Planned births, unplanned persons: "Population" in the making of Chinese modernity

In this article I suggest that "population" operates as a capacious domain of modern power, with its own imaginaries, discourses, bureaucratic apparatuses, and social effects. Taking China, home to the world's largest population, as my ethnographic case, I examine the role of "birth planning," China's distinctive Marxist-Leninist-Maoist approach to population control, in the construction of "Chinese socialist modernity." I trace the historical, political, and bureaucratic process by which the state's planned birth project, designed to create a modern, planned population, produced not only a large group of planned persons but also a huge outcast group of unplanned, "black" persons who, as legal nonpersons, exist on the margins of society, lacking citizenship rights and state benefits. With its gargantuan population and fearsome birth planning program, China offers striking evidence of the social power of governmental projects of population control—to create new classifications of social life, new types of personhood, and new forms of social and political exclusion, [population, modernity, personhood, China]

[1]  S. Greenhalgh.  Fresh Winds in Beijing: Chinese Feminists Speak Out on the One-Child Policy and Women's Lives , 2001, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

[2]  N. Chatterjee,et al.  Planning an Indian Modernity: The Gendered Politics of Fertility Control , 2001, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

[3]  Li Zhang.  Migration and Privatization of Space and Power in Late Socialist China , 2001 .

[4]  K. Chan,et al.  The Hukou System and Rural-Urban Migration in China: Processes and Changes , 1999, The China Quarterly.

[5]  Z. Weiguo.  Implementation of State Family Planning Programmes in a Northern Chinese Village , 1999, The China Quarterly.

[6]  K. Johnson,et al.  Infant abandonment and adoption in China. , 1998 .

[7]  S. Greenhalgh,et al.  Engendering Reproductive Policy and Practice in Peasant China: For a Feminist Demography of Reproduction , 1995, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

[8]  M. Palmer.  The Re-emergence of Family Law in Post-Mao China: Marriage, Divorce and Reproduction , 1995, The China Quarterly.

[9]  Mark Selden,et al.  The Origins and Social Consequences of China's Hukou System , 1994, The China Quarterly.

[10]  K. Johnson.  Chinese Orphanages: Saving China's Abandoned Girls , 1993, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs.

[11]  Yi Zeng,et al.  Causes and implications of the recent increase in the reported sex ratio at birth in China. , 1993 .

[12]  D. Yaukey,et al.  The Population of Modern China , 1993 .

[13]  S. Pigg.  Inventing Social Categories Through Place: Social Representations and Development in Nepal , 1992, Comparative Studies in Society and History.

[14]  Tyrene White.  Birth Planning Between Plan And Market: The Impact Of Reform On China's One-Child Policy , 1991 .

[15]  Mayfair M Yang.  The Gift Economy and State Power in China , 1989, Comparative Studies in Society and History.

[16]  J. Wasserstrom.  Resistance to the One-Child Family , 1984 .

[17]  B. Cohn.  The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia in Culture and History of India. , 1984 .

[18]  J. Aird.  Population studies and population policy in China. , 1982 .

[19]  A. Kols,et al.  Population and birth planning in the People's Republic of China. , 1982, Population reports. Series J, Family planning programs.

[20]  J. Krantz,et al.  The birth of the clinic. An archaeology of medical perception , 1975, Medical History.