Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China (review)

Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China is an important work by anthropologist and science studies scholar Susan Greenhalgh, based on more than two decades of research on population politics in the People's Republic of China (PRC). In the rapidly growing body of literature on the one-child policy, Greenhalgh found few satisfactory answers for questions such as where the radical idea of strict fertility control came from in the late 1970s and what the PRC leaders' rationale was in establishing such a strict social policy. Drawing on interdisciplinary analytical approaches—policy problematization, policy assemblage, and micropolitics of science making and policy making—Greenhalgh identifies various actors, institutions, and sciences/knowledge that participated in the process. Herein, the conceptual tools of science studies, such as credibility contests, boundary work, and coproduction of science and politics, are empirically employed in assessing the activities and discourses of science making and policy making. Greenhalgh's main argument is 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" (xvii).

This book consists of nine chapters. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the scholarship on policy studies and science studies and explains how the two can benefit each other. By concisely introducing the analytical approaches and conceptual tools employed in this book, as well as social locations of her research subjects in China, Greenhalgh provides readers with a useful roadmap to navigate this complex case. Chapter 2 traces the development of modern China's population science back to the Mao era, when Malthusian theory was harshly denounced and intellectuals were encouraged to create a Marxian theory of population and birth planning. In a section titled "Making Population Science," Greenhalgh discusses a time when China's leaders opened the "forbidden zone" of population in the late 1970s and details how three very different scientific schools of thought—a Marxian statistics of population, a sinified cybernetics of population, and a Marxian humanism of population—emerged and competed for credibility in defining both the nature of China's population problems and the best solutions.

Although the Deng regime fervently embraced science and technology as the essence of the Four Modernizations, residual influences of the Mao era, in which all disciplines were subordinated to state and party politics, were not easy to remove. The rehabilitation of the social sciences in the post-Mao cultural map, including Marxian statistics of population, vividly demonstrated this dilemma. Greenhalgh observes that the relaunch of population studies after the mid-1970s was still statist and party-dominated. These scholars, such as Liu Zheng and his colleagues at the People's University in Beijing, were trained in Soviet planning statistics and the Maoist Marxian theory of population. They employed several scientific practices—quantification, visualization, and categorization and comparison—in problematizing the Chinese population, placing a special focus on rural people, who were perceived as "over-reproducing" and as the main cause of a backward, impoverished nation. Their works shaped how China's leaders and public "saw" the population problem in specific ways through numbers, tables, and figures and served as the foundation for various official birth planning proposals, from "later-longer-fewer" to "encourage one, prohibit three." Although they were eager to establish population as an object of scientific study and governance, their association with ideology/party politics and "state-mandated commitment to using Marxian theory" greatly constrained their autonomy in intellectual activities and competition for cultural authority in the Deng era.

In contrast to these social scientists who were "tainted" by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideologies, a small group of natural scientists-cum-system engineers appeared in the forum of population issues and soon established themselves at the center of the debate on the one-child-family policy. Greenhalgh addresses the unexpected trajectory of the "sinified...