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Birth Planning in the People's Republic, 1949-2005
Cornell University Press
June 2008
On Sale: June 30, 2006
320 pages
ISBN: 0801444055
EAN: 9780801444050
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In the late 1970s, just as China was embarking on a
sweeping program of post-Mao reforms, it also launched a
one-child campaign. This campaign, which cut against the
grain of rural reforms and childbearing preferences, was
the culmination of a decade-long effort to subject
reproduction to state planning. Tyrene White here analyzes
this great social engineering experiment, drawing on more
than twenty years of research, including fieldwork and
interviews with a wide range of family-planning officials
and rural cadres. White explores the origins of
China’s "birth-planning" approach to population control,
the implementation of the campaign in rural China,
strategies of resistance employed by villagers, and policy
consequences (among them infanticide, infant abandonment,
and sex-ratio imbalances). She also provides the first
extensive political analysis of China’s massive 1983
sterilization drive.
The birth-planning project was the last and longest of the
great mobilization campaigns, surviving long after the Deng
regime had officially abandoned mass campaigns as
instruments of political control. Arguing that the campaign
had become an indispensable institution of rural
governance, White shows how the one-child campaign mimicked
the organizational style and rhythms both of political
campaigns and economic production campaigns. Against the
backdrop of unfolding rural reforms, only the campaign
method could override obstacles to rural enforcement. As
reform gradually eroded and transformed patterns of power
and authority, however, even campaigns grew increasingly
ineffective, paving the way for long-overdue reform of the
birth-planning program.
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