University, he made signal contributions to the development of the nation’s statistical system and the training of

a cadre of statistical workers (PAC and PI 1994: 407-420). A party member since 1953, Liu could be counted on to be loyal—that is, to use his knowledge to serve the nation and to follow party rules and prerogatives at all times. Although his background was in quantitative social science, Liu responded energetically to the party’s request to develop a

Marxian theory of population because, as one official put it, Liu “unfailingly worked for the benefit of the nation” (IF,12/15/03,BJa).

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 103 Translated, this means: when the party calls, one responds. As others in the field explained, Liu’s training made him a suitable candidate, and no one else could do population research in any case. Liu recruited five colleagues from his department to work with him

in developing a Marxian science and policy of population. The core group included Wu Cangping, Zha Ruichuan, and Lin Fude.'* Wu Cangping (1922-—) was an economist with a master’s degree in business

administration from New York University. He returned to China in 1951, teaching statistics at Furen University (later amalgamated into Beying University) before joining People’s. Zha Ruichuan (1925-2001) and Lin Fude (1925—-) came to People’s University from the prestigious

Qinghua University, a leading polytechnic university reorganized in 1952 to concentrate on various engineering disciplines. Zha had a master’s degree in chemistry and superlative mathematical skills, while Lin held a degree in economics. Two others who worked with the Ren Da group were Zhou Qing, a woman agricultural economist, and Hou Wenruo, a translator of Russian and English.

Formally organized in February 1974, the Office of Population Research at the Beijing College of Economics was the first independent population research center in the history of the People’s Republic.'? In June 1978, Liu and his colleagues were transferred to the newly reopened People’s University, where they formed the core of the new Population

Theory Institute. In early 1979, as China entered the era of socialist reform, Liu and his social science team at Ren Da were the nation’s lead-

ing scholarly authorities on population. As population came to occupy an ever larger place on the nation’s agenda, they would become major public voices on population as well, serving as propagandists for the state’s birth planning effort. By lecturing at meetings of birth planning workers and publishing articles in leading newspapers and popular magazines, they would play crucial roles in educating China’s cadres and masses on the importance of population control in China’s modernization. I draw on some of these articles in the following discussion. In early 1979, the Liu group developed a proposal for China’s population policy that would be a leading contender for official adoption. That proposal had been recruited by the Leading Group in January 1979. By March, Liu, Wu, and Lin had prepared an internal document for the State Council’s Birth Planning Office titled “Five Recommendations for Controlling China’s Population Growth.” That office sent it on to higher levels, where it received favorable comments from Li Xiannian (ConfidChron). This historic report will form the basis for much of our discussion.

104 Making Population Science A Marxian Statistics of Population: Roots in Soviet Planning Statistics and Maoist Marxian Theory During the early and mid-1970s, when population work was too sensitive to be openly discussed, the Liu group was busy quietly creating the foundations of a new field of Chinese population studies and urging an impor-

tant place for population control in China’s program of socialist modernization. Following the writings of Marx and Engels, they viewed population as an economic domain, to be studied by the tools of Marxian economics and its main applied discipline, socialist state planning.

This pathbreaking research—in theory and statistics—was shaped by China’s own, Maoist version of Marxist theory and by Soviet statistics. The first project, discussed in chapter 2, was the development of a Marxian theory of population management and control. Western scholars have generally dismissed these endeavors, either ignoring them or deriding them as “rather useless ideological exercises” (Aird 1982: 282). Yet the theory project in Chinese population studies was anything but useless. In the complicated political context of the mid-1970s, it was both useful and necessary. Above all, it was politically productive. The Marx-

ian theory that was developed served not just to legitimate state birth planning; it would also have major policy effects, defining one of two major positions in an intense debate about the speed, universality, and acceptable social costs of a policy to promote single-child families. The group’s second project was to create a Marxian statistics of population. Modeled on Soviet statistics, Chinese statistics was not statistics in the conventional Western sense but the statistics of the planned economy (Li Choh-Ming 1962; C.C. Lin 1981).'* During the 1950s and 1960s, Liu Zheng had developed specialties in the statistical systems for state economic planning, industria! development, and national construction. In the mid-1970s, he and his colleagues applied this same intellectual framework to population, seeing it as an aggregate, national-level phenomenon sub_ ject to statistical measurement and understanding, and governable through the reasoning and practice of comprehensive state planning. The statistical project was multistranded, evolving as opportunities and needs arose. Three strands can be delineated. As early as 1971-1972, Wu Cangping, whose command of English was excellent, began translating documents provided by the United Nations and introducing Chinese readers to population data and research on foreign countries. These interna-

tional researches, though remaining unpublished, helped China’s population experts (and, in turn, policy makers) put China’s situation in

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population IO§ international perspective ([K12/16/03,BJa; Wu Cangping 2001). Using the

limited demographic data available, in the mid-1970s the group also began to undertake descriptive empirical research to gauge the structure and likely growth trends of the population. Though seemingly mundane, this statistical work was crucial to the emergence of a new mode of population governance. In creating statistical descriptions of China’s population, the People’s University scholars were bringing population into being as an object of science and scientific governance. The descriptive statistics would also facilitate population governance by providing the input data needed for population planning and policymaking. A third strand of statistical work involved the development of quantitative tools needed for population planning and policymaking. From the mid-1970s, Zha Ruichuan and Lin Fude helped fashion a system of population indicators that became standardized throughout the country (Zha 2001). By studying measures used elsewhere and adapting them to

the specific context of state birth planning in China, Zha and others developed a set of indigenous projection and other techniques to inform

plan and policy deliberations. Because they had to “start from zero” (Zha 2001: 76), and because any techniques they devised had to be adapted to China’s birth planning mode of population control, the tools they created would be relatively simple and crude and fit Chinese reali-

ties rather than international standards.

The Handicaps of Maoist History Although the Liu group and other social scientists recovered their abil-

ity to conduct research with impressive rapidity, after almost twenty years of intellectual isolation, resource deprivation, and political intimidation, the last five years involving complete disruption of their professional lives, they entered the contest to shape China’s population policy with severe handicaps.!° In the 1970s, virtually all the scientific ingredients for the making of the new discipline were absent. China’s state-designated population spe-

cialists lacked a background in population studies and knowledge of developments in population thought and demographic technique elsewhere. Western materials were generally unavailable and, when they could be located, had to be translated into Chinese, a time-consuming task for which few were trained. The statisticians not only lacked training in formal quantitative methods of population analysis, they were ill

106 Making Population Science equipped to absorb those methods when they were introduced (Coale 1981). Their background in the statistics of the planned economy was useful, but that statistical system had to be adapted to the wholly new task of planning population growth. There were no precedents for such work anywhere. Moreover, the statisticians and others working on population had to create a field of demography in an environment largely bereft of demographic data (for the reasons, see chapter 2). In the mid-1970s, the People’s University specialists had to create their object of study— China’s population—with virtually no reliable national data on it. Infor-

mation on the age structure of fertility, crucial to the formulation of fertility policy, was totally absent (Lin Fude 2002). The basic data needed for population projections were incomplete and poor in quality. The Ren Da group also lacked modern data-processing equipment. The Liu team did not acquire a personal computer until 1982, far too late to help them fashion China’s new population policy (IK.12/16/03,BJa). The

data difficulties would make it impossible for them—or anyone—to create a policy closely fitted to China’s demographic realities.

In the highly politicized science environment of the PRC, political resources were perhaps as important to intellectuals as conventional scientific resources. The Ren Da group lacked these as well. As noted earlier, as social scientists the statisticians were constrained to use Marxian theory as their guide and to stay within the speech space of China’s top leaders. These demands greatly limited the kind of population science and policy they could create. During the Cultural Revolution, their institutional base, People’s University, had been designated one of two major centers of pernicious Soviet influence and targeted for especially heavy criticism. It was closed for eight years, depriving its faculty not only of basic scientific resources (books, journals, offices, and so on) but also of political capital that might have enabled them to respond quickly to the

call to build a field of population theory and policy studies (CEAIE 1989: 6). During the ten years of turmoil, social scientists had been turned into propagandists for various party factions, required to produce theoretical justifications for their policy preferences (Harding 1980). Indeed, throughout the “twenty bad years” that began in the late 19508, social scientists of all sorts had been openly and mercilessly disparaged, disdained, and abused, severely eroding their social status and self-esteem (Ogden 1982). In the struggles over population policy that would soon ensue, the social scientists’ lack of political resources—in the form of personal ties to policy makers, social status in official circles, and

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 107 cultural prestige in the wider society—would be one of the greatest handicaps of all.

Because the statisticians’ work on population remained part of “ideology/politics,” any support they might offer to population control would be vulnerable to charges of Malthusian influence and ideological heresy. Mao’s death in September 1976, followed by the arrest of the Gang of Four, took the severe chill off the climate for population

research. The climate warmed further with the formal rehabilitation of , Ma Yinchu in the late summer of 1979. Yet years of political intimidation, persecution, and highly personal attacks on the worth of their life

work and lives had bred a culture of caution, an ingrained fear that would mute their voices in the policy arena (cf. T.H. Chen 1981: 139-149). In meetings with me in the mid- and late 1980s, Liu Zheng invariably adopted a guarded, polite, and official demeanor. The model

communist cadre, he seemed never to deviate from the party line. According to others in the field, the Ren Da group were subject to a particularly restrictive set of rules about what they could discuss with

outsiders (IF,11/18/85,BJb). Compared to the other contenders for policy influence, the Liu group would exhibit a political style marked by circumspection and avoidance of any initiative that might provoke censure. The Liu group had an additional reason for caution: some of its core members had been targeted for repression in Mao’s campaigns of terror

against political “enemies.” Lin Fude was blessed with a background devoid of serious political problems, but the other two were not so fortunate (IK 11/28/o1,USb). Neither had received the terrible label “rightist,” which virtually destroyed the careers of hundreds of thousands of intellectuals so labeled in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, but both Wu and Zha suffered from Mao-era “political problems.” With his degree from the United States, Wu had the dreaded foreign connections (haiwai guanxi), while Zha was tainted by connections to the Nationalist Party (apparently some members of his family were high officials in the Nationalist government of Taiwan). These political stigmas, which left these two scholars always vulnerable to political attack, would haunt them throughout their careers, constraining them to publicly support official positions

and to limit the expression of dissenting views. The fear of attack or reprisal limited their ability to speak out against what they saw as wrong, forcing them to express disagreement in indirect and largely ineffective — ways. This caution, which sometimes bordered on fear, was palpable in interviews conducted with these scholars over the years.

108 Making Population Science Finally, while the Marxian social scientists were eager to answer the call to transnationalize their work, their state-mandated commitment to using Marxian theory greatly constrained what they could borrow from the West. Starting with its inaugural issue in 1977, Population Research featured special sections introducing readers to international population organizations, population policies and problems in various countries, and international statistics on population trends. Regular articles explained techniques of demographic analysis that were standard fare

in transnational demography but had been officially unwelcome in China for decades. These were all safe borrowings. What was less safe were Malthusian perspectives on the nature and scale of the population problem. The necessity of using Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought limited them to using old problematizations that were not only tainted by association with Mao and the Cultural Revolution, but also out of touch with the new spirit of reform and opening up. Being consigned to the Marxist-Maoist past would hobble China’s social scientists in the competition for policy influence.

A BACKWARD POPULATION, A BACKWARD NATION: PROBLEMATIZING POPULATION

During the 1960s and 1970s, concerned Chinese had quietly worried about the economic impact of rapid population growth, but with few statistics available they had little grasp of the scale of those problems. In . the late 1970s, as China opened up to the outside world and news of life

elsewhere began to reach the middle kingdom, Chinese intellectuals began to discover how poor China still was relative not only to the advanced capitalist countries but to many third world countries as well. _ Despite thirty years of socialist development, China remained a poor country whose citizens faced stagnant living standards, slow growth of agriculture, and a severe shortage of consumer goods (Naughton 1995). What enabled these new understandings was the availability of statistics, released in a trickle by the Chinese government and in a flood by

the United Nations and other international agencies. These numbers enabled the Marxian statisticians to see, to measure, and to represent to others—including China’s leaders—the scale of China’s backwardness relative to the rest of the world, the important influence of population in that, and the distance that must still be traveled for China to become a rich, powerful, modern nation. This pedagogy of numbers—for they

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 109 taught others to see and to think about population differently—would forever change the way the population problem was understood. Building on the official construction of the population problem, the writings of Ma Yinchu, and the Marxian-Engelsian theory of the twofold

character of production, in the late 1970s the Marxian statisticians defined the population problem as one of imbalance, or disproportion,

between economic and population growth. Excessive population growth posed “many difficulties” for China’s socioeconomic development, they argued, jeopardizing the PRC’s emergence as a wealthy, powerful, and modern nation by century’s end. In creating this narrative, the Marxian statisticians used conventional

practices of science making to good effect. Particularly important was their use of scientific modes of representing reality. As science and technology studies scholars have shown, representation is crucial to the construction and communication of scientific facts and a major source of science’s power (e.g., Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Lenoir 1998; Smith et al. 2000). Far from simply reflecting the natural order, representational practices transform natural objects and relationships in ways that render them general, abstract, and universal, rather than specific, concrete, and local. In this way, small-scale, local practices of knowledge production and representation, consistently applied, may produce large effects (Latour, in

Smith et al. 2000: 76). In their efforts to shape the thinking of China’s leaders and opinion makers, the social scientists relied primarily on two types of representational practices: quantification and visualization. Quantification (or statisticalization) is a set of scientific practices that transforms text statements into numerical ones, depersonalizing and decontextualizing them in the process. Statisticalization also works to transform mere statements into scientific “facts.” Facts can be thought of as statements that have been stripped of any trace of ownership, construction, time, or place; they are by definition true (Latour 1987: 23). Students of the modern West have rescued the scientific fact from obscurity, showing its centrality to the making of modern life (Poovey 1998).

Although scientific facts are invariably presented as unquestioned truths, on closer inspection they turn out to be humanly created through factification. In this process facts are first established through scientific practices that involve human choices. Those choices are then rhetorically removed, making the facts appear to be direct reflections of nature. With its injunction to “seek truth from facts,” late 1970s China was an especially interesting context in which to be making scientific facts. That context not only encouraged social scientists to statisticalize social

IIO Making Population Science and economic life, it also created a political market for their statistics, giving those numbers a political weight they might not enjoy in other contexts. Constrained to practice a follow-the-leaders demography, the statisticians would create their facts and narratives out of political truths already established by China’s leaders. Yet, as we shall see, through a variety of quantifying practices they were also able to alter those political

truths in ways that mattered. Visualization is a set of representational practices that render natural objects and relationships scientifically seeable. With the term scientific inscriptions—literally, visual displays in a scientific text—science studies scholars have drawn our attention to the work performed by mun-

dane tools such as tables, figures, and charts (Latour 1987: 64-70; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch and Woolgar 1990). Unremarkable | though they appear, such pictorial representations possess an “ocular power” that mere scientific text does not enjoy (Golinski 1998: 145).

The ocular power of numerical pictures was especially great in late 1970s China, because social science research had been sharply restricted for almost two decades. In such a context, tables and figures on the state

of China’s economy conveyed fresh information in novel and readily graspable ways. With the power of the picture, charts and graphs can have extraordinary 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 compelling

new narrative of population overload that constituted both a new regime of “truth” about the nature and urgency of the population problem and a scientific rationale for the firm control of population growth. Put another way, these scientific pictures did not simply reflect a prior reality that existed in nature. Instead, by representing social life in new ways, the tables, figures, and associated text actively constituted a new demographic and political reality. The social scientists also deployed a third set of scientific practices, categorization and comparison. A classification system can be thought of as “a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind of work—bureaucratic or knowledge production” (Bowker and Star 1999: 10). Once neglected as an unremarkable part of science making, categorization has drawn increasing attention,

for it both reflects human choices and produces social effects (esp. Bowker and Star 1999). In early Deng-era China, the most important | set of classificatory boxes was that grouping countries under the labels

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 111 “developed” and “underdeveloped,” “rich” and “poor.” By placing China

in a particular category of country and comparing it with others in that category, this practice helped remake the mental map of China’s place in the world. Establishing the Basic Demographic Facts

The Liu group and others seeking to establish the burden imposed by , China’s population began by establishing the basic facts or “special characteristics” (tedian) of China’s population. The language of tedian— special or even peculiar characteristics—was important, for it framed the demographers’ task as part of Deng Xiaoping’s larger project of creating a “Chinese path to modernization” based on China’s special characteristics (Deng 1984[1979]: 171, 172). Indeed, as we have seen, Deng had named China’s “large population of which 80 percent is rural” one of only two attributes that had to be taken into account, making popu-

lation a politically indisputable cause of China’s backwardness. By 1979, four facts had become codified as the most important anomalies of China’s population: its rapid growth, its gargantuan size, its peasant character, and its young, double-peaked age structure. These were listed again and again as the unquestionable facts that “determined” China’s strategy of population control. Given their political import, it is crucial to see how they were scientifically established. In creating their demographic facts, the Marxian statisticians relied

heavily on practices of international categorization and comparison. Clearly, the demographic facts that were created would depend on which

group of nations was selected as the reference group. For example, if Chinese population specialists had compared the PRC to the nations of the third world—a group to which, just a few years earlier, it had clearly and proudly belonged—Chinese fertility and population growth rates in the late 1970s would have looked gratifyingly low. The facts would have shown that the birth planning work of the 1970s was a resounding success, placing China far “ahead” of its developmental peers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet in the new era of socialist modernization, China aspired to join the group of modern industrialized nations—and to make significant progress toward that goal by the year 2000. Accordingly, the experts established the basic facts by comparing China’s performance to that of the advanced nations. Those characteristics that separated China

from the modern nations represented anomalies in the Chinese social

112 Making Population Science India

China

China India 622.7979.2 Soviet Union Soviet Union 259.0

United States 216.7 United States

Japan 114.2 Indonesia Brazil 112.0 Japan Indonesia 136.9

Brazil

Figure 1. Population sizes, China and six other countries (Liu and Wu 1979: 3).

body, undesirable “backward” attributes that would have to be eliminated in order for China to become modern. The basic demographic facts would become the objects of governmental intervention and correction to the “modern” norm. These statistical practices were by no means misguided, but they were consequential, making China appear very abnormal and backward indeed. The first and most obvious fact was China’s indubitably huge popula-

tion base. In an article published in the China Youth Daily in August 1979, Liu and Wu sought to impress on young readers China’s inordinate size with a table listing the populations of nations with more than one hundred million people, rank-ordered by size (see figure 1). China topped the list with 975.2 million, followed by India with 622.7 and the Soviet Union with 259.0 million. Separated from the rest by an unseemly gap, China stood out like a sore thumb. By presenting the numbers in a list rather than embedding them in text, the most common way of pre-

senting numbers in China at the time, the authors made the gap stand

out more sharply. Accompanying the list was a pie chart showing the | PRC making up fully one-quarter of the world’s population. The pie chart was an especially effective pedagogical tool, for long after readers had forgotten the numbers in the list they would remember the image of the circle of the world with China taking up the largest slice. The message was clear: China is taking up too much space in the world. As worrying as the total number of Chinese was the growth in those _ numbers since 1949. In the same article, Liu and Wu lamented: “At the end of 1978, the population increased to 975,230,000, the net increase in population in 29 years (426,460,000) equaling the total population of

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 113 the United States, Canada, West Germany, England, and France” (Liu and Wu 1979: 3). The implication was that by allowing its population to grow so immoderately, the People’s Republic had undermined its chances

of becoming another United States, Canada, Germany, England, or France. To reach that status, it would have to arrest the growth of its human numbers.

Although population growth had slowed dramatically during the 19708, the Marxian statisticians stressed that, because of the huge base of people born in the recent past, China’s population would continue to grow by leaps and bounds for some time to come. This problem, known as population momentum, had not been part of the demographic conversations in the past. In bringing it up and fleshing it out empirically, the Marxian statisticians were making an important contribution to the

understanding of the population problems China continued to face, despite the major gains of the 1970s (Zha 2001: 76). That problem of future growth was particularly worrisome because of the large proportions of peasants and young people, brought out, once again, by comparison with the older and more urban populations of the West. These two categories of persons, which composed some 80 and 66 percent of the total, respectively, were the most prolific parts of the population. The problem of youthfulness was compounded by the irreg-

ular, peak-and-valley nature of past population growth, the demographic fingerprint left by the adventurous campaigns of Mao’s rule. Tian Xueyuan, a like-minded demographer at the Chinese Academy of

Social Sciences (who, however, would soon switch allegiances), used a line figure to show the “double hump” character of population growth, in which large numbers of people were born during 1953 to 1957 and

then again from 1963 to 1971 (see figure 2). With a glance, viewers could see the ugly, lumpy nature of China’s population growth and appreciate the importance of smoothing it out. They could also see the big problems posed by the large Cultural Revolution generation, whose

members would begin marrying and reproducing in the mid-1980s, threatening the achievement of century-end goals. Overly Reproductive Individuals Burden the State These anomalies in the social body were so worrying to the social scientists at People’s University and elsewhere because of their dire effects on

economic growth. One of the major contributions of the Liu group to the leaders’ understanding of the population problem was to calculate,

II4 Making Population Science

25 |

3.0

2.0 %

15 | 1.0

0.5

1949 55 60 65 70 fe. 80 Year

[1981]: 76). 7

Figure 2. Rate of natural increase of population, 1950-1980, expressed as average levels over selected periods (Tian 1985

in precise dollar (yuan) amounts, the cost to China’s economic development of the excess births in recent decades. These calculations—which made individuals responsible for imposing costs on the state—assumed

a socialist setup in which the socialist state promises to provision its population, so that when population grows too large the people become burdens on their state. Following the lead of Ma Yinchu, who had made similar calculations

in the 1950s, and in the spirit of “seeking truth from facts,” in 1978-1979 the Liu group carried out a survey to discover the real costs borne by the individual, the collective, and the state to raise a child to working age of sixteen (Lin Fude 2002; Ma 1997[1957]: 98-99).!” This exercise had broader theoretical and political significance, for it was tied to the long-standing debate in Marxian circles over whether man was primarily a hand or a mouth, a producer or a consumer. In the late 19708, the figure of the consuming mouth loomed large, as theorists realized that the neglect of mouths was responsible for China’s tragic

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population L15 | failure to control population growth in the 1950s and 1960s. More specifically, the one-sided emphasis on man’s role as producer had led to

the misguided notion that the more people, the more producers, and thus the faster, better, and more economically socialism could be built (Hou 1981: 61). Such notions, advanced at times by Mao himself, had decisively discouraged efforts to control population growth. In the late 1970s, the Liu group drew attention to mouths by adding up the cumulative costs of the country’s failure to deal with the problem of consumption in the past. In their Five Recommendations report, Liu, Wu,

and Lin presented detailed calculations showing that the combined burden placed on the state, collectives, and individual families of raising

the six hundred million children born since liberation was more than 1,000 billion yuan. Estimating that the state and collective paid 30 percent of this amount, they concluded that fully 396 billion yuan—roughly one-

third of the total accumulation since 1949—had been spent on child rearing (Liu, Wu, and Lin 1980[1979]: 1). “Obviously,” Liu concluded, “if fewer children had been born, some savings could have been made available for more accumulation and hence for more construction” (Liu 1981: 9). Ina newly marketizing economy, this was a compelling rationale for population control, one that demonstrated, in precise monetary

terms, the great burden imposed on the state by reckless individual reproduction and the threat that excessive childbearing posed to China’s hopes to become a prosperous nation.

This little calculation not only reflected a particular political setup and set of political assumptions, it did further political work. By computing the value of human life in Chinese dollars and focusing exclusively on humans’ role as consumers, it treated children as financial burdens on the state, neglecting their social and cultural values to their families and society at large. And by focusing on individual childbearing as the main cause of the problem, the authors suggested that it was greedy individuals, not a misguided party-state, who were responsible for the population problem. Individuals then must bear the burden of solving it by drastically controlling their reproductive urges. An Economy under Siege

Working within the planned economy framework, the Marxian statisticians showed how the rapid increase in China’s gargantuan population was worsening problems of employment, accumulation, livelihood, and

116 Making Population Science education, pushing China’s modernization into the distant future (e.g., Liu 1980b; Liu, Wu, and Lin 1980[1979]; also Tian 1985[1979]). Their numbers put empirical flesh on the story of population-induced backwardness sketched in broad strokes by China’s top leaders, making it concrete and vivid. Called on to “seek truth from facts,” they marshaled countless facts to empirically substantiate and in turn deepen a political truth. A major conceptual innovation of the late 1970s was the “per capita

concept” (renjun sixiang), later attributed to Deng Xiaoping but certainly used to best effect by China’s social scientists. By dividing economic aggregates by the size of the population, Chinese specialists discovered, they could bring out the lack of proportion in the twofold character of production and the truly dismal level of China’s socioeconomic development (Lin Fude 2002). The sense of shock and dismay produced by the “denominator effect” (fenmu yingxiang) of population is hard to convey to readers of this book, for whom such calculations are daily fare (Wu Cangping 2001: 71). This technique was used with great effectiveness in the Five Recommendations report. The authors defined the problem as one of contra-

diction between the rapid population growth of the previous few decades, on the one hand, and various aspects of economic and social development, on the other. Using the few numbers available, they laid out the huge imbalances that had been created by that excessive growth of human numbers between 1956 and 1977. Among the most worrying, per capita arable land had been halved, falling from 3 to 1.55 mu per person (a mu is about one-sixth of an acre) and leaving China’s peasants with the smallest acreage in the world. Those decades had also brought notable declines in the per capita levels of such measures of economic well-being as industrial crop production, grain output, urban housing, and schools. Expressing his frustration with the glacial pace of economic

modernization, one author who had performed similar exercises described the PRC in the late 1970s as no better off than the China of the ancient Han dynasty two thousand years earlier (Tian 1985[1979]: 13). Although the People’s University scholars attributed these difficulties

“mainly to the prolonged failure . . . to shift the focus . . . to socialist construction,” they described population growth as “also one of the important causes” (Liu, Wu, and Lin 1980[1979]: 3). By calling population growth “a direct major cause” of China’s economic problems and focusing exclusively on it, they and other economic demographers made

population stand out as the major cause of China’s poverty. Here and elsewhere, population growth was represented as an all-purpose villain,

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 117 responsible for exacerbating if not creating virtually every problem of development. For example, in China Youth Daily, Liu and Wu lamented the post-1949 decline in China’s per capita grain consumption compared to that of the United States and France. “The reason for this kind of abnormal change,” they wrote, “ is... population: in these 26 years [1950-1976], China’s population increased by 69 percent, that of the United States increased by 41 percent, and that of France by 27 percent” (Liu and Wu 1979: 3).

There can be no doubt that rapid population growth was a major contributor to the many economic problems that had accumulated during the late Maoist era. By blaming all these problems on population, the scholars may have been deliberately erring on the side of overemphasis to counteract the widespread belief—spread by Jiang Qing during the Cultural Revolution and apparently shared by ordinary people, cadres, and even some of China’s leaders—that population was unimportant to the great affairs of state, that it was, in Jiang’s memo-

rable phrase, a “feminine triviality.” Given that political context, an overstatement may well have served useful pedagogical purposes. Yet what bears noting is that, aside from these simple comparisons of aggregate and per capita measures of economic performance, the size of population’s contribution to China’s dismal economic state, either absolutely

or relative to other factors, was never empirically measured. That is because the devastating effect of population growth on the economy was a political truth that had already been articulated by China’s leaders and embedded in the official Marxian theory of specific population-

economy imbalances.!® The scholars’ role was not to empirically measure the impact of population or assess the size of that impact relative to the influence of the disastrous social and economic policies of Mao’s time—political considerations clearly precluded that. Their role

was rather to illustrate the new political and ideological truth with available statistics. The social scientists’ main rationale for population control—the devastating impact on the economy—was thus asserted and illustrated but not carefully measured. Here is a clear instance in which the political context shaped the population science that got made. What is interesting for our purposes is not

so much the “poor quality” of the resulting science—science often embodies political assumptions—but the political work that imprinting performed, What the politicization of the science produced was a simple, indeed, extraordinarily simplistic picture that made population appear to be the single most important source of China’s economic woes. The bigger

118 Making Population Science result was a new, now factually substantiated political truth about the necessity of strong population control to China’s modernization. A Nation Kept Backward

Although the predicament of the economy was serious enough, the Marxian statisticians were ultimately most concerned about the fate of the Chinese nation. At the June 1978 Leading Group meeting, senior leader Li Xiannian had depicted birth planning as a “strategic problem” (zhanlue wenti) that affects the realization of the Four Modernizations as well as China’s prosperity and power (ME: 64). The “strategic char-

acter” of birth planning quickly became the official formulation, appearing repeatedly in official speeches and documents. Following this

new framing, in early 1979 the People’s University scholars began to elaborate a cluster of notions according to which China’s rapid population growth was self-evident proof of the country’s backwardness, a source of national shame, and a major cause of China’s continued failure to achieve its rightful place in the world. Once a cause for pride, China’s bulky population was now a source

, of national humiliation. In a People’s Daily article, Liu Zheng lamented the fact that the PRC’s per capita income was a mere U.S. $200, leaving

it in one hundred tenth place among the world’s countries, lower, he lamented, than many developing countries (Liu 1980a: 5). Particularly shameful was China’s failure to keep up even with India, China’s historic competitor. And that failure was most glaring in the fields of education and science and technology, fields Deng had declared the keys to China’s modernization: There are only 6.5 university students among every 10,000 people in our country, and this number is the smallest in the world. In the United States, there are 456; in Japan and the Soviet Union, 185. Even India has 37 undergraduates per ten thousand population, several times our level. The rapid increase of population has handicapped our historical mission of raising our scientific, cultural, and technological levels. (Liu, Wu, and Lin 1980/1979]: 3)

In the statisticians’ hands, rapid population growth also became incontestable proof of the nation’s backwardness in the global order of things. From mid-1979, a number of comparisons appeared ranking the PRC alongside key industrialized nations on per capita measures of development. A typical table showed China, whose per capita income

had risen only modestly between 1950 and 1976, followed by the ,

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 119 TABLE 4. PER CAPITA GRAIN OUTPUT AND NATIONAL INCOME, COMPARISON OF CHINA WITH THE UNITED STATES,

FRANCE, AND JAPAN, 1950-1976

Measure Country 1950 1955 1965 1970 1976 Output of food China 479 599 536 = 589 614

grains per United States 2,001 1,938 2,166 2,164 2,750

capita (catty”) France 810 992 A292 A328. 1,262 National income China 28 49 78 a5 Bee, per capita United States 1,746 2,194 3,245 4,352 7,028 (dollars) Japan 195 245 785 1,630 4,193 SOURCE: Chen Muhua 1979: 2 *1 catty = 604.8 grams

United States and Japan, whose incomes had spurted in the same period (see table 4). Such tables, which were just beginning to emerge at this time, gave China’s backwardness a striking new visibility, while the numbers, which seemed to speak a patently obvious truth, endowed the tables and their message with facticity. By making population growth the only thing that separated the PRC from the great powers, the tables and their associated text also seemed to make China’s overly large population the main cause of its backwardness, keeping other sources of

those economic problems out of sight. :

Here again, by making China’s peers the already-developed countries, Chinese writers made the severity of China’s problems stand out with special force. Reflecting the party’s new goal of rapid modernization, these international tables also fostered a national identity in which China was only a temporarily backward nation, whose rightful place was among the industrial powers of the world. The viewer is invited first to imagine the PRC among the leading industrial powers, and then to contemplate how drastically the country’s population growth must be limited in order to arrive quickly at this desired destination. Behind China’s aspirations to great-power status lay a wounded nationalism rooted in painful memories of a 150-year-long history of being bullied by more powerful nations. The desire to quickly catch up with the West also reflected an international socialist imperative to demonstrate the superiority of socialism by catching up with and even overtaking the advanced capitalist countries. Mao Zedong had certainly had such aspirations for China. Unfortunately, Mao’s leap projects not only failed to propel China past the United States and Great Britain,

120 Making Population Science they pushed China further back into the abyss of poverty. In the late 19708, leap thinking reemerged as China embarked on a bold project of reentering and achieving rapid modernization within a highly competitive capitalist world economy.!” Taking their cue from top leaders, in 1979 the Marxian statisticians presented population control as a certain means to accomplish that historic leap mission. Liu’s colleague Wu Cangping underscored the nationalist and socialist pride China would

feel by achieving in decades what it had taken the capitalist powers cen- | turies to accomplish: If we make energetic efforts to develop production and at the same time effectively control population growth, and in a few decades complete the course of development which took the capitalist countries several hundred years, it will prove that once a long-oppressed country is freed from the yoke of colonialism and imperialism, it is entirely possible to transform it from a backward country into an advanced one. This is the historic duty of our generation. (Wu Cangping 1980o0c: 34)

Rooted in a belief that China now faced a highly competitive, even Darwinian, international economic environment in which only the fittest could survive and prosper, this leap mentality would be critically important, for it would encourage the adoption of leap-sized popula-

tion control goals whose attainment would require little short of a demographic miracle.

My point here is not that population growth had no influence on China’s backwardness in the global order of things—it did. My point rather is that this narrative of demographically induced poverty was based on certain scientific procedures that reflected particular political assumptions—a specific theory of population-economy relations, a specific political setup, specific international comparisons, and specific relationships that were assumed, not measured—and it emphasized one cause of China’s poverty to the exclusion of all others. The narrative was then presented in visually powerful and factifying numerical pictures. The procedures and choices behind that formulation were veiled by the language of facts and science and, in this way, closed to scrutiny. Once created, the new narrative did important political work. It taught people that population was about aggregates, not individuals. It indicated that the problem of population was one of abstract numbers, not sentient people. It instructed that population was properly a concern of the state and state planners; the reproductive desires of individuals and families occupied at best second place. Perhaps most important, it produced a new, empirically self-evident, and thus politically indubitable truth: that

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 121 population growth was one of the greatest obstacles to China’s modernization and global ascent.

A “FEASIBLE” PROPOSAL: | ENCOURAGE ONE, PREVENT THREE

If excessive population growth was a huge burden that was slowing China’s push to modernize, how should the population problem be solved? The Liu group’s answer, laid out in the Five Recommendations

report, was to prohibit the birth of third children and vigorously encourage couples to have only one child. Because reproduction was to be planned by the state, like the production of material commodities

and in proportion to material production, the statisticians’ proposal carried the worrying potential to dehumanize the objects of population planning. Yet in Marxian theory, population belonged to society; its development was to be guided by social theory. Accordingly, the planning of reproduction was subject to some social restraints. Following Mao’s dictum, theory had to be combined with practice. This meant that, in creating a concrete population control plan, the feasibility of its enforcement had to be taken into account. In addition, the plan was a unified social and economic development plan that sought balance and proportion between the component parts. In this schema, at least theoretically, the need to create a balanced, normal society was as important as the need to foster the development of the economy. In devising their proposal on population policy, then, the Marxian statisticians took both political viability and social consequences into account. A Go-Slow One-Child Policy The key to solving the population problem was a policy restraining fertility at the family level. But how far and how fast could fertility be lowered? The People’s University scholars drew on the historical experience

of the developed countries to conclude that reducing fertility to two children per couple and eventually stopping population growth, a goal they introduced into China’s policy conversations for the first time, would require decades or longer (IK,12/16/03,BJa). History, they argued, called for patience. In China, patience was especially needed because of the huge numbers of young people in the population. The scholars sought to bring

out the impact of China’s youthful age structure with projections of

122 Making Population Science future population growth. Using the limited data available and some crude techniques they had devised, they calculated a series of rough forecasts (Lin Fude 2002). They offered their projections not as predictions of real demographic futures, but as heuristic tools that could be used to weigh different policy options. Their projections showed that even if all couples could be limited to two children, China’s population would rise to 1.2 billion by the end of the century. Under less favorable

assumptions, the population would expand to 1.3 to 1.7 billion. “Therefore,” they argued, “the job of .. . bringing the population to a standstill calls for long sustained efforts. Like a car being driven at full speed, it cannot be brought to a sudden halt. It must first slow down” (Liu, Wu, and Lin 1980[1979]: 4). Given these hard demographic realities, the Liu team began to contemplate the possibility of encouraging one-child families. How did that

rather drastic solution become politically thinkable? For the Marxian statisticians the idea emerged from personal observations of childbearing among ordinary citizens in Beijing. According to Lin Fude, in 1977 the Ren Da group had carried out a one-per-seven population survey in the city’s Xuanwu District. In one politically advanced factory, they discovered, twenty-six married women of reproductive age, or 5 percent of the total, responded to the slogan “best is one, at most two” by saying

they wanted only one child. This left a deep impression on Lin. On a districtwide level, the survey showed that almost one-fifth of the married women of reproductive age with one child did not have a second after nine to ten years. These findings were supported by the experience of municipal birth planning officials, who had encountered many cases

of couples willingly stopping at one. Based on these anecdotal and survey findings, Lin and his colleagues felt that the social climate—at least in the cities—would be receptive to a call for one-child families (Lin Fude 2002). Based on these sociodemographic realities, they proposed a policy of gradually raising the proportion of first births while immediately eliminating all third births. They deliberately did not mention the difficult

question of second births, which were culturally desired but demographically problematic (Lin Fude 2002). This was offered as a “fairly feasible method” that was demographically realistic, socially acceptable, and politically enforceable in the countryside:

Use every possible means to prevent each couple from having three or | more children (currently more than 30 percent of rural and ro percent of urban births are third and higher births) and vigorously advocate that

Chinese Marxian Statistics of Population 123 people have only one child. Then by the end of the century, it may be possible for half of the families in the cities and one-fourth of the families in the countryside to have only one child. . . . [B]y the end of the century the population growth rate will fall to 4.7 per 1,000 and the total population will be around 1.18 billion. If, by the end of the century, it is possible for half of the families in the countryside and two-thirds of the families in the cities to have only one child then, by 2008, when the population will be slightly more than 1.2 billion, it will be possible for popu-

: lation growth to come to a standstill. (Liu, Wu, and Lin 1980[1979]: 4) This was a modest plan, for it called for raising the proportion of onechild families in the countryside to only one-quarter or, at most, one-half by the end of the century. (The former would yield a population of 1.18 billion in 2000, the latter 1.2 billion in 2008.) This was a go-slow onechild policy.

Political Feasibility and Social Costs

As Marxian social scientists whose work combined theory and practice, the Liu group was deeply concerned with the question of concrete practice: how would their policy be carried out among the Chinese masses and the state’s population goals achieved? They recommended a cluster of interlocked economic and educational measures that were informed by their own theory as well as nearly ten years of birth planning practice. Because reproduction, in their view, was regulated mainly by economic factors, and decisions were made at the family level, they urged

first and foremost the institution of a set of economic measures that would alleviate the hardship of rural families asked to have only one or two children by solving the concrete socioeconomic problems (such as

old-age support) that underlay their desires for more. Based on the rationale that children were financial burdens on the state, the Liu group

proposed that couples limiting themselves to one child be materially rewarded, while those having more than their share be fined. The economic measures should be supplemented by the sorts of party-purveyed propaganda and education that had proven highly effective during the previous ten years. Clearly, such a sharp decline in fertility would have marked effects

on the population structure. Following their stress on aggregate, national-level issues, a focus given by Marxian theory as well as by their field of statistics, the Liu group gave serious consideration to those costs that would be borne by society as a whole. They were not so concerned with consequences that might be borne at the family or individual level.

124 Making Population Science Their research suggested that the impact on labor power and military recruits would be manageable. Yet as family size shrank, the population

would age very rapidly, creating a host of social and economic problems. To avoid such a scenario, they argued, the new policy should be in effect only for the next twenty years, after which the matter should be

reviewed in light of prospects at that time for continued population growth. Twenty years of only “encouraging” one-child families: this was a modest proposal compared to what others would soon propose.

CHAPTER 4

A Sinified Cybernetics of Population

Throughout the mid- and late 1970s, the emerging field of Chinese population studies was a social science committed to formulating China’s population problem and its solution in terms of China’s own intellectual tradition of Marxian economics. Indeed, since the 1950s Marxian social science had provided the only publicly available framework for thinking about the governance of population in the PRC.! Yet the social sciences’ grip on population was about to be challenged. In mid-1978, a group of three natural scientists-cum-—systems engineers from the defense world began quietly applying their skills to the population question. Their field was cybernetics, the science of control and communications in complex machine systems. Their specialty was control theory, an engineering approach to controlling the behavior of machines—not humans (Wiener 1948). Although the researchers had no experience in population research, they had developed a keen per-

sonal interest in China’s population affairs ([K11/16/99,BJa). The group’s leader and prime mover was Song Jian, a top control theorist at the Seventh Ministry of Machine Building—in charge of missiles. Song and his colleagues occupied a politically protected and intellectually privileged place on the elite cultural map of the PRC. As military researchers, they were denizens of the relatively independent land of “defense science and technology.” Unlike their social science colleagues, who as subjects of the kingdom of “party politics” remained burdened by the tortuous history of PRC population politics, the defense scientists

xs |

126 Making Population Science were outside “ideology/politics” and thus free to develop the science of

population in fresh directions. Although defense researchers such as Song were required to serve the regime and to respect its ideological fun-

damentals, they had their own highly authoritative and newly elevated body of thought—the reasoning of modern science and mathematics—to use as their guide. In contrast to the social scientists, who were constrained to practice a follow-the-leaders demography, the scientists and

engineers were able to develop an independent body of population thought based on modern science and technology that pushed the leaders’ views in new directions. Moreover, as beneficiaries of decades of top-level support for strategic defense science, the defense researchers possessed an extraordinary wealth of intellectual, political, and cultural resources with which to create a new and more “scientific” approach to population policy. In 1978-1979 this team of researchers created a novel natural science of population that reflected their training in defense mathematics and systems engineering, an institutional location affording privileged access

| to international science, and their histories of relative freedom from political attack. Drawing techniques and logics from two sources—the population alarmist writings of the Club of Rome, an international network of scientists and engineers based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Chinese strategic defense scilence—the Song group created a distinctive set of scientific ideas and practices that I gloss as a sini-

fied cybernetics of population. The resulting policy construct recast China’s population problem as a population-environment-economy crisis whose solution could only be a policy of one child for all to be implemented immediately, regardless of the social and political costs. Whereas the Marxian statisticians had merely numericized population, making the. leaders’ narrative of population-induced economic backwardness appear more empirically “true,” the defense scientists had scientized the leaders’ narrative—and changed the story. This chapter tells this remarkable story. It begins with Song’s rise during the Mao years and the personal attributes, intellectual training, and political connections that propelled it. The next two sections trace the practices by which Song and his colleagues radically redefined the

population problem and its ideal solution in scientific terms. Their crisis-crackdown story did not replace the economic story, but rather subsumed it in a more urgent account of the disaster facing the Chinese nation. By taking apart the procedures by which their scientific policy construct was created, these sections show how consequential political

Sinified Cybernetics of Population £29 assumptions got embedded in it and then got veiled in powerful lan-

guage of international scientific truth. | FROM MISSILE SCIENCE TO POPULATION SCIENCE

As we have seen, in the revolutionary turmoil of Mao’s China, most of the

social sciences were abolished and the natural sciences decimated. Yet because of Mao’s military view of the world and the very real threats of attack from the United States and, after 1960, the Soviet Union, military science became an advantaged site of knowledge and technology production. Most favored of all was the strategic weapons community of scientists and engineers charged with building the atomic bomb and the missile systems to deliver the payload. While the rest of the science community

suffered, the strategic defense community was largely protected from political violence and supported with exceptional state largesse. During the Maoist decades, students of China’s military have shown, Chinese science was virtually all military science (Lewis and Xue 1988, 1994; Feigen-

baum 2003). As a result, at the beginning of the Deng era, China’s strategic weaponeers were the only fully functioning scientists capable of responding rapidly and effectively to the call to apply modern science and

technology to the challenge of rapid economic modernization (Feigenbaum 2003: 71-72). In using their skills to solve China’s social and economic problems, they both built on the advantages of strategic defense science and—more consequentially—built some of the logics and techniques of their field into the new sciences they created.* At the forefront of that movement to convert military to civilian science was Song Jian. An innovative scientist, talented technician, and savvy politician, Song Jian was a major figure in China’s defense science establishment, playing key roles first in building China’s military-industrial complex and later in converting it to civilian uses. In the 1960s and 1970s, Song pioneered the development of Chinese cybernetics and its application to missile guidance systems, becoming one of the nation’s leading missile experts. Because of the enormous secrecy surrounding China’s defense research, for the past twenty-five years Song has kept his military science and engineering background out of sight in his population writings, leaving the military foundations of his population research obscure even to Chinese who have devoted their professional lives to population work. Yet by mining the literature on China’s defense research and development (R&D), and by tracking the development of Song’s work © in the scientific literature, we can tease out the strategies by which he

128 Making Population Science took advantage of that favored background to create an entirely new natural (and physical) science of population. Song Jian: Control Theorist with Talent, Ambition, and Luck

In the mid- to late 1970s, when our story of population begins, Song Jian inhabited the highest echelons of the elite world of strategic defense science. His rise had begun early. In 1946, at the age of fourteen, Song left his home village in Shandong’s Rongcheng County and joined the Eighth Route Army.’ With this move he essentially joined the Chinese

Communist movement, apparently securing the party credentials that were crucial to all who wished to rise in China’s soon to be party-led society. In 1953, he passed a crucial exam and, on the recommendation of top leader Liu Shaogqi, was sent to the Soviet Union, where he trained in cybernetics and military science. An outstanding student, Song studied with the world-famous control theorist A. A. Feldbaum, received an

associate PhD degree from Moscow University, and published seven papers in Russian on the theory of optimal control, later earning the acclaim of Soviet and American scientists. Song returned to China after the Sino-Soviet split in 1960. From his position in the second subacademy of the fifth academy of the Ministry of National Defense, Song became the nation’s leading control theorist and a foremost expert on missile guidance and control systems.* (The fifth academy was in charge of missiles and space. In 1965, it became a separate ministry, the Seventh Machine Building Ministry [Qijibu]. The second subacademy [after 1965, second academy] was in charge of con-

trol systems.) Song was the first in China to apply optimal control theory to missile guidance and control. Early on, Song was singled out for patronage by Qian Xuesen (1911-),

| the brilliant and politically shrewd MIT-educated father of China’s aerospace and missile defense programs. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Qian was the Goddard Professor of Jet Propulsion at the California Insti-

| tute of Technology and the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena before coming under suspicion during the McCarthy era. He was permitted to return to China in 1955. There, as the top military science advisor to Mao and Zhou, Qian quickly became the most powerful scientist in the country. Patron-client ties are a fundamental feature of Chinese politics, enabling the rise of many a junior politician. Qian’s patronage seems to have been a powerful asset, for many informants stressed the fundamental role it played in Song’s ascent (IF,12/22/03,BJ;

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 129 12/24/03,BJb). And, indeed, the written record shows that that eminent scientist-politician showered the young Song with praise and favored opportunities for scientific advance. With great fanfare Qian announced that Song, not he, was the country’s leading control theory scientist. At Qian’s behest, Song was invited to head a new Control Theory Research Office in the Mathematics Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Song was chosen to coauthor the revised edition of Qian’s two-volume Engineering Cybernetics, a bible for generations of Chinese defense scientists and engineers (Qian and Song 1981). With his stellar list of scientific and political accomplishments, Qian

undoubtedly facilitated Song’s rise—or prevented his fall—in other ways as well. From Qian’s political biography we learn of his leadership

of countless scientific societies. He was a member of the Executive Council of the International Federation of Automatic Control (1957); president of the (Chinese) Dynamics Society (1957), the Automation Society (1961), the Society of Mechanics and Automation (1978), and the Mechanics Society (1980); vice president of the Association for Sci- | ence and Technology (1980); advisor to the Society for the Study of the

Future (1979); and honorary president of several other associations. Academically, Qian was the founding director of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Mechanics (1956), a member of the Academy’s Department of Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry (1957, 1979), and the director of the Department of Mechanics at the Chinese University of Science and Technology (1959). Qian was influential in scientific publishing as well, serving on the editorial board of Zhongguo kexue (Scientica Sinica) (1961) and the editorial staff of Kexue tongbao (Science Bulletin) (1956). In the political arena, Qian was a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee (1956), a member of the presidium of the National People’s Congress (1964, 1980), and a

People’s Liberation Army deputy to the National People’s Congress (1978). A party member from 1958, Qian was appointed alternate member of the CCP’s Central Committee in 1969 and member and vice

chairman of the Science and Technology Commission for National Defense (1975, 1978) (Bartke and Schier 1985: 168-170). With this extraordinary résumé, Qian must have had dense and powerful networks throughout party, government, military, and science circles. In any of these capacities he could have greased Song’s career.

Song’s abundant talent, technical accomplishments, and political patronage and savoir faire combined to propel him into the ranks of the foremost defense scientists and engineers. During the Cultural Revolution,

130 Making Population Science after Song’s house was ransacked by the Red Guards, Zhou Enlai placed

him on his list of roughly fifty scientists who, because of their indispensability to the nation’s defense, would enjoy special protection by the state. Perhaps Qian prevailed on Zhou to save Song from the Red Guards. Qian himself not only survived the Cultural Revolution without coming under attack, he was seen participating in numerous official occasions at the time (Bartke and Schier 1985: 169). Song was sent to the Jiuquan missile base in the Gobi Desert, where he spent more than a year broadening his scientific knowledge by reading in astronomy, nuclear physics, and other fields. In 1969, he returned to Beijing, where he continued his work on missile control and guidance systems, attract-

ing the attention of Zhou for his work on antimissile missiles (fan daodan dandan). In 1978, Song was awarded the post of deputy director of the missile ministry’s second academy. By 1978, Song had become more than a military scientist. He had joined a small class of elite scientists, strategic defense experts whose native brilliance, signal contributions to national defense, and list of accolades from top scientists and politicians led them to see themselves, and others to see them, as almost superscientists who could speak with

originality and authority on any subject and command attention. In China the most prominent elite scientists, Qian Xuesen and the nuclear physicist Qian Sangiang, gained extraordinary prestige and influence

among political leaders (Lewis and Xue 1988, 1994; Feigenbaum 2003).° The boldness and self-assurance with which Song would tackle the new project on population and promote his plan to China’s leaders can be traced in part to this special status. In 1977-1978, Deng Xiaoping was reducing investment in military R&D and urging defense scientists to turn their attention to the nation’s many economic problems. One of China’s most serious problems was

its huge and still swiftly growing population. As we have seen, after Mao’s death a strong consensus had emerged at the highest levels of the

party and government that the rapid growth of a largely rural population was a major obstacle to the achievement of the Four Modernizations. The sorry history of population studies and population control in Mao’s China was only too well known in Chinese intellectual circles. Song tells how deeply “unsettled” he felt by the case of Ma Yinchu, who had suffered great persecution for his views even though they were correct (IK. 12/24/03,BJa). The cuts in defense spending and encouragement

to turn from defense to development issues may well have whetted Song’s interest in Ma and the population question.

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 131 These were the historical currents prevailing in mid-1978 when Song traveled to Helsinki to attend the Seventh Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). There Song met two Dutch control theorists, G. J. Olsder and Huibert Kwakernaak, who had developed a new cybernetic-based natural science of population control that was tied to the well-known work of the Club of Rome (Song 1986: 2-3). Song immediately saw the promise of the systems sci-

ence approach. As he put it in an interview, the encounter provided a “tremendous stimulus,” enabling him to “suddenly see” that the precise quantitative techniques of control theory could also be applied to population, a qualitative field long mired in ideological controversy. “Anyone could have quantified population,” Song said, speaking of his own central contribution, “but no one had” (IK,12/24/03,BJa). Moreover, developing such an approach would both utilize and showcase Song’s peerless cybernetic skills, while giving him an exceptional opportunity to respond to the call for defense conversion by helping to solve one of the country’s most urgent problems. The appeal, evidently, was irresistible. Part of that appeal may well have lain in the opportunity population provided for Song to mobilize his talents as an elite scientist, one who could quickly master new fields and find brilliant solutions that lesser minds had missed. Song’s population writings provide ample evidence that he saw himself in these terms. Unusually for population work, Song’s writings would occasionally draw on fields as diverse as astronomy, geography, and environmental science. After 1980, his articles would sometimes note the praise his work had earned from China’s leaders and famous foreign specialists. Song would also write with supreme self-confidence that his techniques and policy proposals were not only right but also the very best available. It was as though everything he wrote was by definition correct and compelling. These unconventional features of his work make sense when one sees Song as he apparently saw himself: as an elite scientist who stood head and shoulders above the rest. Even as he was developing the new science of population, Song continued work in missile and aerospace science. Indeed, Song reports that he did the population work in the wee hours of the night (from ro P.M.

to 2 A.M.), spending his days solving problems of satellite launching and the like (IFK,12/24/03,BJa). In publications, Song would keep his two sciences separate, but they were very much intermeshed in his career and, one must imagine, in his thinking. In February 1980, the month he scored a key victory in the population battles (described in a

later chapter), Song became the principal deputy chief designer of

£32 Making Population Science China’s submarine-launched ballistic missile. From this important post, he would move rapidly up the scientific-political hierarchy, a subject | return to in the book’s final chapter. A Cybernetics of Population: Euro-American Origins and Social Scientific Critiques

In the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s, when China was in the throes , of the Cultural Revolution, an influential body of neo-Malthusian thought was developing in the West that predicted mass starvation—a , “race to oblivion”—as the inevitable result of rapid population growth (Ehrlich 1968: cover). Composed of natural scientists, engineers, and others who favored the application of scientific and engineering techniques (such as systems analysis, simulation, and decision theory) to the solution of human problems, the Club of Rome presented a global systems model in which population growth was exacerbating pollution

and depleting the food supply and nonrenewable natural resources. According to this school of thought, population was now approaching the limit of the planet’s ability to sustain it; without a significant change in orientation, population would exceed the planet’s “limit to growth,” triggering calamitous environmental and social decline within the next hundred years. To avert catastrophe it was necessary to immediately institute strong, even drastic, population control. The best-known texts produced by this alarmist school of thought were Paul R. Ehrlich’s enormously popular The Population Bomb (1968) and the more academic

study The Limits to Growth, by a computer research team based at MIT (Meadows et al. 1972). In China, because of sharp limits on access

to Western scholarship at the time, the term “Club of Rome” (Luoma Julebu) came to be used loosely to refer to any Western work in this alarmist vein. Here I follow the Chinese usage. It was this Club-type body of work, along with a more narrowly focused population cybernetics that specified a control theory solution to the problem of popula- |

tion control, that would capture the imagination of the Chinese scientists and engineers.’

Song’s description of his encounters with the work of Olsder, Kwakernaak, and Edward Goldsmith et al. (1972), who had done similar work in Britain, brings out the excitement his discovery produced. This passage also provides a backward glimpse at the larger intellectual climate of the 1970s, when notions of explosions of population growth were prevalent around the world and applications of control theory to

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 133 abstract economies facing such situations were standard fare in Western population economics: After more than ten years [of] isolation from the outside world, during a visit to Europe in 1978, I happened to learn about the application of systems analysis 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 [the] ecosystem of the Kingdom. They argued [that] Britain’s population should be gradually reduced to 30 million, namely, a reduction by nearly 50 percent; some Dutch scientists also believed that [the] Netherlands’ population of 13.5 million had far gone beyond the limit of what the country’s 40,000-square-kilometer territory could possibly bear and should therefore be reduced at least by a half. I was extremely excited about these documents and determined to try the method of demography. (Song 1986: 2-3)

Clearly, what enticed Song were the possibilities of applying the tools of systems analysis and control theory, which he had pioneered in missile

design, to the new domain of population. By quantifying population and treating it as a biological entity free of social and political complications, a natural science of population held out the tantalizing promise of solving this major problem that had vexed China and its social scientists for decades.

In the West, the COR work had provoked an outcry from economists, demographers, and other social scientists concerned about its substantive limitations, methodological weaknesses, and ethical implications. So wide-ranging was the critique of World3, the best-known computer model, that in 1982, a decade after its publication, its creators acknowledged that it was “one of the most criticized models of all

time” (Sanderson 1994: 47). The economic critique highlighted the neglect of continued technological progress and price and other adjust-

ment mechanisms. Were such possibilities considered, the outcome might well be not global collapse but continued growth. Methodologically, economists complained, the relationships specified in the model were based largely on subjective plausibility; both the relationships and the variables in the model ignored theory and evidence in economics

and demography. The global modeling was, in short, “measurement without data,” resulting in the spurious appearance of precise knowledge of quantities and relationships that were in fact unknown, and in many cases unknowable (Nordhaus 1973). To many economists, the lack of necessary data and the ignorance of the underlying relationships

134 Making Population Science made the kind of modeling that would attract Song’s attention virtually

meaningless (Nordhaus 1973; also Cole et al. 1973; an excellent overview is O’Neill 2001). Economic demographers were equally dismissive. In a trenchant critique of the economic-demographic models of the 1970s, Brian Arthur and Geoffrey McNicoll worried about the lack of validity, or relation-

ship between model and reality. Despite their limited utility in policy evaluation, Arthur and McNicoll argued, such models have effects nonetheless, effects that are eminently political: [Such] models, although apparently outside the political process, may be used to strengthen the hand of the planner. . . . Sometimes it appears that the larger and more complex the model (though actually it may be nothing more than a long list of variables), the more important the planner. Since he alone can interpret it, he may gain a kind of status from being its guardian. Finally, economic-demographic models see policies as emanating from a central supply house (the government) to its ultimate constituents, the individual citizens. A whole range of policy options involving decentralization of authority to local groups tends to be ignored. A central government “programmatic” approach results. (Arthur and McNicoll 1975: 262)

Sociologists worried about the application of the mechanistic models of cybernetics to the understanding and solution of human problems.

Ignoring humans as thinking and purposefully adapting elements of dynamic systems, the cybernetic models neglected future social, political, and cultural changes that would surely prevent the arrival of that

dark future. Equally if not more worrying were the potential consequences of applying the technicist solutions of cybernetics to real-world

human problems (e.g., Lilienfeld 1975; Ludz 1975; Jahoda 1973). Critics of all stripes warned sharply of the dangers of computer fetishism—

endowing computer models with a validity and independent power transcending the mental models that are their essential basis. Instead of overweaning confidence in their results, the modelers should be humble about the limited ability of science to model the world and predict the

future (Freeman 1973: 8). Though this earlier generation of critics lacked the language of contemporary science studies, they made one of that field’s basic points when they argued that beneath the appearance

of the detached neutrality of the computer model lay the subjective political values of the scientists, in particular the value of technocracy: the vision of a world run by scientists and engineers whose technical brilliance was matched by their sociological ignorance of the world they sought to reengineer.

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 135 By the late 1970s, when Song visited Europe, countless critiques of the Club-style work had appeared, many of them scathing and many by well-respected social scientists. Yet Song apparently did not encounter such perspectives in his travels. This is not surprising given the intellectual context in which Song discovered the Club of Rome ideas. The Helsinki world congress on automatic control was an impressive gathering that brought together more than 1,100 scientists from forty-five countries to give papers on highly technical and applied subjects. Those subjects ranged from nuclear power plant dynamics to thermal processes in metallurgical industries to computer control of pulp and paper plants. Judging from the conference volumes, the congress was infused with a spirit of scientific certainty, progress, and messianic fervor about the potential of control science to revolutionize the world. Participants were especially enthusiastic about the potential of control science to ameliorate problems of third-world development, a special topic of discussion (Kekkonen 1979; Apter 1979; Chestnut 1979). In his opening address to the congress, the president of the Republic of Finland put it this way: “We are just now experiencing the period of most vigorous development in this field. . . . [T]he technique of automation has already progressed beyond belief... . The development of this branch [of knowledge] is not only important to technology and industry: the extensive scope of the field and the far-reaching significance of its ideas mean a lot to the welfare and development of humanity as a whole” (Kekkonen 1979: xxviii). To the Chinese delegate encountering this work for the first time, the cybernetics of population that the Dutch scientists described must have seemed every bit as scientific and progressive as the other projects published in the IFAC’s four-volume 2,662-page conference proceedings (Niemi, Wahlstrom, and Virkkunen 1979). In any case, in his writings Song would treat the cybernetics of population with the same messianic fervor that dominated the IFAC conference volumes. Other factors may also have prevented an encounter with the social science perspective on the cybernetics of population. The short duration of Song’s visit (roughly two weeks) precluded his gaining familiarity with the broader context of population studies in the West. And even if Song

had encountered the sociological and economic critiques, his (and his Dutch hosts’) training and intellectual predilections would almost certainly have led them to reject those perspectives as irrelevant to the science they were pursuing. Social science review articles are absent from the reference lists of the Olsder and Kwakernaak papers that Song read and receive no note in any of Song’s own many publications (Olsder and

136 Making Population Science Strijbos 1976; Kwakernaak 1977). When he returned to China, Song brought back with him only the building blocks for the new natural science of population: the mathematical tools, the problematization of population as an environmental crisis, the engineering-type control solutions to that crisis, certain rhetorical devices, and a messianic fervor about it all. Assembling a Research Team: Two Defense Mathematicians and a Population Theorist

After the June 1978 IFAC meeting, Song spent a week with Olsder and

Kwakernaak at their home base, the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Twentieth University of Technology in Enschede, the Netherlands. Soon after returning to China, he recruited two talented subordinates at the missile ministry—Yu Jingyuan, a control theorist and systems engineer in his own research institute, and Li Guangyuan, a mathematically trained computer expert based in another institute— to work with him. As is often the case in China (and, indeed, in many scientific communities), because the team’s leader was busy with other

things, there emerged a division of labor in which the subordinates would do virtually all the concrete work of model building (Yu Jingyuan)

and computation (Li Guangyuan), while the leader would assume the role of entrepreneur, promoting the research to political leaders and the public, and taking credit for the group’s achievements.® Because their talents would be crucial to the success of the new approach, Yu’s and Li’s backgrounds are important to note. A highly skilled mathematician, Yu Jingyuan (1937-), like Song, was

a specialist in the application of control theory to problems of missile guidance and control. Yet Yu lacked the early political good fortune of his boss (IK.12/21/03,BJ). After finishing high school in the mid-19 50s, Yu was named to study in the USSR, but because of a “bad class background” (a landlord family) he was denied the opportunity. Instead he

studied mathematics at the Harbin College of Military Industry and Changchun’s Northeast Teacher’s College and Northeast People’s College, before moving to Beijing in 1960 to join the research staff of the missile ministry (at that time still the Ministry of National Defense’s

fifth academy). Song would become his “leader” in the early 1960s, when Song was named deputy head of the second subacademy. Sometime along the way, Yu worked under the direct guidance of Qian Xuesen on systems science and engineering. Yu names Qian as a major

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 37 intellectual influence and inspiration; Qian undoubtedly helped Yu in other ways as well (Population Awards 2003: 330-341). During the Red Guard years (1966-1969), the Cultural Revolution disrupted work at the missile ministry, Yu reports, but it did not generate the kinds of political havoc it created for some other intellectuals.’ Unlike the social scientists, who were targeted for political attack, Yu managed to avoid the political crime of possessing “thought problems” (sixiang wenti) by participating in the incessant political study sessions of the day but keeping his opinions to himself. It was during this period, when ministry staff were pursuing research on their own, that Yu first came into close contact with Song Jian through their joint work on space

vibrators and other techniques of missile control. In 1972-1973, Yu started to learn English from new English-language programs broadcast on Chinese television; Song may have picked up his English this way too. However it was acquired, this familiarity with the world’s dominant scientific language would help them access the international scientific texts that they would later mine in creating a mathematics of population. In the mid-1970s, when the research environment was largely normalized, Yu published his first article with Song, on a problem in the mathematics of missile and spacecraft control (Song and Yu 1975). Li Guangyuan was in charge of the missile ministry’s computer facilities, a very major responsibility. A mathematician with a degree from the top-flight Chinese University of Science and Technology in Anhui, he had joined the ministry in 1965 (IK12/21/03,BJ). Sometime in the early to mid-1980s, Li left China to go into business in the United States,

allowing his ties to former colleagues to lapse. Because none of his former collaborators know his whereabouts, I have been unable to include Li’s perspective in this study. From late 1978, this team, assisted by three computer experts work-

ing under Li, began to assemble the theoretical and methodological tools they would need for the new project.!” In his telling, Song studied up on population, reading Malthus and leading Western mathematical demographers to figure out how to adapt the control theory he had used for missile guidance to the problem of population (IF,12/24/03,BJa). Encouraged by the Birth Planning Leading Group (this important story is told in chapter 6), those involved in the concrete work used data provided by the Public Security Bureau and the computers of the missile ministry to project the growth of China’s population twenty, fifty, and one hundred years into the future. This was the first time any mathe-

matically sophisticated researchers had done projections of China’s

138 Making Population Science demographic future. The results came as a shock to everyone. Throughout 1979, the scientists vetted their work among leading physical scientists and engineers. In March and October, they presented their findings to colleagues in the Institute of Mathematics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Association of Systems Engineering, and the Expert Com-

mittee on Automation Theory (IF,12/21/03,BJ; Song, Yu, and Li 1999[1980]). By the end of the year, they had gained the support of key

establishment. |

constituencies in China’s powerful defense science and engineering The natural scientists, however, had limited understanding of popu-

lation dynamics. In the fall of 1979, Song, Yu, and Li paid a personal visit to Tian Xueyuan (1938-), an economist in the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, to recruit him to the effort. Tian,

who had been a student at Beijing University in the 1950s when Ma Yinchu was its president, had long-standing interests in demography and a key publication on Ma to his name (Tian 1979). Tian had just moved to the newly opened Academy from the State Education Commission, where he had spent the previous fifteen years (IEK11/16/99,BJa; Population Awards 2003: 298-305). From Tian the military scientists hoped to

get a better understanding of age-specific birth and death rates and demography more generally. The scientists had some riveting numbers, but little idea of what they meant. Tian was needed to add the “theory” that would make the numbers make sense. Tian was, in his own telling, eager to join the endeavor (IF,11/16/99,BjJa). In December 1979, Li Guangyuan presented the initial findings of the group’s work for the first time to the population field, at the enlarged conference in Chengdu (Song and Li 1980[1979]). With encouragement from China’s top population officials, Song immediately began promot-

ing his ideas to those who would ultimately decide the nation’s new population policy—China’s political leaders. Over the next four months, he would introduce a gripping new construction of the population problem combined with a radical new solution. Because of the sensitivity of the policy and the process, Song would conduct his entrepreneurial activities in utmost secrecy, using open publications selectively and strategically while relying on internal reports within the government for the most important communications. Over the next few months, the pieces of the conceptual structure underlying Song’s policy construct were gradually made available to leaders, midlevel officials, and eventually the broader public, with the most arresting scientific findings coming first and the most

politically sensitive ideas emerging last. As a result of this piecemeal

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 139 politics, the full conceptual apparatus supporting the team’s one-childfor-all policy became public only in late 1980—after the crucial decisions had been made and made public. Yet the evidence from interviews and other sources suggests that that conceptual apparatus was already virtually fully assembled by the time of the Chengdu conference.!! To convey a sense of the intellectual coherence and power of the scientists’ program, and of its contrasts with other policy packages in circulation at the time, in this chapter I pull the pieces together and present them as components

of an ordered policy science framework. In part 2 of the book, I show how the various pieces were selectively shared with strategic audiences over the next few months, until eventually a decision in favor of the sci-

entists’ proposal was reached. . The Advantages of Strategic Defense Science

In developing this new science of population, the scientific resources,

political capital, and cultural prestige Song enjoyed as a prominent defense scientist-engineer gave him enormous advantages. The missile ministry in which Song had spent virtually his entire career was part of a huge, powerful, and resource-rich military-industrial complex built up by Mao. During Mao’s lifetime, the strategic defense community not only enjoyed protection from political violence, it also received a huge proportion of the nation’s scarce developmental resources.!? It absorbed the best-trained and most talented scientists, enjoyed use of the most modern equipment and facilities, and virtually monopolized the modern industrial sector. Scientists and engineers working on strategic weapons were a scientifically privileged and politically powerful group. Unlike other specialists, they had access to foreign literature, to data, and to computers with which to analyze them. The institutions in which they

worked encouraged the construction of personal networks that gave them access to the highest levels of the government and involved some in important national policy decisions. Defense scientists and engineers worked in an environment with an entrepreneurial, risk-taking culture

that encouraged bold initiatives and rewarded technical accomplishment with political influence and cultural prestige. Moreover, after years

of active participation in national political debates on spending and policy priorities—debates that gave them a say in decisions on broad development policy—by the mid-1970s leading defense scientists had acquired the self-assurance, risk-taking attitude, and political protection needed to safely undertake new ventures in fields in which they had

140 Making Population Science no training (Feigenbaum 2003). This is the larger context in which Song was able to create and promote a new science and policy on population. From their position in the missile ministry, Song and his colleagues enjoyed access to many scientific resources that population specialists in

less well endowed institutions lacked. In an environment in which all statistics were treated as state secrets, the missile ministry scientists were able to use personal connections to officials in other government agencies to gain early access to crucial population data. It was through a per-

sonal tie to a contact at the Public Security Bureau (who must go unnamed) that the scientists were able to acquire the sample survey data of 1975 and 1978 that formed the basis for their population projections (IE,.11/16/99,BJa; 12/21/03,BJ). Although these data had serious limita-

tions, they were the only national population data available. Other groups would obtain these data as well, but the personal relationship appears to have given the Song group earlier access to them. The military scientists also had better access to the resources of the international scientific community. After the announcement that China would open up to the outside world, natural scientists were among the first to travel abroad. Song recounts how, after the thaw, Chinese cybernetics was quickly able to catch up with developments in international cybernetics

(Song 1986: 2). The contrast with the situation of social scientists, whose access to their peers abroad was restricted by politics and ideology, was striking. The Song group also benefited enormously from the availability of the missile ministry’s large computers. As in many countries, in China computers had been developed by the military for weapons applications (Reichers 1972). According to a key staff member at the Birth Planning

Leading Group, in the late 1970s the missile ministry had one of the biggest and most sophisticated computers in China (IF,12/24/03,BJb). The ability to process large quantities of data rapidly and accurately enabled Song and his colleagues to perform modeling tasks the social scientists could scarcely imagine. Song tells how it took but five minutes of borrowed time on the ministry’s computer to run all the population computations (IF,12/24/03,BJa). Moreover, unlike the social scientists,

who possessed only basic statistical skills, the natural scientists were highly trained mathematicians who had used sophisticated mathematics in working on some of the most complex tasks of advanced weapons development. These skills enabled them to develop models that were both

different from, and much more sophisticated than, any demographic

Sinified Cybernetics of Population I4I models available in China—or almost anywhere—at the time. Such complex models were not necessary to understand population dynamics, but they were original and, with their esoteric equations, would impress many who could not understand them. As natural scientists based in a leading military science research institute, the Song group were able to publish their work in prestigious sites not open to the social scientists. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Song and his team would frequently publish in top science journals such as Nature Magazine (Ziran zazhi), Chinese Science (Zhongguo kexue, officially translated as Scientia Sinica), and Science Bulletin (Kexue tongbao). | (As noted earlier, Qian Xuesen had ties to editorial staff at the latter two.) Like the Liu group, they also had the political connections needed to get

their work printed in leading national newspapers such as the People’s , Daily and Guangming Daily. Later, the scientists’ books would be published by top presses, including the People’s Press (Song et al. 1982) and Science Press (Song and Yu 1985). Publishing in such venues would lend scientific (and political) authority to their population work and enable them to reach a large and influential audience for their ideas. The missile ministry team also possessed exceptional political and cultural resources. During their years in the defense science field, Song and his colleagues had developed ties to influential military science figures who could press their case with the nation’s political leadership. Song’s greatest asset, his patron Qian Xuesen, was only the most prominent. In their years in the weapons development community, the physical scientists and engineers had also imbibed that community’s culture of bold experimentation and risk-taking. Whereas the social scientists

were encumbered by an ingrained caution and fear born of years of political persecution, the military scientists possessed the self-assurance to enter an entirely new field, borrow a set of foreign techniques they had encountered only briefly, modify them in significant ways, and then employ those techniques to quickly develop and press for a radically new solution to social problems that had vexed the nation for decades. Of course, such maneuvers posed dangers to China’s leaders and people, but those would emerge only later. Finally, in China in the late 1970s, natural scientists generally and

military scientists specifically enjoyed tremendous cultural prestige. That high esteem was based not only on their record of past accomplishments in building bombs and missiles, but also on the unchallenged prestige of science at a time when ideology was moribund. Unlike the

| 142 Making Population Science social scientists, who by political definition belonged to an inward-looking ideological past, the natural scientists by definition belonged to an inter-.

nationally oriented scientific and technological future. In his National Science Conference speech in March 1978, no less a figure than Deng Xiaoping had extolled the virtues of science, and especially cybernetics

and computers, as the keys to transforming China into a powerful modern nation (see chapter 3). Song and his team would greatly benefit from this wider culture of scientism that Deng’s speech reflected and, in turn, intensified. The advantages of the missile ministry team emerge with particular clarity when one considers the history of a similar intellectual enterprise— one that failed to reach China’s leaders. In a case of independent invention, in the late 1970s a group of systems scientists at Xi’an Jiaotong University under Wang Huanchen was also applying systems techniques to find a solution to the nation’s population problems (IK12/16/03,BJc; 3/30/02,LB). The group included Jiang Zhenghua, who later became a leading economic demographer and vice minister of the State Birth Planning Commission. According to Jiang, Xi’an Jiaotong, a leading center of scientific and technological research, had developed its own computer by 1961 or 1962. Although the machine was slow and cumbersome, it was able to process large-scale data. The Xi'an group conducted military

research for a couple of years, but their major emphasis was on economic development. In the mid-1960s, the group encountered the idea of applying systems engineering techniques to social and economic devel-

opment in the international literature. The work was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, when many faculty were sent to the countryside, but it resumed in 1976-1977. In the late 1970s, in an effort to demonstrate the applicability of systems engineering to a wide range of human

problems (and thus garner more state funding for it), the group tried their hand at population research, a subject they found much easier than

industrial production, their staple. Although the Beijing and Xi’an groups both used equations from missile control research, the Song group developed partial differential equations while the Wang group used difference equations.'* The two groups were in close contact; indeed, in a collegial move, Yu Jingyuan shared the Public Security Bureau data with the Xi’an researchers. The results reached by the two groups were strikingly similar. Yet the work of the Xi’an group would disappear from sight, while that of the Beijing team would enjoy a long political life. Jiang’s explanation—that Song was “more political”—can serve as shorthand for the many advantages listed here.

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 143 PROBLEMATIZING POPULATION: A (VIRTUAL) CRISIS OF HUMAN NUMBERS AND ECOSYSTEM COLLAPSE

Despite the often rapid growth of its population, throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s China officially had no population crisis. On the eve of the reform era, Deng and other political leaders had expressed con-

cern about the burdensome impact of population growth on the achievement of the Four Modernizations, but there was no sense of alarm. In early 1979, China’s social scientists had put empirical flesh on

those concerns by describing a population-economy imbalance in the state plan in which rapid population growth represented at worst a potential threat to the nation’s economic well-being. All observers believed that future population growth would be very worrisome, but the specifics eluded them. Beginning in late 1979, the Song group profoundly recast the population problem by revealing the (purportedly) precise numerical extent of that increase and by drawing attention to the fearful environmental

consequences of that gargantuan growth in human numbers. In doing so they effected a profound paradigm shift. In China, population had conventionally been viewed as part of society, to be analyzed by the theories and methods of the social sciences. The natural scientists redefined population as a biological entity located in nature and subject to “natural laws” that were comprehensible only by the theories and methods of the natural sciences. Responding to Deng’s invitation to utilize West-

ern science (while ignoring his instruction to create “modernization with Chinese characteristics”), Song and his colleagues drew on a particular body of Western population science (the ecological work of the COR and some associated control theory applications) that treated pop-

ulation as a biological universal, subject to universally applicable models in which local culture, politics, and society did not matter. Drawing ideas, images, and facts from the COR and from China’s own strategic military doctrines, the Chinese cyberneticists created a narrative about a population crisis that was ruining the country’s chance of becoming a rich, powerful, modern nation by century’s end. In China, the political climate for such ideas remained difficult if not hostile. Although some ideas of this sort had begun to enter the country

in the opening to Western economics that occurred in the late 1970s (Hamrin 1990: 36-38), notions of population crisis remained ideologically suspect and politically dangerous.!° The PRC’s official position, articulated at the United Nations conference at Bucharest only five years

144 Making Population Science earlier, was that the notion of a third-world population crisis was Malthusian heresy. The Bucharest statement was also scathing in its criticism of the reams of statistics—on food supply, natural resources, and so on—amassed to prove the existence of a demographic crisis. In Marxist China, population could impose a “burden” on the socialist state plan, but it could not constitute a Malthusian “crisis.” The terms “burden” and “crisis” belonged to two warring discursive worlds. The natural scientists and others who were attracted to such constructions were thus constrained to avoid explicit crisis language, creating instead a virtual crisis—a picture of ecological and thus economic devastation that was catastrophic in all but name. Equally important, they had to find a way to de-Malthusianize the notion to make it politically viable in a context in which anti-Malthusianism was the party line. From their writings and from interviews with social scientists and government officials who worked with them, it is clear that Song and his colleagues found the COR writings on the global and third-world population crisis intellectually compelling (IK12/21/03,BJ). The statistics on the exponential growth of the population, the destruction of natural resources, and other matters helped them see, probably for the very first time, the apparently terrible scale of China’s population problems, a subject new to these men who had spent their professional lives thinking about weapons development, not social ills. Despite the skepticism about the extreme version of these ideas in the West, the evidence suggests that the Chinese scientists deeply believed that the Club’s work represented

the very best international scientific thinking on population.'® Seeing the Club constructions as highly illuminating of the Chinese situation, the Song group proceeded to craft a narrative of a Chinese population crisis, drawing heavily on the Club’s vivid images and riveting statistics (without, however, citing their sources). They resolved the ideological problem by redefining the whole package of ideas they were using. No longer were the notions of population explosion and ecological devastation matters of Malthusian ideology. In the scientists’ hands, they became international scientific truths. The Song group redefined the Malthusian story as scientific fact by using the language of numbers, emphasizing the truth-telling capacity of statistics, and mobilizing the ocular techniques of science, while using terminological and citational practices that worked to distance the work from its Western (Malthusian) sources.

In this section I track this hybrid, scientific-political process, show-

ing how the scientists rhetorically created the crisis, scientized and _

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 145 depoliticized it, and finally intensified its political appeal by packaging it in a larger narrative of nation drawn from the doctrinal repertoire of strategic defense science. Whereas the social scientists acknowledged their location within society and politics, the natural scientists drew a sharp rhetorical line between science and society, claiming that their science was objective, not subjective, and rational, not biased. Yet their

science was humanly constructed, and thus socially and politically shaped, in ways that deeply mattered. The scientists’ individual political

histories, disciplinary backgrounds, and institutional locations would all leave an imprint on their formulation of the population problem and its necessary solution, producing a policy proposal that was much more extreme than that advanced by the social scientists. A Crisis in Numbers and Pictures: The Club of Rome in China In the biological view of population, humans are biological organisms, animals like any other animals, who live within and thus depend on the natural environment. Following the Western ecologists, the scientists took it as axiomatic that, as human population grows, people take more

resources from the biological world in order to survive. In doing so, they threaten to exceed nature’s “limits” (jixian) and destroy the balance and stability of the ecosystem. The natural scientists thus spoke in the name of nature—indeed, of the environment of the whole earth— emphasizing their concern with preserving its stability and sustainability in the face of the depredations of rising human numbers. In chapter 3 we saw how China’s social scientists exploited numbers, tables, and simple line figures to provide newly ocular proof of the seriousness of China’s population-economy imbalance. The natural scientists used the same sorts of scientific tools to create a population-environment crisis. They largely bypassed economic concerns—which, after all, had been thoroughly explicated by the social scientists—focusing instead on issues of time and space, more specifically, the acceleration of population growth over time and its ruinous effects on China’s natural environment. The natural scientists’ formulation of the problem was more powerful than the Marxian economists’, not only because a “crisis” is a

more gripping construct than an “imbalance,” but also because they spoke on a grander temporal and spatial scale. Their subject was the whole earth, not merely the Chinese nation; and a time span covering thousands of years, not just the hundred-plus years since the Western incursion. Moreover, while the social scientists had only indigenous

146 Making Population Science

arresting. |

images to draw on, and rather stale Marxian ones at that, the natural scientists were able to draw on images from abroad that were new and

Their textual and pictorial representations seemed to show two

things: that China’s population was growing at a historically unprecedented pace and that the increase in human numbers was depleting natural resources, ruining the environment, and preventing the Chinese nation from achieving its rightful place in the world. In creating this story, the scientists drew heavily on images and numerical concepts popularized by the COR. These Western constructs brought out the fearsome nature and consequences of rapid population growth in ways that were new to China at the time. Here I examine a handful of these techniques that helped the scientists and their readers see the terrible scale of China’s problems. Central to all of them was a rhetoric of numerical fact and scientific truth. Paul R. Ehrlich of Population Bomb fame was a master of the effortless conversion of population numbers into objective scientific facts and truths apparently devoid of subjective human origins: “In a book about population,” he wrote in his characteristic

confiding yet authoritative style, “there is a temptation to stun the reader with an avalanche of statistics... . After all, no matter how you slice it, population is a numbers game” (Ehrlich 1968: 17). The Chinese scientists quickly mastered this rhetoric of numbers, effectively scientizing and factifying ideas that were at root humanly shaped. In creating this narrative of crisis, the scientists emphasized the vast

temporal and spatial scale of their concerns. An especially effective device was to lay out first the population problems of the whole earth, and then those of China, suggesting that China’s problems were not only shared by people around the globe but also contributed mightily to the world’s problems: Statistics have shown that in the last century, the speed of growth in the world’s population has risen to historically unprecedented heights. After living on earth for several million years, in 1830 the population of mankind reached 1 billion. In the following 100 years, however, it added another billion, reaching 2 billion in 1930. In terms of the speed of population | growth, 100 years was the equivalent of several million years. Adding the third billion took only 30 years, placing the world’s population at 3 billion in 1960. Adding the fourth billion required only 15 years, so that by 1975 world population approached 4 billion. . . . It is projected that by 2000 it will exceed 6 billion. Starting from 1830, then, the time needed for the world’s population to increase 1 billion [shrank from] 100 years [to] 30 years, 1§ years, and ro years.

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 147 Population growth in China has followed a similar pattern. In the early Qing dynasty (1760) the population was 200 million; by 1900 it had risen to 400 million, by 1954 to 600 million, by 1969 to 800 million and, according to projections, by 1982 it will exceed 1 billion. It took several hundred thousand years to reach 200 million in 1760. Thereafter, the time required to increase 200 million [has fallen from] 140 years to §4 years, 15 years, and 13 years. (Song 1999[1980a]: 550)

This passage makes highly effective use of a staple in COR writings: the concept of the shrinking time it takes a population to double or grow by a certain large amount (e.g., Goldsmith et al. 1972: 6-7). In China in the late 1970s, when population was thought of in the staid terms of imbalances in the state plan, these scientific notions of human numbers rising imminently out of control would have been fresh and even frightening. A closely related concept that Song borrowed and used to good effect was that of exponential population growth, in which a population grows slowly over long periods before beginning to rise explosively in recent

time. One vivid graph showed China’s population remaining low for 3,750 years, rising worryingly in the next 200 years, and then spiking up to one billion in the final few decades before 2000 (figure 3). The tone of the writer’s commentary conveyed the alarm readers were supposed to

feel: “Facing the rapid increase in population, countries everywhere are watching developments with grave concern” (Song 1981: 25-26). 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 population growth (aggregate numbers versus, say, natural growth rate). 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 1971-1979 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 II.7 per 1,000, respectively [Tian 1985[1981]: 81]). Although the graph helpfully highlighted the large effects of population momentum on growth in human numbers 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 unusual political context in which it was introduced.

Song also borrowed and creatively adapted some of the colorful images crafted by the Club writers. For example, the image of people

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covering every square inch of the earth, popular in the Western work, appears as well in Song’s writings. Although by the late 1970s such images had become a tired staple of population alarmist writing in the West, in China at that time they were new and provocative. The rapidly accelerating rise in human numbers was so worrying to the scientists because the increased numbers were destroying the ecosystem,

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 149 pushing up against nature’s “limits to growth” and threatening human survival. Painting scary scenarios of ecological devastation, scenes that echo those in the COR work, Song warned: Before the appearance of human beings, more than half the land was covered with forests. ... Now forest coverage is about 30 percent worldwide; in China that figure is only 12 percent. .. . As population increases, now people have only 5 mu of arable land per person globally; in our country there is only 1.5 mu per person... . According to the calculations of the U.S. international grain policy research institute . . . after 1985, if the population growth rate is not lowered, every year there will be © a shortage of 100 million tons of grain and 50 million tons of protein... . Because of large-scale use of fertilizer and pesticides, ports, lakes, rivers, bays, and streams have become highly polluted. Two hundred eighty species of mammals, 350 species of birds, and twenty thousand species of plants have been killed or rendered extinct. [All this] followed the growth of population. ... We must admit that, as the population rises, people take more resources from nature and the ecosystem in order to survive. However, the expendable power of nature’s stability has limits. To guarantee future generations adequate or even good survival conditions, we cannot exceed our limit on taking natural resources. ... [We certainly must not] destroy the ecosystem’s balance and stability. (Song 1999[1980a]: 552-553; emphasis added)

Another metaphor that found its way to China was that of the earth as a spaceship. This image, now a stale cliché in the West, was meant to ©

suggest that “outer space offers no escape from the laws of population growth [on earth]” (Ehrlich 1968: 21; also Goldsmith et al. 1972: 18). Song elaborated this image, adding charming references to Chinese folktales and reporting the dismal results of space explorations to the moon, Mars, Venus, and Mercury: no other planetary body can support human life. He concludes: Science has proved that there is no place for humans within this 4 lightyear earth limit. Earth... is the only hope, a “spaceship” that has set its course around the sun. There is nowhere people can call upon around the solar system, there is no “station” where the spaceship Earth can dock in the next several hundred thousand years, there is no new land in space to which humans can migrate. (Song 1999[1980a]: 551)

This spaceship metaphor would certainly have been colorful and new in China at the time, but its rhetorical power was greater than that, for it tied the population work to space science, Song’s own field and one of the most prestigious domains of knowledge. The reference would also have tied him to the great space scientist Qian Xuesen.

150 Making Population Science Scientizing—and Depoliticizing—the Club of Rome

In using the Club of Rome material Song had to exercise supreme caution, for the official ideology remained resolutely Marxian while the

COR work was indubitably Malthusian. One long-term population insider in the central government explained the ideological politics of population to me this way: In principle, after the arrest of the Gang of Four [in October 1976] ideas such as those of the Club of Rome were no longer dangerous. Indeed, top government leaders had already articulated the notion that popula-

. tion growth was outstripping economic resources. In practice, however, one could never be too cautious because there would also be “some people” [that is, leftists or radicals} who will have doubts about the COR. After all, Ma Yinchu had insisted that his ideas were proletarian and socialist, but he was severely criticized for being bourgeois and capitalist. In China it is officially unacceptable to support the Malthusian idea of “population absolutism” (renkou juedui lun), which holds that there are absolute laws of population that apply everywhere. In Marxian China, population can only be relative to the mode of production. For this reason, it was politically imperative for Song to deny that his population thought was Malthusian. Song had to say that his work was socialist and he had to clearly distance himself from the COR. (IK,12/1 5/03,BJa; remarks paraphrased from interview notes)

Song protected his work from political and ideological attack in part

by scientizing the ideas. He used a number of techniques to convert these ideas from “Malthusian ideology” into “international scientific truth.” These included speaking the language of numbers, stressing the truth-telling ability of statistics, underscoring the worldwide acceptance

of the ideas, and stressing the language of “scientific” and “natural laws.” (Such rhetoric will be discussed in detail in a later chapter.) Although he used precisely the kinds of “masses of statistics” the Bucharest statement had decried—indeed, some of his numbers and even text were drawn directly from the COR texts—by reframing the numbers in the authoritative language of international science, he effectively domesticated and depoliticized the ideas of the COR, rendering them politically acceptable. Song also defused the dangers by adopting specific conversational, terminological, and citational practices that removed any traces of a connection between his work and its Western Malthusian roots. First, he seems to have talked little about these issues publicly. According to one informant, in key early 1980 meetings on population policy, Song never mentioned the

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 151 Club of Rome work or the fundamentally Malthusian character of his ideas (IF,12/1 5/03,BJa). In discussions with me two decades later, Song maintained that he had encountered the Club of Rome work relatively late in the process, he “paid no attention to it,” and it “had little effect” on his work (IE 12/24/03,BJa). These statements are puzzling. Perhaps Song was trying

to maintain a safe distance from a source that, at the time it was used, remained dangerous. Perhaps, as some Chinese suggested, he was seeking to preserve the aura of originality for his own work by denying knowledge of the Western work from which it drew. Or, more generously, perhaps in Song’s thinking, his “work” (or signal contribution) was methodological (the mathematics of population), not thematic (apocalyptic visions of environmental collapse). Or perhaps his understanding of the term “Club of Rome” just differed from that used here.

Terminological practices also worked to create distance between Song’s work and its potentially dangerous origins. In writings published in China, Song and his colleagues avoided the language of population “crises,” “catastrophes,” “explosions,” and “bombs.” In all their volu-

minous writings on population—including dozens of articles and two books—I found no use of these terms. The group was less restrained in speaking and writing in the West, where Malthusian views generally and population explosions specifically were more commonly accepted. In a talk given in the United States in late 1980, Song would speak of the “explosive population expansion waves” of the 1960s and 19708 (Song 1982: 385). Ina 1985 book published in the United States in English, Song, Yu, and a Chinese American demographer abandoned all

caution, depicting China’s population growth as an “eminent [sic| threat” and a “time-bomb waiting to be detonated” (Song, Tuan, and Yu 1985: 266-267). We may never know whether such language was quietly circulating in China in the late 1970s. That seems unlikely, however. Twenty-five years later key population officials readily recalled that Chen Muhua had used the phrase “explosive growth of population” in a December 1979 speech. Their recollection of the use of this relatively mild term suggests the political sensitivity of the Club language at the time. The term “population bomb,” they indicated, was forbidden or, as they put it, “not approved by China’s leaders” (IF,12/17/03,BJb; 12/24/ 03,BJb). Song seems to have taken the safe route of avoiding all such terms in his published Chinese-language texts. Citational practices had the same politically distancing and protecting effect. In their work published in China, the cyberneticists liberally

152 Making Population Science cited Western work in mathematical and cybernetic demography, but they omitted citations to COR-type work. References to the two reports to the Club of Rome, Meadows et al.’s Limits to Growth (1972), and Mesarovic and Pestel’s Mankind at the Turning Point (1974), appear only in the 1985 book that was published abroad (Song, Tuan, and Yu 1985). (The Chinese-language version of the same book [Song and Yu 1985] omitted these citations.) Ehrlich’s Population Bomb is not cited anywhere in the cyberneticists’ huge corpus of writings on population. Did Song in fact have access to these materials in late 1979 and early 1980, when he was doing his most influential research? Based on interviews with government officials and researchers close to him, I believe that he did have access:to at least some of the Club literature, probably acquired through his personal contacts with European scholars, but that he kept that information (as well as the materials) to himself.!” It is pos-

sible that in 1978-1980, Song got his COR-type ideas primarily from Goldsmith et al.’s Blueprint for Survival (1972), a text Song encountered during his 1978 trip and cited in a piece of writing dated July 1, 1980, but not published until 1982 (Song et al. 1982). The influence of Blueprint, which includes an introduction by Ehrlich, is clearly evident in Song’s writings, which occasionally directly reproduce material from that work. (Unfortunately, plagiarism from Western works was not uncommon in China at the time.) Whether Song saw Limits to Growth, Mankind at the Turning Point, or Population Bomb remains uncertain. Several social sci-

entists told me that they themselves did not see any Club texts until 1982-1983, when Limits to Growth was translated into Chinese.'® By that time, however, the notion of crisis was quite unexceptional—indeed, according to several informants, “sense of crisis” (wetji gan) had become

the official construction of the population problem, precisely because Song had desensitized it by reframing it as scientific truth.

Military Metaphors: A Threat to China’s National Security and Global Ambitions

Since the party’s early days in Yan’an, Mao and his successors have crafted a powerful narrative of the fall and rise of the Chinese nation that has served to legitimate the political order and the party’s place within it (Apter and Saich 1994; Kluver 1996). According to this narrative, the PRC, through heroic efforts of the leadership and masses, has freed itself from poverty and feudalism and will one day stand among the world’s

Sinified Cybernetics of Population £53 most modernized, prosperous, and important nations. Although the story of population crisis was riveting, what gave it power and urgency in the political arena was its connections to this larger, historically developed narrative about the struggles of the Chinese nation to gain wealth, power,

and position on the global stage. In creating those connections, Song appears to have drawn on an unusual source: strategic defense doctrine. In framing their concerns about population and the environment, the scientists advanced two larger theses that closely paralleled arguments long used in the defense community to justify large expenditures on strate-

gic weaponry. In the population domain, however, the enemy was not external, but internal: the Chinese people themselves. In the first thesis, China’s impending population explosion was depicted as a threat to national security and even survival, for by degrading the nation’s ecosystem, population growth would eventually destroy the resources necessary

to sustain human life (Song 1999[1980a]; Song 1981). This first thesis drew heavily on the catastrophic framings of the Club of Rome, but its language of threats to national security would have come easily to scientists accustomed to making the case for military resources in such terms. A second thesis appears to have been directly modeled on a doctrine that lay at the heart of military thinking. As Feigenbaum has shown, during the Mao era China’s military scientists had developed and successfully promoted a unique doctrine of techno-nationalism that framed the acquisition of atomic bombs and nuclear missiles as strategic matters affecting not just China’s security, but also its military and economic competitiveness, standing, and power in the world (2003: 13-68). Realizing China’s destiny as a great power was a burning desire of Mao and many other leaders of the Chinese revolution. As noted in chapter 3, in mid-1978 Li Xiannian had told the new Birth Planning Leading Group that birth planning was a “strategic issue” that affected the nation’s prosperity, wealth, and power. The Liu group had elaborated that notion, providing empirical evidence that population was a source of China’s backwardness and failure to achieve its rightful place in the world. In early 1980, Song would give that term a new, quasi-military cast by suggesting that China’s population growth constituted a threat to the world and, in turn, China’s standing in the global community.!” The larger argument, pieced together from several sources, ran as follows. As the world’s most populous and a still fast-growing country, China was the single greatest contributor to the explosive rates of global population growth that were threatening human survival by destroying the world’s

154 Making Population Science environment (e.g., Song 1999[1980a], 1982). If China’s population growth continued unchecked, it would not only undermine the Four Modernizations, keeping China from catching up with the advanced nations and regaining its proper place among the world’s powers. It would also

damage China’s international reputation, as the explosion of Chinese numbers worsened the state of the world at large. This is not what an ambitious nation seeking acceptance by the world community wanted. By arresting the fierce growth of its human numbers, China could accel-

erate its own modernization and at the same time help to alleviate a global crisis. From a shameful contributor to the world’s problems, China would become a proud solver of those problems. Through popu-

lation control, then, China would join the world’s powers as an economic powerhouse and a socially responsible, morally commendable member of the world community of nations. Compared to the social scientific construction of population as a problem of imbalance in domes-

tic development resources, these new, almost militaristic framings of population as problems of national survival and global position both raised the stakes involved in gaining control over population growth and intensified the sense of urgency surrounding that project. In drawing attention to the human constructedness of the crisis story,

I am not suggesting that China had no population crisis. A crisis of human numbers was both real and constructed. My aim in emphasizing its human making is to underscore the historical contingency of the crisis story. Created from two unusual sources, that story bore the traces of the

particular time in which it was made and of the particular specialists who made it. The historical specificity of the story is worth remembering because the messy, humanly shaped, empirically weakly verified account of demographic crisis would become an “international scientific truth” about the fundamental cause of China’s backwardness. The constructedness of the story is also important because the problematic procedures by which it was created were veiled in the powerful language of numbers and facts and, in this way, closed to scrutiny. The population crisis story would have powerful effects, in part because it quietly built on the story

of economic imbalance. The social scientists had laid the political groundwork by purveying a pedagogy of numbers—a new way of thinking through population problems in numbers—that factified the leaders’ account of population growth harming the nation’s economic recovery. The crisis story would not replace the economic story, but come to envelop it in a much more urgent account of temporal and spatial disaster facing

Sinified Cybernetics of Population 155 the Chinese nation as it sought to emerge as a global power. But I am getting ahead of myself.

THE SCIENTIFIC SOLUTION: ONE CHILD FOR ALL, BEGINNING IMMEDIATELY

Once the problem was defined as a population-environment crisis, the solution could only be a drastic one, for now the survival of China’s ecosystem, and, in turn, the economic security and global ascent of the Chinese nation, hung in the balance. But what kind of policy solution was needed? By reducing population to a few simple biological variables (births, deaths, age structure, and so on) unaffected by social, cultural, and political entanglements, the natural scientists were able to apply mathematical methods and new computer technologies to a subject that had been treated in qualitative or only simple statistical terms. |

Mathematization—the use of scientific procedures that work to attribute mathematical order to natural objects and relationships—was a powerful device. This procedure was more powerful than mere quantification because it placed nature within a theoretical domain of pure structure and universal reason. Through mathematization, population became subject to a “higher order” of logic (Lynch 1990). In this section I examine which mathematical techniques were applied and with what consequences for the policy solution. In the next part of the book we see how those practices achieved their political effect. In 1978-1979, the Song group used the COR’s notion of an “optimal population” determined by its environmental “carrying capacity,” as well as control theory, to perform two crucial sets of calculations. In the first they determined the future ideal or target population to serve as the objective of population policy. The control or optimization problem

was to determine the best fertility trajectory by which to reach that long-term goal, given specific constraints. As part of that work, the researchers projected future population growth under different fertility

assumptions. On these bases, they then formulated the quantitative goals of population policy for recommendation to the nation’s decision

makers. Their quantitative research showed that “the only solution” was a policy to encourage all couples to have one child beginning immediately, regardless of the costs to individuals and society. The engineering model in The Limits to Growth that is shown in figure 4

vividly captures the type of thinking that was carried to China—and that

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Such an approach could best be carried out by a nationwide system of planning and target setting centered in the state. Here Song’s contribution was more explicit, for his group articulated a new vision of such an apparatus and an ambition to turn it into reality. In their writings Song and his colleagues laid out their ideal image of a birth planning technocracy in which technicians in the state were in charge of design-

ing and running a multilevel system of social engineering aimed at

168 Making Population Science _ managing the growth of the entire population from the top, with little input from the objects of control at the bottom (e.g., Song and Li 1979; Song, Tuan, and Yu 1985: 29-32). Figure 5 displays their version of that stratified structure of administration, coordination, and control. I return to this technocratic vision—and its significance—at the end of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 5

A Chinese Marxian

Humanism of Population

In 1979, hints of a one-child “wind” (chuifeng) blowing in Beijing provoked consternation among humanistically oriented population specialists. Alarmed at the prospect of the party’s imposing a strict onechild rule on the peasantry, for whom several children were crucial to

survival, intellectuals with close ties to the rural people began to voice | concerns about what might happen if such a policy became political reality. I call this handful of specialists—for they were few in number— Marxian humanists. In 1979-1980, only one dared openly express such views: Liang Zhongtang of the Shanxi Provincial Party School. Yet there were others who quietly harbored similar sentiments. Their sociointellectual roots in Chinese Marxian theory and Chinese Communist rural

practice marked them as Marxian scholars, while their focus on the people that made up the population gave their writings a populist or even humanistic character that was rare in the field of population studies.! In

a 2003 interview, Liang offered the term renwen (humanistic) as an appropriate label for his work, adding that the more colloquial renqing weidao (having human feelings) or even wethe ren (for the benefit of people) captured the spirit of his interventions even better.” Although the demographic humanists did not explicitly identify their work with the humanistic strand in Chinese political thought and literature that arose

in the late 1970s in revulsion against the viciousness of late Maoism, they shared that school’s concern with the human costs of Chinese Marxism and the importance of viewing humans as ends in themselves 169

170 Making Population Science rather than means to other ends (Hua Shiping 1995; Link 2000). As social science rather than humanities scholars, their humanism was more concrete, dealing with the daily suffering of the peasantry under tough party policies that historically had extracted great sacrifices from the rural people. Like the Marxian statisticians, the Marxian humanists were located in the space of “ideology/politics” on the cultural map, constrained to create a follow-the-leaders demography. Liang Zhongtang, the focus of this chapter, was located even deeper in the territory of politics than the People’s University scholars, for his institutional base, a provincial party

school, was part of the CCP apparatus. As a party researcher and teacher, Liang was expected to frame his ideas in terms of CCP thought and practice. A generation younger than Liu and Song, Liang was very much a product of Mao’s revolutionary, peasant-based politics. This larger political context would stamp Liang’s life, intellectual practices, and population policy construct. Reflecting his institutional location, his

minimal formal training, and his personal political history as a Red Guard, People’s Liberation Army soldier, commune head, and finally party intellectual, Liang developed a set of “scientific” practices and policy views on population that were more explicitly political than those of the other groups of specialists. Accepting the Marxian view of the population problem formulated by the Liu group, Liang focused on the costs

of a one-child policy to the peasant masses, arguing that a two-childplus-spacing policy was a better choice because it would impose fewer human costs on the people and thus incur lower political costs for the party. While staying within the speech space of the PRC’s new leaders, Liang’s policy construct did important political work, serving to massify their views by adding the perspective of the rural masses that China’s leaders and the other specialists had essentially ignored. This chapter tells Liang’s story. It begins with his life history, tracing the imprint of Maoist politics on his personal experiences, intellectual

training, and professional location. It then turns to the practices by which he constructed a distinctive Marxian humanism of population. ~ The chapter’s conclusion draws together the main analytic points of this first part of the book by comparing the three sciences of population and the larger intellectual frameworks, political values, and visions of statescience-society interrelations they embodied. This broadened discussion

allows us to see what was distinctively “Chinese” and “late 1970s” about these population sciences and what was at stake in the political victory of one policy construct over the others.

Chinese Marxian Humanism of Population 171 A “SELF-EDUCATED TALENT” FROM THE PROVINCES

As we saw in chapter 3, in 1979 several top leaders began openly encouraging one-child families. In April, Li Xiannian, senior generation leader in charge of birth policy, became the first to publicly endorse the one-child idea. In August, Chen Muhua, vice premier and head of the

Birth Planning Leading Group, actively promoted it in an important article in the People’s Daily. The Central Party School in Beijing imme-

diately instructed party schools throughout the country to propagandize Chen’s speech. The impression from inside party circles was that China’s leaders were already spreading the word that a one-child policy of some sort must be promoted (IK,12/19-20/03, TY). Casting doubt on

the wisdom of this new policy direction carried great political risk. Interviews conducted in the mid-1980s revealed that many scholars around the country privately harbored deep concerns about the enforceability and human costs of a policy promoting one child per couple in the countryside. Yet only one dared to openly and insistently articulate

those concerns and to urge a fundamentally different solution to the population problem. As the key proponent of the most moderate policy in the population debates, Liang Zhongtang would become one of the best-known names in Chinese population circles. Where did Liang’s unorthodox ideas come from? How did he have the courage to publicly press his convictions when almost everyone else was cowed into silence?

The answer appears to lie in Liang’s generational location in Maoist history. Membership in the unique Cultural Revolution generation gave him a set of educational liabilities and (temporary) political opportunities that would deeply shape his population thought and politics. Red Guard—Turned-Party Intellectual

| The careers of Liu Zheng, Song Jian, and Liang Zhongtang (1948 -) bore interesting similarities. All three men rose on a combination of raw intelligence, sociopolitical savvy, and professional ambition. None had any training in population studies, the field in which each would become famous. Song and Liang, men from opposite ends of the ideological and social spectrum and adversaries in the heated debates over population policy, both got their ticket out of the countryside by joining the People’s Liberation Army. All three were favored for advancement by their party connections. What gave Liang’s career and ideas their distinctive cast was the era in which he came of political age. Born in the early 1930s, Liu Zheng

172 Making Population Science and Song Jian reached young adulthood in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They were among the first wave of PRC intellectuals who enjoyed the privilege of getting a college degree and securing a place in

the intelligentsia of the new nation before Mao selectively wreaked havoc with the country’s scientific elite. What a difference almost two decades would make. Born in the late 1940s, on the eve of the Commu-

nist liberation, Liang was a product of Mao’s revolution whose life chances were profoundly affected by the Cultural Revolution. That era’s antielitist and anti-intellectual policies cut short his hopes of obtaining higher education while giving him the extraordinary opportunity to rise

two full administrative ranks, from commune (now township) to provincial level of government service (IF,12/15/03,BJa).

Unlike the other major figures in the population debates, who had relatively privileged urban class backgrounds, Liang was, in the words of one admirer, a “self-taught talent” (zixue rencai) with deep roots in the north Chinese countryside. The son of a middle peasant from the cultured Yongji County in southern Shanxi, Liang graduated from high school in the fateful year of 1966. His hopes of passing the college entrance exam and studying philosophy at Beijing University were dashed by the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution that summer. Like most high school students, Liang became a Red Guard and spent the next two years making revolution against the establishment. In 1968, he joined the People’s Liberation Army. By helping to restore order, the PLA had become the most progressive force in the country. During his five years in the army, Liang joined the party, the major route up the social hierarchy, and studied Marxist philosophy, economy, and law on his own. Realizing that army life was not for him, in 1973 he returned to Yongji County to enter government service.

As a communist cadre, Liang was required to have a deep understanding of Marxism. Building on the knowledge acquired during his PLA years, from 1973 to 1978 Liang taught political economy and philosophy in the party school in the county seat. In 1975, he also served as commune head. This experience gave him deep personal insight into the living conditions of the rural people. In 1978, when the provincial party school reopened, Liang was recruited to teach economics and moved to the provincial capital, Taiyuan, to do so. Because he was already teaching in an institution of higher education, there was no question of his returning to get a college degree. Liang would remain an autodidact. In the fall of 1978, around the time the Central Committee shifted to a policy of “one is best, at most two,” the CCP instructed party schools

Chinese Marxian Humanism of Population 173 throughout the country to teach the subjects of population and birth planning. At the Shanxi party school, that task fell to Liang because his field was economics. (Because Malthus was a political economist, in China population belonged to political economy, a branch of economics.) Although he had little enthusiasm for the subject, seeing it as an area of capitalist, not socialist, thought and practice, in preparation for attend-

ing the first national population theory conference in Beijing in late 1978 he began to study the population question. Puzzled by the disjunction between the policy discussions at the national level and village realities, in July and August 1979 Liang carried out a village investigation of population issues. Accompanied by two birth planning cadres who helped him understand the local situation, Liang made two important discoveries: a one-child-for-all policy was not implementable in the countryside; and if imposed, such a policy would have severe adverse

consequences for the rural people. These would form the core of his paper for the second national population theory conference, scheduled for December in Chengdu.”

The Advantages—and Disadvantages— of the Cultural Revolution Generation In making and pressing a policy for the new era, Liang would be deeply marked by his experiences in the early years of the Cultural Revolution. In mid-1966, Mao mobilized the nation’s high school and university students to defend the revolution by exposing and destroying (alleged) class enemies of the proletariat, including those in the party itself. Incited to violence, some twenty million Red Guards launched a reign of terror in the big cities, smashing cultural treasures, violently “struggling their teachers,” and beating and killing huge numbers of “enemies of the people.” In 1968, with the nation slipping into virtual civil war, Mao called in the People’s Liberation Army to restore order. The Red Guards were repudiated and sent to the countryside for reeducation by the peasants." Despite the passing of time, the Cultural Revolution remains a highly sensitive issue in Chinese politics. The role of the Red Guards remains officially unresolved (Dittmer 2002; Vittinghoff 2002). Unofficially, however, a number of contradictory views circulate in popular discourse (Chong 2002). For some, the Red Guards are a lost generation. Deceived

by Mao, they were deprived not only of their political idealism, but also of their chances for a good education and career. Others see the Guards as China’s critical generation. Because of their experience as

174 Making Population Science revolutionary critics of the status quo, they possess a rare critical consciousness and a deep skepticism about all received wisdoms. For still others, the Red Guards are the PRC’s strongest and most capable generation; despite their tragic history, they have emerged as the most loyal and patriotic contributors to China’s post-Mao modernization. Liang Zhongtang was all three: lost, critical, and patriotic. In the debates over population policy, the greatest obstacle Liang would face was the lack of formal education in general and of statistical or mathematical training in particular. In a society that now trea-

sured schooling, Liang’s lack of advanced education was a distinct liability, diminishing both his cultural capital and his social status. It also limited the kind of population study and policy he could develop. Although his social science colleagues in Beijing had no background in demography and little access to developments in international population studies, their training in mathematics and statistics gave them the tools with which to create usable techniques of demographic analysis on their own. They also possessed foreign language skills that enabled them to access materials on international population affairs. As a selftaught intellectual, Liang lacked these crucial skills. His deep readings in Chinese Marxist philosophy and political economy, while giving him a uniquely humanistic perspective on population, provided a limited foundation for developing population studies in a society newly elevat-

ing international science and its language of mathematics. | Liang was distinguished not only by his unusual ideas, but also by his courage to challenge the direction of official policy. Few dared openly

, oppose authority as Liang would do in late 1979 and early 1980, when the one-child policy was being worked out. That political nerve was especially surprising because party school intellectuals were expected to strongly support official policies. Liang’s daring may well have come

from his experiences as a Red Guard. Unlike the senior generation of demographers at People’s University, who developed carapaces of caution after suffering decades of political intimidation, Liang had escaped political victimization and torment. Quite the contrary, he had been part of a revolutionary generation that had been chosen by Chairman Mao to challenge authority, seize the political initiative, and root out uncommunist thoughts, practices, and people. Throughout the first three decades of his life, Liang appears to have been always on the correct side of the political divide. From the Red Guards he went into the PLA, joined the party, and then entered the party school, serving leadership roles in many of these institutions. These life experiences may have given him both a

Chinese Marxian Humanism of Population 175 sense of being politically and ethically correct and thus reasonably safe from attack, and a confidence in his ability to negotiate a dicey politics that others with more difficult political histories were unable to muster. Perhaps Liang shared the sentiments of two colleagues in Beijing, who declared: “Our generation is not afraid of anything!” (IF,12/24/03,BJb). Finally, Liang may also have been relatively fearless because, as we will see in the next part of the book, his views were shared by an influential minority at the highest levels of the regime. Despite his location in the provinces, as a party school faculty member Liang was privy to important policy and political material that was transmitted down the political hierarchy through the party school system.> His access to such internal documents was probably better than that of his Beijing-based peers. Yet that provincial location would definitely hurt him. Lacking personal connections to officials in Beijing, Liang had few ways to promote his policy ideas except by mobilizing ties to other social scientists based in the capital city, scholars who had few political ties either. Scientific resources were also scarce. The provincial party school

where Liang worked was unlikely to have been well endowed with library, data-processing, or other research facilities. Like his colleagues in Beijing, Liang suffered from lack of data, being forced to use the partial and biased Public Security Bureau data to guesstimate key demographic measures. Like the social scientists at People’s University, Liang had to rely on a handheld calculator to perform the projections and other computations that formed the core of demographic analysis. The process was slow and tedious, the results crude and error-prone (IF,12/19-20/03,TY). Despite some political advantages, Liang’s paucity of formal creden-

tials and institutional power—the peasant background, with its lack of social savoir faire, the high school degree, the location in the provinces rather than the capital—made him something of a social and political outsider whose voice could be easily marginalized in discussions at the political Center. While the Marxian statisticians could publish readily in

their nationally circulated house journal and in influential national newspapers and magazines, and the cyberneticists had easy access to a wide range of prominent economic, engineering, and natural science journals, as well as leading newspapers, Liang was denied access to any kind of important publication outlet. In the crucial months of late 1979 and early 1980, he would be unable to publish in any widely circulated journals or newspapers. The reason, he explained in an interview, lay in the impossibility of publishing positions that differed from the official ones (IF,10/12/87,TY). The effect of this virtual ban was striking. Of the

176 Making Population Science thirteen papers that Liang assembled and published in his first book, On China’s Population Development Strategy (1985), only three had been formally published, and two of those had appeared in “internal circulation” (neibu) locations. The rest were unpublished conference papers, talking notes, and position papers circulated internally. And this — modest little book (a mere 158 pages), which contained virtually all of

Liang’s population writings from the key policymaking period 1979-1981, was not published until early 1985 (when the political climate opened briefly), and then by a provincial press (the Shanxi People’s

Press), which undertook a tiny print run of three thousand copies.°® Liang’s outsider status meant that the only way he could spread his views widely was to give papers at open conferences. When he did have the opportunity to speak at national conferences, he told me, he felt he had to criticize his opponents directly because he had the floor for only twenty minutes. This is the tactic he would use in Chengdu in late 1979, his first opportunity to present his ideas to a broad audience.

In the following discussion, I draw primarily on Liang’s first two papers, written in September 1979 and January 1980, as well as extended discussions with Liang himself in 1987 and 2003, to map out his intellectual background and earliest ideas. He would continue to energetically advance those ideas until an official decision on policy was made and debate was shut off. I pay special attention to the September 1979 paper, “Several Opinions on China’s Population Development Strategy in the

Next Few Decades.” This essay, which would be presented at the Chengdu conference, was Liang’s first and most influential policy paper, making his name known in population circles throughout the country. A MARXIAN HUMANISM OF POPULATION: ROOTS IN PARTY THOUGHT AND RURAL PRACTICE

Using the limited resources at his disposal, Liang developed a distinctive

set of ideas that reflected his institutional location, personal political history, and training. Located in a party school, Liang was constrained to practice a follow-the-leaders demography that took Marxian thought as its guide and took the leaders’ statements on population as the point of departure. Unlike the university-based Marxian statisticians, whose project was to quantitatively elaborate the leaders’ statements, Liang’s task as a party-school researcher was to bring in the role of political factors, helping ensure that any policy the Center adopted adhere to party basics and respect the political and social realities of the PRC.

Chinese Marxian Humanism of Population [77 Like the Marxian statisticians, Liang’s intellectual roots lay in Chinese

Marxist thought and practice, in which population control belonged to the sphere of socialist economic planning. The two groups drew on different aspects of Chinese Marxism, however. While Liu and his colleagues built on the abstract theories of Marx and Engels, Liang was more concerned with the concrete practices and party-mass relations of Chinese communism. Liang was proud of the PRC’s achievements in population control, calling China’s birth planning program a pioneering

achievement of communism (Liang 1985[1984b]: 142). He just as fiercely resisted the import of scientific logics and techniques that were incompatible with the nation’s socialist ideology. Any birth plan that was adopted, he maintained, had to be based on Chinese realities and consider the interconnections among population, economy, and society.

A Demography of and for the Peasantry: Massifying the Leaders’ Views

Liang did not offer an original formulation of the population problem or

rationale for state birth planning. He accepted the official rationale of the mid- to late 1970s, articulated most thoroughly by the Ren Da group, that the fierce population growth of the past had created “many social

and economic difficulties,” necessitating birth planning today (Liang 1985[1979]: 1). The central question for him was one of method: how could births be planned in a way that benefited not only the Four Modernizations, but also “the development of the Chinese people” (1985 [1979]: 1; IR r0/12/87,TY). The concrete needs and interests of the Chinese people, especially the rural masses, had been largely neglected in the rapidly developing discussions on population. In bringing those needs and interests to bear on population policy, Liang’s distinctive contribution would be to massify the leaders’ narrative about population. As noted earlier, in Chinese Marxian thought the objective of birth planning was the planned and proportionate development of population and economic growth. While the Marxian statisticians had focused on coordination at the macro level, Liang was concerned with microlevel realities that would make national coordination difficult if not impossible. In early 1979, Deng Xiaoping had appealed to China’s new schol-

arly policy advisors to identify China’s “special characteristics” and, from them, forge a “Chinese path to modernization” (see chapter 3). The cyberneticists largely ignored Chinese realities, creating a technically efficient population control plan that, with a few modifications,

178 Making Population Science could well be implemented anywhere. Both groups of Marxian scholars accepted Deng’s assignment and made the concrete realities of postMao China central to their analyses. Yet while the Marxian statisticians identified characteristics of the population as a whole as the basic demographic facts requiring attention, for Liang the most noteworthy characteristics were the distinctive cultural, social, and economic features of _ the Chinese peasant family, the ultimate unit of demographic behavior and the target of population policy. In making the peasant family the subject of modern Chinese history,

Liang was carrying forward into the early reform years that body of Maoist thought that made the peasant the hero and maker of China’s socialist revolution (Kelliher 1994; Feuerwerker 1998). Clearly, for Liang, population was a domain of society, broadly defined, and popu-

lation study was a branch of the social sciences. Had the method of ethnography existed in China at that time, Liang’s work might well have constituted an anthropology of population, for its understandings of China’s population problems relied on in-depth knowledge gained from long immersion in peasant life. Liang’s writings, like those of cul-

tural anthropologists, featured fine-grained (if quite generalized) descriptions of the lifeways of the people. But anthropology did not exist in China, and Liang had only the still-amorphous and explicitly political “(Marxian) social science” to call his intellectual home. Reflecting his concerns with the customs of the peasantry, as well as his lack of quantitative training, Liang’s methods and rhetorical style were largely qualitative. He did of course employ numbers, but he used them descriptively, presenting quantitative material in what might be called text-tables. By that I mean tables that were embedded in text and simply continued the conversation started in the text, and that used Chinese characters, rather than roman numbers, for key terms, such as years. The year 2000, for example, would be rendered in the Chinese characters for 2-o—o-o (er, ling, ling, ling). Liang’s calculative practices

(such as projections) were also basic, amounting to a simple seat-ofthe-pants demography. Compared to the fancy mathematics of Song Jian and colleagues, and even to the relatively sophisticated demo-

graphic statistics of the People’s University scholars such as Zha Ruichuan and Lin Fude, Liang’s use of numbers was closer to the people’s numeracy espoused by Mao Zedong in his famous essay “Work Methods of Party Committees.” With the instruction “have a head for figures!” Mao urged communist cadres to develop an appreciation of “the basic statistics” and “the main percentages” so they could

Chinese Marxian Humanism of Population 179 create policies that fit local realities (Mao 1954-1962[1949]: 379-380). Unlike the mathematicians, who told their stories in equations, Liang told his in plain words. The Political Roots of Demographic Humanism

Where did Liang’s unusual demographic humanism come from? Such

concerns were not part of any social science available at the time. Instead, they derived from party thought and rural practice. Asked about the origins of his ideas on population, Liang replied without hesitation that they emerged from his year-long experience as a commune head in Yongji County (IF,12/19-20/03,TY). The face-to-face “peasant work” that job involved gave him a deep understanding of the living conditions

of China’s rural people and of the vital role of children in the peasant family economy. Having “entered the party school directly from the countryside,” Liang saw the villagers first and foremost as people, or subjects, whose childbearing desires were embedded in a dense network of cultural values, economic needs, and social relations (IK 10/12/87, TY). The cyberneticists’ view of the peasants as objects of state engineering to be manipulated in the interest of state goals ran counter to values he had acquired over a lifetime. In the scientific and policy deliberations on population to which he was able to gain entry, Liang sought to give voice to the peasants’ worries. In a society in which the rural masses historically

had few means to articulate their own interests, reflecting the rural people’s views to the leadership was a traditional role of the Chinese scholar. In the population debates, only Liang and other, less vocal Marxian humanists deemed this role worth playing. (Liu Zheng and other economists described the economic organization and interests of

the rural people, but in relatively abstract, objectifying terms that reflected the view of cultural outsiders from the cities.) Liang’s emphasis on the social and human costs of a one-child policy also reflected some fundamentals of CCP political practice. Two in par-

ticular found expression in his work. The first was the concept of the mass line. A fundamental political and organizational line of the CCP, the mass line served as a general statement of the party’s reliance on the masses and need to remain in constant contact with them. The mass line

also functioned as a more specific statement concerning the proper means of exercising party leadership (Townsend 1967: 72-74). Those

correct methods included taking the wishes and needs of ordinary people into account in the formulation of party policy (IK. 10/12/87,TY;

180 Making Population Science see chapter 2). A second party basic reflected in Liang’s work was the distaste for the use of coercion in policy implementation, which was

supposed to rely on “voluntarism” produced by grassroots cadres through the propagation of “propaganda and education.” While general party rules condemned the use of “coercion and commandism” (giangzhi mingling) as bad political practice and poor ethical conduct, Liang’s concern centered on the harm it did its victims. THE SOCIAL COSTS AND HUMAN CONSEQUENCES

: OF ONE-CHILDIZATION In the late summer of 1979, when Liang began writing about population, Chen Muhua had just announced in the People’s Daily the ambitious new goal of reducing population growth to 5 per 1,000 by 1985 and to zero by the end of the century. Based on some simple projections, Liang had calculated that in order to reach zero growth by 2000, given the coming baby boom, virtually all couples, urban and rural alike, would have to be limited to one child and the death rate would actually have to rise (Liang 2003: 148). Neither scenario was politically acceptable. In early September, soon after finishing a draft of his Chengdu paper,

Liang traveled to Beijing to see Liu Zheng and Tian Xueyuan. Liang told Liu: “The government quite possibly has not calculated the century-end target that it has [just] announced. No matter how [it tries to do so], there is no way to reduce population growth to zero. This target definitely is unrealizable” (Liang 2003: 148n1). Recognizing Liu Zheng’s

influence at the State Council’s Leading Group, Liang stressed the unthinkability of this prospect, urging Liu to support his view that the government should not adopt unrealizable targets. But Liu was not persuaded. He replied: “This is just the government’s struggle target; if we can’t achieve it, it isn’t that important” (p. 148n1). Liang’s trip was not successful, but this story about it is quite illuminating for it reveals the prevailing attitudes toward population control targets—demographically impossible goals are politically acceptable—and suggests the difficulty Liang would face promoting a propeasant policy, even among other social scientists.

Despite the rebuke, Liang remained alarmed at the thought that a one-child-for-all policy might be carried out in an agrarian society whose “special characteristics” were deplorable: economic backwardness, low productivity, and extreme poverty. His analysis highlighted two aspects of rural production and livelihood that would have determinative effects

Chinese Marxian Humanism of Population 181 on population growth (Liang 1985[1979], 1985[1980e]; also 1985 [1984b]: 143-144). First, because of the constraints of the natural environment, the mechanization of agricultural production remained limited. Manual production predominated, and it encouraged childbearing — by tying the size of the harvest to the size of the family labor force. © Second, given the uneven development of Chinese industry (and the lack

of government-provided social security, a point Liang prudently left unmentioned), the peasant family remained the basic unit of production, social security (in particular, old-age support), and the provision of daily necessities such as food, housing, and clothing. Without children, especially sons, families could not fulfill these essential functions (Liang 198 5 [1984b]: 144). Any strategy of population control, Liang insisted, must

take these economic, cultural, and social realities into account. To be workable, its limits on childbearing must be tolerable to peasant families and the social costs it imposes must not be so great as to undermine the integrity and viability of the peasant family. To the outsider considering these arguments later, these seem like reasonable, indeed, modest concerns. In the policy deliberations of the late 1970s, however, few expressed concern about the viability of the peasant family.

Rapid Aging and the Plight of the Elderly

Liang directed most of his energies to exposing the social costs that a radical program of one child for all would entail. He was the very first to stress that “one-childization,” a notion he abhorred, would bring a host of social ills, especially at the family level. His fall 1979 paper sought to make those costs vivid. Liang was most impassioned about the plight of China’s old people under a policy of one-childization. He insisted that the aging problem would be “ten tenths” (shifen) serious. To illustrate, he created a simple text-table (table 5; note the rendering of dates and population sizes in Chinese characters), showing that, under conservative assumptions, the proportion of the population sixty and older would rise from 14 percent in 2000 to 23 percent in 2020. Rapid aging, he emphasized, would result in more and more elderly people with no children to support them. Assuming that the proportion of first births rises from 40 percent in 1980 to 100 percent in 2000, Liang calculated that in several decades there would be 150 million “gloomy and lonely old people,” and China would becomea_

“breathless, lifeless society without a future” (Liang 1985[1979]: 5; 1985[1980c]: 80; 1985[1984a]: 136). Writing in emotional language that

182 Making Population Science TABLE 5. LIANG ZHONGTANG’S TEXT-TABLE ON POPULATION AGING

Number Age 60 Percentage of

and Older Population

2000 150 million 14 2010 2020 180 150 million million 16 23 source: Liang 1985[1979];: 5.

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contrasted sharply with the dry economics of the statisticians and the drier mathematics of the cyberneticists, he suggested that the result could be terrible tragedy, for changes in social psychology and traditional customs such as child support for the elderly would be unable to keep up with the pace of demographic change. In Japan, he pointed out, many old people have been unable to adjust to the rapid change in family life, contributing to suicide rates that are among the highest in

the world. China, he implied, might well be the next Japan (Liang 1985[1980c]: 80). The 4:2:1 Problem and the Real Crisis—in the Peasant Family Liang’s most arresting—and influential—idea was that of the coming 4:2:1 age structure. Under a one-child policy, he argued, two working-age adults

will have to support four older parents and one child. Simple though it was, this little numerical figure served as a powerful rhetorical device.

Chinese Marxian Humanism of Population 183 Throughout Chinese history, the ideal had been a large happy family, knit

together by intergenerational bonds of mutual support. Such a family would flourish and grow over the generations with many children filling the house with cheerful noise and hopes for a prosperous future and secure old age. Liang’s image showed how a one-child policy would invert the generational numbers, destroying that cherished ideal and leaving older people bereft. Beyond these cultural upheavals, Liang emphasized, this unbalanced age structure would create distortions throughout the society and economy. The dependency burden would worsen. With fewer working-age people, the nation might also face a shortage of labor and military recruits, an issue the Liu group also addressed (Liang 1985[1979]). These disturbances in the age structure would also distort the normal development of the national economy (pp. 6-7). Warning against “calamitous” constructions of the population prob-

. lem—which would call for drastic solutions—Liang argued that if excessively restrictive solutions were adopted they would lead to a real social crisis in the peasant family and, in turn, sociopolitical instability in the countryside. The real dangers and difficulties China would face, he insisted, were not a population crisis, but the near-term damage to

the peasant family and the long-term consequences for society that would surely occur if fertility were pushed down too far too fast (p. ro). No More Coercion: The Peasants Have Suffered Enough

In a rural context in which children are essential to the well-being and even survival of the peasant family, Liang argued, the vast majority of couples, especially in the backward areas, would have “difficulty accepting” a one-child policy (Liang 1985[1979]: 11). (This rather bland formulation of the peasants’ reaction to a one-child demand was dictated by political protocol.) Also discouraging the acceptance of a one-child

rule was the poor state of rural health care. If peasants cannot be assured that their one child will survive, how can they agree to a onechild policy (Liang 1985[1980e]: 35)?’ A third factor impeding the spread of one-child families was the household responsibility system. Since the rural reforms were initiated in late 1978, Liang pointed out, private economic activities had proliferated, creating an “anarchic” (that is, unplanned and unplannable) situation in childbearing (Liang 1985§[1980e]: 36). To enforce a one-child rule in these circumstances, the state would have to use “simple and hard administrative measures”

and “brute coercion,” including “one stroke of the knife” (that is,

184 Making Population Science TABLE 6. LIANG ZHONGTANG’S TWO-CHILDPLUS-SPACING PROPOSAL

1980- 1990— 2000- 2010- 2016-

1989 1997 2009 2115 2120

Final population size 1billion 1.009b 1.11b 1.11b £21.11b

Number of births 100 = 1,700 1,200 1,200 1,350 (in 10,000s)

Number of deaths 600 800 1,000 1,200 1,400 | (in 10,000s)

Population growth 4 9 2 0 ~—0.5 rate (per 1,000)

First marriages 1,000 1,000 500 850 600 (10,000 couples) Stipulated percentage n.a. 30 30 30 0 one-child couples SOURCE: Liang 1985[1979]: 13.

imposing a uniform policy on all), especially during the coming birth

peak years. “This approach is not right,” he declared (Liang 1985 [1980e]: 36). Making a lonely plea to put the peasants’ suffering near the top of the policymaking agenda, he wrote: “In the past, under the extreme leftist road, China’s peasants were subject to all kinds of (zhong zhong) coercion. We have made the peasants’ suffering bitter enough in the economic realm. We cannot make them suffer further [in the reproductive realm]” (Liang 1985]1980e]: 36). A BETTER CHOICE: TWO CHILDREN, WIDELY SPACED

Although the tide was rapidly shifting toward an extreme solution, in his fall paper Liang openly—and bravely—called for a two-child policy

with eight to ten years spacing and a certain stipulated proportion of one-child families. Liang’s “two-child-plus-spacing” (liangge haitzi jia

jian’ge) proposal represented a modified version of the later-longerfewer policy that had guided birth planning during the 1970s. In Liang’s plan, urban women, who married at age twenty-five on average, would be required to space their births by eight years, while rural couples, who

married at twenty-three, would wait ten years before having their second child. The details can be found in another text-table, which I have translated in table 6. Readers might note the sharply rounded off and sometimes unchanging numbers, which suggest the crudeness of the calculations behind them. Indeed, the numbers in this table seem more

Chinese Marxian Humanism of Population 185 like guesstimates—or Mao-type “main percentages”—than careful, machine-assisted computations. Liang’s proposal of 30 percent one-child families was similar to that of the Liu group, which had envisioned a rise in the one-child rate to 25 percent of rural and 50 percent of urban couples. After ten years of propaganda and persuasion, Liang suggested, and with work, people would gradually come to accept the notion of one-child families and the mandated one-child rate could be raised. Liang’s plan contrasted sharply with the strict one-child proposal advocated by Song and his colleagues, however. Song’s plan forbade second children and called for a one-child rate of 100 percent by 1985. Under that scheme, China would achieve zero population growth by 2000, with a final population of 1.05 billion. Under Liang’s plan, China would attain zero growth a decade later, in 2010, with the population topping out at 1.11 billion. Song’s plan would

not become publicly available for reaction for several months. (And when it was, Liang would react, as we shall see in a later chapter.) Liang urged the adoption of his two-child policy primarily because its social and human consequences would be less severe. His policy would also help to ensure sociopolitical stability, long a concern of party leaders. Noting that “the masses are not accustomed to frequent policy fluctuations” (code for: they have difficulty adapting to ever-tougher policies), Liang argued that his proposal would ensure policy stability by building on the foundation of the later-longer-fewer policy. Under that policy, the peasants had already become accustomed to state management of their childbearing and had even come to accept the idea of having only two children. Liang’s new plan for the reform era asked them only to wait a

few more years before having the second child. Finally, there was an economic rationale for the two-child policy: the economic incentives offered to single-child families (health fee, priority in schooling, and so on) would be unmanageably expensive for local governments. A strict one-child policy would shrink local coffers, causing political and socioeconomic instability in the countryside. THREE SCIENCES OF POPULATION, THREE VISIONS OF STATE, SCIENCE, AND SOCIETY

In the waning years and months of the 1970s, then, China was home to the development of three culturally specific and historically contingent “sciences” of population. Each had a different view of the nature and severity of the population problem, its best solution, and the social costs

186 Making Population Science TABLE 7. THREE CHINESE “SCIENCES” OF POPULATION: INTELLECTUAL BASICS

Intellectual Feature Marxian Statistics Sinified Cybernetics Marxian Humanism

Domain to which Economy Nature Socioeconomy population belongs

Discipline by which Marxian economics, Biological and Marxian economics,

population should esp. Marx/Engels physical sciences esp. CCP thought

be studied theory; planning | and rural practice Statistics

Indigenous Chinese/ Indigenous Foreign Indigenous Foreign Object of primary Nation Nature, the Peasant family

concern environment

Methods Quantitative: Quantitative: Largely qualitative, planning statistics, mathematics, based on political numbers used esp. cybernetics reasoning; seat-

descriptively of-the-pants quantification

Larger vision Economistic Technocratic Humanistic

that were tolerable in the name of solving this vexed problem in PRC

history. In December 1979, a big struggle would erupt over the right to . shape China’s population policy for the new era. Before turning to those contestations, I take a brief look back over these three sciences and the larger intellectual frameworks of which they are a part. By examining

them as a group, we can see what was distinctly “Chinese” and “late 1970s” about them, what range of meanings was tapped by the term “population science” in that historical and cultural context, and what was at stake in the choice of one proposal over the others. Marxian Economics, Biology, and Party Practice: Three Disciplinary Frameworks for the Study of Population

Underlying these varying policy proposals were marked differences in the overarching intellectual framework within which population issues were conceived. Table 7 brings together the key elements of the three frameworks for comparison and contrast. In this table we find a cluster of specialties that Deng Xiaoping would have been happy to call “population science with Chinese characteristics.” Compared to the international demography that dominated in the West,

Chinese population studies was more Marxian in its theory, more Soviet | in its statistics, less quantitative in its methods, and more indigenous in its

Chinese Marxian Humanism of Population 187 orientation. Although these features would begin to change in the 1980s as China’s links to transnational science grew, these were the features

that would characterize the field in the crucial months of 1979-1980, when the one-child policy was made. Although this collection of disciplines was clearly Chinese, equally clearly “Chinese population science” was no one thing. Table 7 shows that in the late 1970s the subject of “population” belonged to three quite different empirical domains: the economy, the socioeconomy, and nature. It was studied by three disciplines that were indigenous or foreign, quantitative or qualitative, and ultimately concerned with three analytically distinct entities: the peasant family, the Chinese nation, and the environment or even nature. The historical era also left its imprint on the sciences of population that could be and were made. These sciences of population were dis-

tinctively “late 1970s” in many important ways. The existence of a cybernetic science of population reflects the immediate post-Mao era in which defense science was being urged to turn to civilian work and the social sciences of population remained seriously underdeveloped. The environmental concerns and cybernetic methods of that natural science of population reflect the extraordinary influence of the Club of Rome in international demography in the 1970s. China’s social sciences of population also reflect the time in which they were made. Their indigenous character, their heavily Marxian orientation, and their lack of quantitative sophistication are all products of late Maoism, when demography was a forbidden zone and population was a sensitive domain of party politics. Finally, the dwindling concern with peasant welfare reflects the tail end of an era when China’s peasants were deemed the motive force in history; within a short time, they would be redefined as a major cause of China’s backwardness and a primary target of modernizing control. Economism, Technocratism Humanism: Three Visions of State, Science, and Society

Which policy proposal, and thus larger agenda, would prevail in the coming battle over policy? Would it be an indigenous Chinese demography that respected Chinese realities and made the welfare of the individual its prime concern? Would it be a local Chinese demography that emphasized the planned socioeconomy and the fate of the nation? Or would it be a foreign demography that ignored China’s politics and culture and spoke in the name of the higher good of preserving the earth’s ecosystem?

188 Making Population Science The stakes in this contest were huge—and not only because of the implications for population policy. The stakes were also big because each

proposal embodied a different set of political values and visions of the interrelations among state, science, and society. Because China’s program

of population control would become an all-encompassing project of human governance in the 1980s and 1990s, the policy proposal that prevailed would find its vision and values embedded in the society and poli-

tics of the reform era. Before turning to the contests over population policy, then, let us see which visions and values would be in contention. The Marxian statisticians offered a highly nationalistic demography whose central concern was the restoration of China’s greatness on the world stage. Underlying their approach to the population problem was a radically economistic or materialistic vision in which people were ultimately treated like economic goods, their value measured in dollars and cents in the state development plan. In this vision, societal reproduction

was to be planned by the state like the production of material commodities, and in proportion to material production, according to the ideal of balance and proportion in the unified state plan. This stateplanning approach to population policy carried the worrying potential to dehumanize the objects of population planning. Yet in the Marxist vision, population belonged to society, its development to be guided by social theory. Accordingly, in the Marxian statisticians’ scheme, the planning of reproduction was subject to two important social restraints.

First, following Mao’s dictum “combine theory with practice,” the political feasibility of policy enforcement was taken into account. Second, according to the principle of balance and proportion in the socioeconomic plan, theoretically the need to create a balanced, normal society was as important as the need to foster the development of the economy. Following this principle, the Marxian statisticians also took

the social consequences of planned reproduction into account. The Marxian statisticians thus offered a model of society in which societal development was to be planned by the state, with the assistance of social experts such as economists and demographers, who took societal needs, as given by Marxian theory, into account. In the cyberneticists’ vision, what mattered most was the fate of the PRC’s—and the world’s—ecosystem. Underlying their mathematical approach to policymaking and engineering approach to policy enforcement was a mechanistic model in which society is envisioned as a giant machine, to be run and managed according to the ideal of mechanistic efficiency. Human values, social structures, and politics have little place

Chinese Marxian Humanism of Population 189 in this world of machines. The mechanization of population, and consequent dehumanization of the people comprising it, emerges forcefully, even jarringly, from a momentary journey into the larger intellectual world in which the Song group’s ideas were developed. The great bulk of

the scientists’ work on population was published in journals of control theory and systems engineering. There, articles on population control appeared alongside items on control systems in fields such as industry, transportation, energy, medicine, and defense. To give but one example, an article by Song and Yu on stability theory of population systems appeared in the 1981 volume of Acta Automatica Sinica (Zidonghua xuebao) in the company of the following titles: Study of a Computer Monitoring System in the Weaving Shop of a Textile Mill A General Survey of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Control System

Two Regions in Aerial Combat A Multivariable Self-Tuning Filter and Smoother

The Mathematical Model and Control of Metal Heating Process Dynamics of a Spin-Stabilized Satellite Altitude Control by Jet Like the self-tuning filter or the satellite altitude control gauge, the pop-

ulation is treated like an inanimate object, to be analyzed, optimized, and controlled by the scientist-technician. Underlying such scenarios, and informing Song’s descriptions of complex multilevel, multivariable control systems, is a technocratic vision of a perfectly engineered society run by technicians and scientists in the state, with virtually no input from the objects of control. Finally, Liang Zhongtang offered a fundamentally humanistic vision in which people were treated not as economic commodities or machine parts, but as thinking, feeling human subjects. Based on party thought and rural practice—in particular, the notion of the mass line and the (theoretical) antipathy to coercion—this perspective took the material and sociopsychological well-being of one of China’s most underprivileged categories of people, the peasantry, as its central concern. Implicit in this vision was a model of society in which the party-state managed

societal development, with the assistance of sociopolitical specialists who were deeply embedded in rural society and thus able to reflect its needs and interests to decision makers in the regime.

190 Making Population Science What would matter more, the rise of the Chinese nation or the welfare of its people? Which ideal—planning balance, technical efficiency, or human welfare—would prevail? Would China’s people be treated

like material commodities, inanimate machine parts, or sentient human beings? I turn now to the politics that would decide these vital questions.

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eacecerachcscacecest Am BSw MEALS 8 8 O 8H DN SUS Soe OW SS RM NUE BO r scoaseceoeces =! Tat atatetatan Re ee SD eee ba baba

eater retort eee Ente SS Ritetetscatererecs, Tatatasptatbtetatbendatesbiets stots otatecstseesataaeepeatecneaceaeaasaaa

iisisnsosoreansatreeetenabe telatateeteemete atesORD SieteERNE SES ececncesectcsBEREAN Raa ere NA roarSS eee Sasineieeneemenmemeeme I, SEES RES SR RS SE RAN SS REESESESSER BRRERER MAIR KERR SRN SR RRR RN SRR RRRER AER EE RSE DNS CERES So SERS