Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics

Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics, by Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. xvi + 394 pp. US$65.00 (hardcover), US$24.95 (paperback). China has experienced one of the world's most rapid fertility declines: between 1975 and 2000 the country's total fertility rate fell from around 3 to 1.6, well below replacement level (2.1). Covering events from the 1950s to the present, Governing China's Population offers a fresh, engaging and comprehensive analysis of the politics surrounding this dramatic transition. Much international discussion has focused on the coercive dimensions of the Party-state's birthplanning program and the abuses suffered by infant girls as their parents have struggled to obtain one son within aggressively enforced birth limitations. Yet while coercion has been a prominent feature of the program, Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler balance the picture by considering the efficacy of the program's "softer" developmental measures such as education campaigns, improvements in infant and maternal health care and the distribution of contraceptives. Characteristic of their thought-provoking insights, the authors posit that a similar decline in fertility rates may well have been achieved if the billions spent on coercion had been directed towards other renowned "soft" depressants of fertility, especially the education of women and children in rural areas. A further set of soft incentives for smaller family size has arisen as an effect of rapid economic growth, to which fertility decline has contributed. On account of investment in safe childbirth and in contraceptives, parents are able to have fewer children to achieve the goal of having surviving offspring. This in turn generates an economic bonus because the proportion of dependent children relative to the productive population declines and economic growth follows. Meanwhile the socio-economic environment resulting from growth generates additional incentives for lower fertility. For instance, a growing economy both increases the financial costs of parenthood and the earning opportunity costs of motherhood. Yet the virtuous circle of economic growth and fertility decline is only a one-off opportunity, lasting a decade or two, because then the working population grows old and becomes dependent at the other end of the age scale. Accordingly, rapid fertility decline creates a social security crisis, and current trends suggest that China may be the world's first nation to grow old before it has grown rich. While perilous population dilemmas-coercive contraceptive procedures, neglect of baby girls, and ageing-dominate Western imaginations of the PRC, much less is known about the politics that underpin China's ambitious social engineering program and the substantial shifts that have occurred in its population policies. By charting these shifts in policy as well as the politics shaping them, the authors fill a major gap in the literature and provide a valuable corrective to continuing mainstream Western perceptions of an uncompromising policy implemented by a monolithic and unethical state. This aspect of the book's contribution is important because, as the authors demonstrate, Western perceptions of China's population policy have serious consequences. They have, for instance, informed the Bush administration's decision to withdraw funding from the United Nations Family Planning Association. Grounded in Foucauldian analysis, the book's central arguments-that the politics of China's birth planning have an ethical basis and that population politics have propelled cutting-edge governance reforms which have ultimately strengthened the regime-are both challenging and compelling. The authors demonstrate that, particularly in the post-Mao era, the wellbeing of the population became the primary means and ends of government. They suggest that the antinatalist program was ethical in a life-cultivation sense because preventing some births enhanced the wellbeing of those born. …