“The burgeoning population has outstripped economic expansion, overburdening the planet and becoming a crucial issue of social development, national and international political stability.”[1]
— Song
Jiang
I. Introduction
According
to an ancient Chinese legend, the mother goddess, Nüwa, molded the first humans
out of yellow clay. A symbol of creation, she nourished the birth of a new
world, crafting nascent life with careful precision. Millennia later, the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) likewise
assumed a God-like role, seeking to control the nature of humanity. However, instead
of creating life, the CCP suppressed and extinguished life; and, in stark
contrast to Nüwa's beneficent nature, the CCP was motivated by fear – fear of
overpopulation, depleted resources, and the impact of a rapidly rising
population on the country's modernization efforts. With the implementation of
the one-child policy in 1980, the CCP began an undertaking that they hoped would produce an
optimal demographic structure, safeguarding the country's economic destiny and elevating
China’s position on the international stage. However, a slew of indelible aftereffects
followed this attempt at securing stability and prosperity. The CCP had unknowingly planted the seeds
for a monumental population crisis.
By the mid-2000s, China was grappling with significant
social and economic challenges stemming from its population policies: a
shrinking workforce,[2] skewed male-to-female sex ratio, and
rapidly aging population. The decline in the working-age population had resulted
in widespread labor shortages, significantly impacting businesses across the
country.[3] Meanwhile, the gender imbalance, with far
more men than women,[4] fueled social unrest, contributing to a
rise in crime, inflated housing prices, and a marriage crisis where men
struggled to find wives.[5] Simultaneously, China’s rapidly aging
population increasingly pressured younger generations, creating long-term
financial and social strain.[6] Through decades of coercive extensive
abortions, sterilizations, and contraception campaigns, the one-child policy
fundamentally altered Chinese demographics, enduringly curtailing people’s
aspirations of marriage and childbirth[FC2] .
However, if the consequences
of a one-child policy were so immense, why did the party uphold it for so long?
More importantly, why did the one-child policy exist in the first place[FC3] ?
[FC4]
This paper seeks to answer these questions through an
investigation of the historical context and multitude of influences that
produced the policy. First, the immediate historical circumstances underlying Chinese
birth planning in the 1970s and 80s will be described, with a focus on three
aspects in particular: the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under Mao’s
direction, the fear of a population crisis in the West, and the origins of
scientism as an ideological force in China. Following this, a brief history of
Chinese family planning is outlined. Family planning will first be traced to
its genesis in the works of early philosophers, after which its presence in the
20th century during and beyond Mao’s time in power will be
clarified. Furthermore, the radicality of the one-child policy is explored,
highlighting how it differs from the “longer (wan),
later (xi),
fewer (shao)” rule (LLF). Finally, this paper concludes with a
comprehensive analysis of the causes and justifications of the one-child policy,
bringing together the previously discussed topics within a cohesive framework.
Today, the one-child policy is commonly depicted as the
calculated actions of an authoritarian government determined to retain power;
in doing so, they stopped at nothing, not even people’s bedrooms, to achieve
their malicious goals. However, this is not the full story; more
accurately, the one-child policy resulted from a wholesale rejection of the
“ideological” following Mao’s calamitous campaigns, an obstinate belief in
Scientism, and the pervasive influence of the West[FC5]
both intellectually and financially.
II. Historical circumstance
Mao’s China
In
the decades following its establishment, the PRC was transformed from a
backwater, underdeveloped nation into one of the most prominent political and
economic powers of the modern world.[FC6] [FC7] However, the
PRC’s first chairman, Mao Zedong, contributed little to such a development – in
fact, China was in a constant state of societal tension, chaos, and bloodshed
under Mao, largely a result of the mass mobilization campaigns he conducted in
order to indefinitely perpetuate the peasant revolution. Two campaigns are
particularly relevant to the development of birth-planning policies in China:
the Great Leap Forward (a yuejin) and the Cultural Revolution (wenhua da geming).
By
the late 1950s, the collectivization of agriculture, which began almost
immediately after the nation’s founding, had been well under way with the Land
Reform Movement (tudi gaige). To conduct a
final collectivization program, Mao launched a comprehensive five-year plan,
later known as the Great Leap Forward, leading to increased collectivization
and labor-intensive industrialization. Hoping to increase productivity, the
state entirely abolished private property, collectivizing it into communes (gongshe). Rather than transform China
into a communist utopia, however, these reforms produced to the opposite. Factors
such as inefficiency,[7] diminished manpower,[8] the Four Pests
Campaign[FC8] ,[9] and natural
disasters together triggered one of the most devastating famines in human
history – the Great Chinese Famine,[10] or the “three-year
great famine” (san nian da jihuang) – resulting in
a death toll ranging from 15 million to 55 million.[11] During this
period, grain production fell precipitously, leading to numerous occurances of
cannibalism.[12] As one might
imagine, this had tremendous consequences for population growth. As Sinologist Susan Greenhalgh
notes, the “ugly, lumpy” characteristic of an initial decline followed
by a rebound in fertility exceeding pre-famine levels was
later used as a justification for family planning policies as many “[appreciated]
the importance of smoothing it out.”[13]
Less
than a decade after the Great Leap Forward, Mao instigated the Cultural
Revolution, aiming to rectify the CCP and re-instill a revolutionary spirit in
the populace, especially the youth.[14] As described
by Historian Youqin Wang, the revolution mobilized students against their own
teachers, accusing the latter of being “feudal, capitalist, and revisionist.”[15] As such, teachers
were beaten, forced to injure each other, or forced to commit suicide.[16] As a part of
the effort to erase the counter-revolutionary past, traditional Chinese
symbols, names, and artwork were destroyed, replaced with new “revolutionary” names
and objects;[17] in Beijing
alone, 475 roads were renamed to include the word “revolution.”[18] During this
time, the chaos reigning throughout the country forced the government to largely
cease its functionalities, leaving the state paralyzed in the face of an
anarchic movement that was quickly getting out of hand.[19] Seeing the
unbridled turmoil and destruction, Mao finally called for an end to the
violence in late 1968, although the Cultural Revolution persisted in a
diminished state until his death.[20] It was the unrestrained
chaos brought about by such events that helped develop an aversion to the
“ideological” in both the minds of the people and those in power, paving the
way for the rise of scientism in China.
Outside
Mao’s debilitating campaigns, China began to make progress on the international
stage in the 1970s, gaining global acceptance and self-awareness after its
period of self-imposed isolation, which had begun during the initial stages of
the Great Leap Forward.[21] On October 25,
1971, the PRC was admitted as a permanent member of the UN Security Council,
replacing the seat’s previous holder, the Republic of China (Taiwan).[22] This
acceptance into the international community is especially pertinent to family
planning, as gradually, the PRC began importing Western scientific methodology
and literature,[23] including
highly quantitative methods of demography.[24] In addition, China’s
integration into the global intellectual environment give China a novel lens to
quantify its own scientific backwardness;[25] however, not
only was Chinese science criticized, but China’s economy and population were
also scrutinized and compared to the far more industrialized nations such as
France and the United States.[26][FC9] It was these
concerns, made possible by a connection to the West, which were the key to the
creation of a harsh and coercive family planning policy.
Malthusian Crisis
While
China’s economy was experiencing tremendous turbulence under Mao’s political movements
and collectivization efforts, Western nations were experiencing what became
known as the “Golden Age of Capitalism.” Skyrocketing productivity and an expansion
of international trade created a surge of consumer demand, which, when combined
with a seamless conversion of wartime industries to consumer industries, led to
a so-called “baby boom.”[27] Soon,
however, the exploding population became a cause for concern, and the problem
of overpopulation – a so-called “Malthusian Crisis” – began to loom large in
the eyes of the people. This mania was only compounded further by highly
dramatized, pseudo-scientific works in the late 1960s and 70s, filled with
colorful rhetoric describing the human race’s inevitable doom at the hands of
overpopulation.[28][FC10] [FC11]
It is
important to note that concerns regarding overpopulation did not originate in
the 1960s and 70s; rather, during the early 19th century, British
economist Thomas Malthus was the first to discuss the potentially disastrous
consequences of unchecked population growth. In his Essay on the Principle
of Population (1798), Malthus proposed that while population growth
followed a geometric pattern, growth in food production followed a merely
arithmetic pattern.[29] Consequently,
as population growth outpaced food production, societal order breaks down and
chaos ensues. This imbalance between population and available resources would
be the fundamental axiom upon which future Malthusian authors would produce
their studies.
One of
the most prominent works influenced by Malthus’s principle was The
Population Bomb, published in 1968 by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The book became
hugely successful owning to its apocalyptic rhetoric regarding the imminence of
an environmental catastrophe, its authors advancing the claim that there are “[t]oo
many people, packed into too-tight spaces, taking too much from the earth.”[30] “The
battle to feed all of humanity is over[,]” according to The Population Bomb,
“In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in
spite of any crash programs embarked upon now …We are today involved in the
events leading to famine and ecocatastrophe; tomorrow we may be destroyed by
them.”[31] Their
extensive use of fatalist language is most evident when quantified. For
example, in a section of just four pages they utilized over 25 instances of, as
climate scientist Roger Revelle describes, “apocalyptic adverbs and adjectives.”[32] Later
in the early 1980s, it was exactly this type of oratory that was popularized in
China and that convinced its leaders of the need for strict, coercive policies.
Four
years after The Population Bomb, Limits to Growth (LTG) was
published, co-authored by researchers at the Club of Rome (COR), an informal
group of intellectuals and businessmen who discussed the world’s most pressing
issues.[33] LTG
was another work that has its origins in Malthus, though it adopts a more mathematical
approach. Based on their simulation model World3, the COR scientists asserted
that the global population would reach its maximum capacity in approximately a
hundred years, and that continued population growth would surpass the planet’s
“limit to growth,” leading to a catastrophic collapse of human society.[34]
Concurrently,
Western scientists were also authoring studies that saw the application of cybernetics
in population control, more specifically, its potential as a means of preventing
irreversible damage to the Earth’s ecosystems. Often, their conclusions were
quite radical. For example,
the authors of A Blueprint for Survival (1972) recommended nearly
halving the British population, reducing it from 56 million to 30 million.[35] Similarly,
a Dutch study proposed an even steeper reduction, suggesting a decrease from
13.5 million to 5 million – a decrease of approximately 63%.[36] However,
though the impressive results obtained by these calculations were intended only
as exploratory policymaking tools, they would provide the groundwork for
justifying extensive population control after being imported into the PRC.
Scientism in China
In the
early 1910s, a long-awaited period of modernization and transformation
finally occurred in the newly formed Republic of China. Immediately after its
establishment, a new generation of youth began eagerly advocating for the replacement
of old cultural mores and preconceptions with modern Western social values. [FC12] The
glorification and reverence of science played a crucial role in this movement,
as many saw science as the answer to China’s obsolete Confucian ideals, which
they believed were the root cause of the nation’s weakness on the international
stage.[37] Many
young intellectuals believed that if China did not overcome its national weakness,
it would be overtaken and destroyed by predatory, imperialist states.[38] This
Darwinian mindset also justified the displacement of traditional values with
new, “scientifically” founded ones, a seemingly natural evolution to replace China’s
outmoded and inadequate ideas.[39] These
ideas were broadcast widely with the fiery language and confident assertions
made by leading youth intellectuals of the time.
Central to the New Culture Movement’s
philosophy was the figure of “Mr. Science (sai xiansheng),” a
personification of the Western scientific ideal that came to embody the
movement’s push for progress and enlightenment. Chen Duxiu, one of the most
prominent members of the movement and founder of the radical journal New
Youth (xin qingnian), proclaimed that “[w]e now believe that only these two
Messrs. [Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science] can eliminate the darkness in China’s
politics, morality, learning, and thought.”[40] While
a steadfast belief in the capabilities of science was apparent in China at
large, given Chen Duxiu's key role as one of the CCP’s founders, it would
continue to be especially prevalent in the Communist Party.
III. A history of family planning in China
Family Planning in Ancient China
China was, over its five-millennium long history, decidedly
pro-natal, encouraging human reproduction and population growth. Traditional
Confucianism emphasized the importance of a large family, declaring that it promoted
happiness;[41]
in fact, remaining celibate was unfilial. Mencius, a follower of Confucius,
stated that “there are three things that are unfilial (bu xiao you san),
and to have no posterity is the greatest of them (hou wu wei da).”[42] The I Ching (yijing),
a core text of Confucianists doctrine, tells that “it is the great virtue of
heaven and earth to bestow life.”[43] Moreover, since having
more children increased the productivity of the family, the basic unit of
production in ancient China, rulers commonly promoted pronatalist policies.[44] While incentive
structures such as state-subsidized midwifery and material benefits like
foodstuffs, land, livestock, or labor exemptions regularly accompanied
childbirth,[45]
authorities also employed disincentives. For example, if
individuals did not marry at a certain age, the government would arranged
marriages or imposed jail time.[46] Despite the primitive methods
used by these states, their pronatalist policies were generally successful, as such
ideas have persisted in rural areas into the modern day.
These examples also illustrate a crucial element that
facilitated the one-child policy: robust state control. China’s government, a historied
bureaucratic formation, is an overpowering one.[47] Its bureaucracy is not
only efficient, but also capable of mobilizing on a remarkably impressive scale;
however, it is also persistently intrusive and dictatorial. It was precisely
the statist nature of the Chinese government that allowed it to conduct
ambitious, large-scale family planning programs.
Family Planning in 20th Century China
Following the communist victory in the Chinese Civil
War, Mao began implementation of his own population policies. While
it is regularly claimed that Mao was an unwavering pronatalist[FC13] ,[48] this generalization is inaccurate as his stance towards family
planning can only be described as inconsistent and frequently
contradictory. In the early 1950s, considering population
growth a key driver of economic growth, birth control and contraceptives were
condemned and banned by the state, respectively.[49] In 1955, however, the need for some form of family planning policy
was realized after a census reported the population to be 530 million, much
higher than what was previously assumed.[50] Thus, birth control was encouraged.[51] Nevertheless, when the Great Leap Forward was launched in 1958,
efforts were halted, only to briefly resume in the 1960s, when the State
Council instated a Family Planning Commission, which initiated a supply of free
contraceptives for couples of childbearing age.[52]
In the latter parts of the decade, with the chaos of the Cultural Revolution
breaking out around the nation, such efforts were again terminated.[53] Mao made his last statement regarding population control in December
1974, noting in a report by the State Planning Commission, “Population must be
controlled (renkou fei kongzhi buxing).”[54] This, in time, would set in motion the construction of a new field
of Chinese demographic science – the science that would produce the one-child
policy.[55]
Before population control could begin, however, such a
notion was still difficult to justify politically; as per Maoist doctrine,
Malthusianism was equivalent to capitalism. It was argued that since capitalism
needed a “reserve army of the unemployed,” a labor force “which [could] be
employed at any time,” overpopulation had been engineered as a means of
oppressing the impoverished.[56] The dysfunctions Malthus
described were in fact the consequences of societal inequality that could be
solved with the socialist mode of production. Further, they claimed that
imperialist powers used overpopulation to justify expansionism, an especially
pertinent example being the case of Imperial Japan.
Thus,
before an adequate justification was produced, any study
of demographics was forbidden, with those who attempted to create independent
studies in the field suppressed and persecuted.[FC14] Beginning in 1957, Mao launched his Hundred Flowers
Movement, a seemingly benign, even welcomed campaign in which scholars and
intellectuals were encouraged to voice opinions that challenged state policy.[57] As Mao
famously proclaimed, “[let] a hundred flowers bloom (baihua qifang) and
a hundred schools of thought contend (baijia zhengming)[!]”[58] Quickly,
however, criticisms of the regime rose to a level deemed unacceptable, and
central authorities subsequently launched the “Anti-Rightist Campaign (fanyou
yundong),” superficially to remove rightist infiltrators of the CCP;[59] in practice,
it was implemented to silence political detractors.[60] One such
affected person was Ma Yinchu, an economist and president of Beijing University
(beida), who, in March 1957, published “New Population Theory,” a paper
that called for “strong measures” to prevent the rapid ballooning of China’s
population.[61] Despite his
usage of Marxian instruments in justifying his proposal, he was swiftly
denounced as being a Malthusian in 1958, when Mao began supporting a more
pro-natal approach towards family planning.[62] Thereafter, Ma
was fired from his position at beida, becoming a political “nonperson.”[63] Ma’s fall from
grace marked the beginning of a decade-long taboo surrounding population
science that was only destigmatized by Premier Zhou Enlai in 1970.
“Longer, Later, Fewer” & the One-child Policy
In
1973, with the introduction of the LLF (wan, xi, shao) slogan at China’s
first official national birth conference, various restrictions on marriage and
childbirth were implemented.[64]
In urban areas, bridegrooms were required to be above 28, and brides above 25,
to marry; in rural areas, it was 25 and 23 respectively.[65] Furthermore,
couples were required to delay each child by at least four years,[66] and
a limit of two children for urban couples and three for rural couples was
introduced.[67]
This number would eventually be reduced to two children, irrespective of urbanity.
It was also during this period that political justification for population
control was at last produced. In the preface to Engels’ Origin of the
Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), he describes a “twofold
character” to production. On the one hand, one must contend with the production
of the “means of existence,” and on the other, the (re)production of humans.[68] Thus, since societal
organization is determined by both types of production, only a “unified
socialist plan,” where both are regulated by the state, will be able to manage
an optimal balance between the two.[69]
By
1975, official statements regarding population began to circulate between the
Central Committee and provincial governments, with birth planning often given
primary focus on provincial agendas.[70] What marked a pivotal shift was the
central government’s move from focusing on the spacing of births to reducing
the overall number of births. This transition culminated in the 1978 Fifth
National People’s Congress, where family planning became an official state
matter and a “basic national policy;”[71] in fact, an article was inserted into the Chinese
constitution, declaring that “[t]he state advocates and encourages planned
reproduction.”[72] Alongside this, the national birth planning
group was expanded, along with adopting a new slogan that reflected a revamped,
more aggressive approach to controlling population.[73][FC15]
Towards the turn of the decade,
the one-child policy began to take shape tangibly. Susan
Greenhalgh traces this decisive “gestational” period (approximately between
December 1979 and September 1980) of the soon-to-be policy by focusing on three
phases of its formulation.[74]
First, a group of Chinese cyberneticists, experts in control theory, began
pushing for the application of scientific methods to population management,[75]
gerrymandering the boundaries of population science to insert their own
solutions to the problem.[76]
Beginning in January 1980, the cyberneticists formed strategic alliances with
high-ranking, influential politicians and scientists, investing their own
proposals with substantial political force.[77]
By April, the one-child policy emerged from the political arena as the
unchallenged victor; in September, it was officially unveiled to the public in
an open letter, signaling the beginning of a new era of Chinese family planning.[78][FC16] [FC17] [FC18]
IV. Radicality defined
Having briefly illustrated a synopsized history of
population control in China, this paper will now explore how the one-child
policy was distinctly “radical” as compared to earlier measures. To highlight
these differences, the LLF rule is compared with the one-child policy, with their
temporal adjacency minimizing extraneous differences across comparisons. Thus, three
distinguishing factors can be found between the two periods, demonstrating the
radicality of the one-child policy: its overbearing limit of “one child,”[79] its “top-down” enforcement
style, and its legitimized and extensive uses of coercive methodologies.
First, the one-child policy required reducing the fertility
rate to one child per family, though there were regional variations, such as in
rural regions or regions with ethnic minorities.[80] While during LLF, authorities
placed a limit of two children in urban areas,[81] the one-child policy saw
the number of families with two children reduced to 5.8% of the population.[82] In the same census, the
percentage of one child and one-and-a-half child families (families allowed
more than one child, especially if the first child was female or disabled) was
37.5% and 52.8% of the total population, respectively.[83] Despite the existence of
families with two or more children, such cases were the exception, not the
norm.
Second, the one-child policy employed a “top-down,”
statist method of policy enforcement. While health officials and “moderate
development-minded leaders” cooperated to construct LLF, ensuring that it
reflected “popular interest,”[84] the one-child policy consisted largely of
centrally devised and disseminated population quotas. These quotas were often
highly unrealistic, forcing local cadres to employ coercive measures to avoid
penalties.[85] Taking advantage of the Chinese state’s
immense power and acting in opposition to Mao’s “mass line” doctrine of enforcing
political agendas,[86] the one-child policy blatantly overruled the
people’s concerns. In fact, authorities regularly performed family planning
actions despite violent resistance in the countryside, with the state “quietly
accepting” the use of force as a means of policy enforcement.[87] [FC19] Furthermore, the political momentum built
up around the bloated family planning apparatus was a key factor in the
continuation of the one-child policy, making the termination of such an
institution difficult.[88] Undoubtedly, the
obstinate nature of a “top-down” administrative method and the convoluted
central birth-planning apparatus driving the policy contributed to its
invasiveness and duration.
Third, the one-child policy legitimized and even sanctioned discriminatory
and coercive practices. Although the LLF rule saw the initially implementation
of many violent enforcement mechanisms, these measures were only popularized during
the one-child policy.[89] It was the one-child
policy’s stricter criteria and overbearing governmental pressure that led to
the widespread acceptance and application of coercion.[90] For instance, besides
depriving out-of-plan children of household registration (hukou),[91] during the one-child
policy, even the subsidies provided to the family’s previous children were forcefully
“returned” to the state.[92] Furthermore, there were
also exceptionally hefty fines, up to around 30 to 50% of the median income in
some areas, and usually over 50 times the subsidies offered for having only one
child. We also find discrimination towards women and female children. Despite the recent invention of the no-scalp vasectomy, a far safer and
more convenient measure compared to female sterilization, vasectomy rates were
far below those of their female counterparts.[93] [FC20] Moreover, no action was undertaken to
address the perception that male children were more valuable than female
children; in 1980, five percent of female babies “disappeared” from official
records, presumably a victim of abandonment or infanticide, a phenomenon all
too common.[94]
In its most intense year, 1983, the one-child policy saw 14.4 million abortions,
20.7 million female sterilizations, and 17.8 million IUD insertions, the vast
majority of patients being involuntary ones.[95] As evidenced, the one-child policy not only
enforced strict limitations on family size, but also perpetuated harmful gender
biases and practices.
Finally, it should be noted that despite LLF’s comparatively lax policy
enforcement mechanisms and family planning obligations, it was far more effective
at reducing fertility while avoiding adverse socioeconomic consequences. During
LLF, China’s fertility rate saw a decrease of roughly 0.3 per year, while the
sex ratio during this period remained stable.[96] On
the other hand, the one-child policy from 1980 to 2016 saw China’s fertility decrease
by merely 0.025 per year,[97] while
the sex ratio rose to around 120 males per 100 females born, only dropping to relatively
mundane levels post-2010. Surprisingly, the one-child policy was less effective
and more destructive than its predecessor.
V. Radicality explained
To begin investigating the one-child policy, understanding
Deng Xiaoping, especially his political restructuring, is essential. After
Mao’s death, a brief power struggle unfolded between Hua Guofeng, the de facto
leader and supporter of Mao’s policies, and Deng Xiaoping. Eventually, Deng
successfully outmaneuvered Hua, becoming China’s paramount leader by 1980. In a
bid to reinforce party legitimacy, Deng employed several political tactics that
helped promote the new regime as being “pragmatic-not-dogmatic” and based on “facts-not-ideology.”[98] This approach is best
exemplified by two of Deng’s slogans: “crossing the river by feeling the stones
(mozhe shitou guohe),” and “seeking truths from facts (shishi qiushi).”
Such slogans underscored the difference between Mao, whose political actions were
“ideological” and “utopian,” and Deng, whose approach was methodical and
pragmatic.[99]
Indeed, the ideological difference between Dengist and Maoist went far beyond the
merely rhetorical, as many of Deng’s actual policies reflected a scientistic perspective
on governance.
Deng’s New China
One
particularly relevant example of Deng’s political stance was his “Four
Modernizations (sige xiandaihua),” introduced in 1978 with the goal of
strengthening China’s agriculture, industry, defense, and science and
technology (S&T). Deng wanted to create a xiaokang shehui, or
a “modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally
advanced, harmonious, and beautiful.”[100] Though the Four Modernizations were
unofficially announced by Zhou Enlai in 1963,[101]
the political turbulence caused by Mao’s various political campaigns prevented
it from being realized. Despite this, Zhou, one of the most popular leaders in
the CCP, supported the Four Modernizations throughout his life, imbuing the
proposal with significant political gravitas. Deng would be the one to finally
put the plan into action, advocating for the four modernizations as one of the
core tenants of his agenda to modernize China, especially focusing on S&T.[102]
Later, birth planning was
proposed as to negate the effects of China’s enormous population in their bid
to realize the four modernizations.
Another
example of Deng’s revisionist thinking is found in his theory of “socialism
with Chinese characteristics (zhongguo tese shehuizhuyi),” which saw the
partial adoption of free-market economics in China to promote economic growth. It
was argued that only by first adopting such measures, would the emergence of a
Marxist communist society become conceivable.[103] To
quantify these proposals for economic growth, Deng stated that his economic
reforms would allow China to achieve a per capita output of $1,000 by the turn
of the century – more than quadruple per capita output in 1980. Compared to
Mao’s vague, abstract expressions, Deng’s scientistic and utilitarian approach
towards realizing a socialist state imbued his regime with inherent authority
and legitimacy; scientism would come to infiltrate all aspects of governmental
decision-making, ultimately allowing for the creation of the one-child policy.
Scientism in Politics
Why was
the influence of scientism so prominent in Chinese politics? Two causes can be
identified: first, under Mao, the natural sciences were granted significant
political influence. Second, the natural sciences were able to sway top CCP
officials with complex, often incomprehensible, mathematical models and
procedures.
During
Mao’s time in power, he invested significantly in defense science, allocating substantial
amounts of developmental resources for their research. As such, defense science
enjoyed access to “foreign literature, … data, and … [electronic] computers;”[104] accordingly,
many top officials began to view their work as being more credible and
“scientific” than the work of social scientists, who were barred from enjoying
similar advantages. Even after Mao’s death, a preference for the natural
sciences remained. Whereas the natural scientists were no longer constrained by
party politics, oriented by “the reasoning of modern science and mathematics”
alone, social scientists were used as a tool by politicians to “empirically
illustrate” problems and “articulate” solutions in the debilitating framework
of Maoist-Leninist thought.[105] A
germane example of the CCP’s favorability towards the natural sciences was, to
borrow terminology from Susan Greenhalgh, the “Song group,”[106]
a group of cyberneticists led by Song Jian, a leading rocket scientist. Through
Mao’s goodwill, Song acquired extensive political connections and access to population
data unavailable to social scientists; they received endorsements from top
officials and scientists who brandished enormous political influence.[107] Among
these could be found Qian Xuesen and Xu Dixin, father of the Chinese space
program and head of the Population Association of China respectively.[108] As previously mentioned, scientism had existed in China since the
beginning of the 20th century; their early influence on the
nascent Communist Party of the 1920s and 30s almost certainly contributed to
this reverence of the natural sciences, which influenced the CCP during and
beyond Mao’s time. Song’s political dominance will play a crucial role in constituting the
one-child policy.
Similarly,
in their formulation of the population problem, Song relied heavily on complex
mathematics, which many could not understand. Officials accepted Song’s findings
entirely because they “used control theory [(cybernetics)],” or that “the
mathematics and equations were impressive.” One individual even rather
egotistically acknowledged that the calculations seemed credible as “he himself
could not do them.”[109] As
only Song had the means to interpret their own models, they received recognition
and credibility as the “guardian[s]” of their work.[110] Such blind acquiescence towards the natural sciences not only permitted Song to
have substantial sway over policy decisions, but also cemented the future
prevalence of scientism in policymaking. Song repeatedly underlined the
scientific rigor and objective nature of his work, in one case, even adding
arbitrary decimals to demonstrate the exactitude with which his calculations
were apparently conducted.[111] “[T]here
are still quite many intellectuals who,” as he commented in a paper, “starting
off with [biased] sentiment,
go so far as to challenge the irrefutable logic of [the] natural
sciences” [emphasis added].[112]
Such use of rhetoric and display of mathematical prowess would be key in establishing
ethos for claims made by the cyberneticists.
Concurrently,
while many touted the cyberneticists’ works as irrefutable, the work of social
scientists was perceived as being uninformed and unsophisticated. In lieu of
the cyberneticists’ computer-generated graphs and figures, social scientists
had only “crude,” hand drawn ones that were hardly comparable.[113]
Furthermore, social scientists generally pushed for demographic policies that
were far more moderate, making them seem “unoriginal,” “too ideological,” and not
scientific enough compared to the cyberneticists.[114]
Scientistic Methodology
We can now
articulate four key aspects of Song's approach to population science: first, they
reframed the population crisis as an environmental issue; second, they drew
heavily on methodological principles from rocket science; third, they often
relied on incomplete and unreliable data; and fourth, they overlooked the
potential social repercussions of their policy.
First, Song
re-conceptualized the population crisis as not merely a national concern, but a
global, environmental one. In essence, they argued that China’s
population growth was not only a threat to national security and survival,[115]
but that it was an existential and all-encompassing threat to the entirety of
“human survival.” Not only did they argue China could not realize its four
modernizations or achieve a xiaokang society if population growth was to
continue, but also
that China’s role in engendering this looming demographic and ecological crisis
would severely damage the nation’s international reputation.[116] In
a manner analogous to their Western counterparts, Song painted images of
environmental devastation, portraying unmitigated population growth as the
Earth's foremost killer. To demonstrate the imperativeness of the population
crisis, Song conspicuously borrows the clichéd Western metaphor of Earth as a
spaceship, how even the vast cosmos offers no recourse.[117] Thus,
they framed the one-child policy as the “only solution” to keep China’s
population below 1.2 billion, which they calculated to be the limit beyond
which Deng’s previously mentioned economic objectives would become unattainable,
and beyond which the environmental damage would be enormous and irreversible.[118]
Second,
Song advocated for the central government to draft a strong, unidirectional
policy that the various provincial administrations would further disseminate
down the hierarchy. Upon such a structure, each administration would develop and
implement a unique birth control plan modified with regional constraints in mind.[119] Thus,
regional authorities would remain adhered to the central formulation despite
regional variations in enforcement strength and punishment. Influenced by his
work in the defense industry, Song’s proposal was entirely “top down,” rejecting
the responsive nature of LLF, even quietly accepting the use of coercion “in
the interest of achieving greater goals.”[120]
The complex and mathematical nature of Song’s models necessitate that policies originate
from a central government to its citizens, resulting in a “programmatic”
approach to policy implementation and enforcement.[121] Evidently, the forceful and unresponsive nature of the one-child policy made it
highly coercive.
Third, Song
relied heavily on spotty statistics, resulting in inaccurate conclusions. Although
China had a robust system of census collection during the 50s and 60s, the
Great Leap Forward had caused a collapse in census infrastructure, preventing
accurate population data from being gathered.[122] As
such, no demographic data were collected in the 1970s.[123] One
member of Song described there as being “no
[good] input data (meiyou shuju),” and that though the data was “difficult
(kunnan),” they were “workable (kao de zhu).”[124] In
one case, they conducted calculations under the assumption that Chinese protein
intake matched that of the West, despite China’s agricultural sector being far
too underdeveloped to facilitate such consumption.[125] Despite
the lack of reliable data as the basis for drawing conclusions (much less
informing policy), Song nonetheless conducted ostensibly precise calculations
while being forced to make “countless heroic assumptions” regarding their data.[126] Perhaps
most alarmingly, numerous concerns regarding potential defects in the data were
all but dropped by the time conclusions were formulated. Song merely presented
their findings as infallible,[127]
while government authorities censored any complaints regarding the accuracy of the
data.[128] It
was this combination of erroneous calculations and political invulnerability that
eventually birthed the one-child policy.
Lastly,
Song ignored the social consequences of a one-child policy. In an article
published in the People's Daily, Song and his colleagues claimed that “we [China]
cannot run into these problems in this century, and in the first twenty years
of the twenty-first century they will not be serious.”[129] Not
only did they argue that social consequences were of no major concern, they
further claimed that were one to take such concerns into account, any attempt
at birth control would be impossible. As Song stated in a paper, “If social
customs and psychological conditions are considered, [the Total Fertility
Rate] can hardly go below a level acceptable to the public.”[130] Much
like his recommendation of a “top down” enforcement solution, Song’s ignorance of
social consequences can again be attributed to his work in the defense industry.
Under such circumstances, as one might imagine, social consequences were seldom
considered.[131]
Further, despite Song’s ability to mathematically calculate the population
trajectory, they did not have the analytical tools and empirical data to grasp the
gravity of resulting social consequences, allowing the cyberneticists to merely
write off such abstract concerns raised by social scientists as being mere
speculation.[132]
Moreover, due to the manner in which Song had presented the population crisis,
regarding it as an impending, global, and existential environmental threat, the
one-child policy was portrayed as the price that had to be paid in order to
save not only China, but the world, from “impoverishment and extinction.”[133] As
Song emphasized: “At least before the end of this century, we must stick to the
policy of one child per couple, so that the people of the 21st century
will be able to enjoy family happiness.”[134]
The West in China
In 1978,
Song travelled to Helsinki to participate in the Seventh Triennial World
Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control. During his
travels, he encountered Western cyberneticists, some of whom were experimenting
with applying control theory to demography.[135] Finding
this idea appealing,[136] Song
came to borrow many originally Western conceptualizations of the population crisis:
an emphasis on the environmental impacts of overpopulation, the aforementioned analogy
of Earth as a spaceship, the formulation of overpopulation as a transnational
issue, and many others. Additionally, they imitated Western tactics of
manipulating empirical data to underscore the scale of the crisis. For one such
case, they illustrated rapid population growth by showing population increases
over progressively shorter time intervals.[137] They
also defined an “optimal population” based on the environment's carrying
capacity, arguing that unregulated growth would exceed this limit.[138] However,
Song not only borrowed the Western construct of overpopulation; he combined fearmongering
language from Western works such as The Population Bomb[FC28] [FC29]
with the obdurate
belief in “scientism” present in the CCP to produce new rhetorical apparatuses.
Susan Greenhalgh identifies three main rhetorical tools Song
used: quantification, categorization, and comparison. First,
Song reformulated textual
reports into numerical reports, stripping them of their original context.
Through a process Greenhalgh terms “faerification,” empirical statements were
reborn as “facts” and categorical truths, truths independent of circumstance.[139]
This fell in line with Deng’s doctrine of “seek truth from facts,” allowing
their calculations to be easily politicized, and to be seen as having
originated from pure mathematical logic, untainted by political machinations. Second,
they created visual
representations of data, harnessing “ocular power” to present information in an
easily digestible manner. In doing so, they invented a “new demographic and
political reality” through their graphs, compacting their intricate computations
into a universally accessible form;[140] this,
as previously mentioned, also allowed them to manipulate the data in ways that
supported their conclusions. Third, they highlighted China’s apparent
deficiencies through comparisons with the West, portraying China as a backwater
nation that should have been able to compete with the West but was
hopelessly outmatched due to its unwieldy population. Using these three
devices, Song “revealed” overpopulation as the root cause of China’s ills.
It
should be noted that despite Song’s diligent borrowing from the West, there
remain aspects of Western methodology that were not adopted. [FC30] One
such difference was that when Western scientists argued for a reduction in
fertility, they typically imagined such a process to occur over an extended
period of at least several decades. For instance, while Dutch scientists
proposed that a 40% reduction in fertility transpire over the course of 40
years,[141]
Song proposed that Chinese fertility be reduced by 50% in merely five.[142] Unlike
the Song group, towards whom criticisms were either ignored, disregarded, or
outright forbidden due to their lack of political capital, Western literature regularly
received public criticism. For example, The Population Bomb was cast as
fearmongering and unscientific,[143] and
the LTG, methodologically lacking and scientifically inaccurate.[144]
All things considered, the most prominent and unanimous concern of various
scholars was that any conclusions reached through long-term demographic
projections are highly contingent on uncontrolled factors; that such deductions
are at best half-truths, if not outright misleading and fallacious statements.[145] As
evidence, while Western natural scientists had checks and balances all the
while controlling little practical political influence, Chinese natural
scientists practically dictated state policy.
Aside from influencing China in a purely intellectual sense,
Western international organizations also offered financial incentives in
support of Chinese birth control programs. According to the Chinese Embassy in
Norway, by 1999, the “UNFPA [United
Nations Fund for Population Activities] had provided US$177 million of
assistance and carried out 123 projects in China.”[146] These funds contributed
financially to the continuation of the one-child policy, representing an
international endorsement of Chinese family planning efforts.[147] In 1983, the UN
Secretary-General even awarded
Qian Xinzhong, the minister of family planning, with the United Nations
Population Award, apparently impressed by how the Chinese government had
“marshaled the resources necessary to implement population policies on a
massive scale.”[148] Private
foundations also contributed significantly to birth control efforts. For
example, the Rockefeller Foundation provided financial support for birth
control programs, supplied free condoms, and initiated efforts for China to
begin domestic production of birth control pills.[149] Even
the US government supported the policy, though only indirectly. From 1965 to
2004, $17.3 billion was invested into the UNFPA under a directive known as
NSSM-200, commonly known as the “Kissinger Report,”[150] through
which a substantial portion of the funds were funneled to China.[151]
The
motivations of these Western sponsors varied widely. While in the case of the
UNFPA, their support of the one-child policy seems to have been a by-product of
their effort to increase access to birth control worldwide, the Rockefeller
Foundation had the explicit agenda of solving overpopulation, with Rockefeller
himself describing population growth as “an outstanding problem.”[152] Even
more malicious was NSSM-200, which sought to continue the extraction of mineral
resources from third-world nations; in fact, the document itself suggests that
US aid should only be conducted through international non-governmental
organizations as to avoid charges of “economic or racial imperialism.”[153] As
illustrated here, Western involvement in the formulation and preservation of
the one-child policy went far beyond the merely intellectual, as both direct financial
assistance and indirect political legitimization played a part[FC31] .
VI. Conclusion
What price is worth paying for survival?
In 1980, China’s answer to this question was the one-child policy. On September 25th, an open letter was addressed
to the members of the Communist Party and the Youth League. Although the letter
itself was less than two thousand characters long, and had been formulated in a
matter of months, it would come to inform Chinese thinking for the next 40
years. Inevitably, the confluence of Mao’s disastrous campaigns, Western fears
regarding overpopulation, and Scientism’s entrenched nature in Chinese
intellectual culture produced the one-child policy. Like a vast dam attempting
to hold back a powerful river, China’s one-child policy was an attempt to
control the uncontrollable – the very flow of life itself. However, the policy was
by no means adopted out of any semblance of convenience; instead, it was framed
as China’s final recourse, “deemed a ‘solution when there was no
solution’ (meiyou banfa de banfa),” an ultimate measure implemented when
all other option had failed.[154]
Ultimately, the
one-child policy is best seen as the result of a tyrannical government
asserting its control over its citizens, exacerbated by a series of scientific
missteps and pervasive Western influence. The one-child policy illustrates the
power of “science” in shaping policymaking, even when unjustified, and underscores
the significant errors that unchecked government authority can produce.[155] Science,
blindly accepted, is akin to gospel in today’s world; globalization has
advanced tenfold since the inception of the policy; authoritarianism still
reigns in a myriad of regions throughout the world. The one-child policy will be
remembered as one of the most radical social experiments in recent history, a
uniquely modern intersection of science and politics. It is a policy that
formed a pillar of China’s national identity for more than three decades,
shaping the trajectory of its society, economy, and culture. As historians look
back upon this era, they perceive a nation wrestling with immense challenges –
both those of its history and those it unknowingly created for its future. Only
time will tell if China chooses to rewrite its story or remain bound by the
past. The one-child policy may have been uniquely Chinese, but the lesson
learned is universally applicable; we cannot reduce demographics to mere
mathematics, as the cost of ignoring the human element is far too high.
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Michael
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111–113, 118–120.
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