ABSTRACT
The post-Mao era in China has seen the rise of an ever-more encompassing field of vital politics in which human biological life-its production, cultivation, and security-is at stake. Central to the rise of this domain of biopolitics-a politics concerning the administration and optimization of life, especially at the collective level-has been the state’s project on population. Far from mere population control, that project has aimed to quantitatively trim and qualitatively upgrade the Chinese populace in an effort to create a globally savvy, competitive labor force that would both facilitate and symbolize China’s emergence as a global power. Launched in its contemporary form in 1979-1980, the population project has helped biologize Chinese politics, giving rise to new bio-logics, -bureaucracies, and -legalities, which in turn have created new kinds of subjects and ethics and new struggles over the value of human life. These developments have touched the lives of virtually every Chinese and reshaped the society, party, state, and nation. Western accounts of China’s population program have limited our understanding of the nature and significance of population politics in the PRC. Since the early 1980s, when American journalists began reporting news of a fearsome new campaign restricting all couples to one child, American understanding of China’s birth control program has been dominated by a narrative of state coercion. Rooted in Western liberalism and a visceral anti-communism, the coercion narrative tells a story of a vicious communist state that uses its overwhelming power to coerce society to limit fertility against its will. The Western media have recorded tales of fierce resistance and violent struggle, with serious bodily consequences for women and infant girls (e.g., Weisskopf 1985; WuDunn 1991). Both the scholarly literature and politically influential accounts of China watchers in the US government have portrayed rural population politics, and Chinese population politics more generally, as an unending struggle between a coercive state and a resistant society that continues to this day (e.g., Aird 1990; Zhou 1996; Scharping 2003; White 2006). Although this standard story of an oppressive state provoking popular resistance, and, in turn, further state crackdowns, captures important dimensions of the politics of population in some places and times (especially the rural areas during the 1980s), it is a very partial picture. Reflecting its roots in liberal political thought, in this account power is concentrated in the state, it is fundamentally negative or repressive, and the
logics and practices of communist coercion are virtually the only things that matter. As long as the Chinese Communist Party remains in charge, the politics of population won’t and can’t change in any important way. The coercion story did not fit what I was seeing in China in the 1980s. My first encounter with the one-child policy occurred quite by chance when, in 1984, on a visit to Fujian’s Zhangzhou City, I happened upon a colorful troupe of Chinese children, dancing in the street singing, “One child is the very, very best!” (yige haizi zui zui hao!). My first sustained engagement with the state’s population project was as an ethnographer of family life in rural Shaanxi in the mid to late 1980s. In the villages of Shijiazhuang, Lijiabu, and Tianjiacun, the story of state coercion and peasant opposition was repeatedly confirmed by village birth cadres and reproductive-age women, who relayed grim histories of state crackdowns and fierce resistance. Yet the politics of population in the villages was more complicated than that. Young parents were preoccupied not only with having the right number and gender of children-one son and one daughter-but also with giving their youngsters every advantage they could afford, from good food and medical care to piano, martial arts, and other lessons. The policy had created new imaginings of the healthy, well-educated generation of China’s future. What most struck me was the ubiquity of the population issue. Looking around, I saw the one-child policy everywhere-on the blackboard outside the township government, in character posters painted on walls, in pictures hung in people’s homes, even in the iconography used in peasant weddings. Chatting with individual women, I discovered how the population project had come to inhabit and transform people, creating new kinds of bodies and lives in which family and work would be done differently now. As a researcher for the Population Council, a prominent, not-for-profit international scientific research organization based in New York City, between 1984 and 1994 I returned to China again and again to study the dynamics of population and population policy in that newly rising nation. The Council position opened doors rarely open to foreign academics. As a Council researcher, I worked closely with Chinese population specialists. I had opportunities to meet and talk to people at central, provincial, and local levels of government engaged in the management of population. In working with population specialists and officials, I was able to ethnographically observe the Chinese party-state as it debated, formulated, and carried out the one-child policy. In this way, my ethnographic terrain expanded beyond the village to embrace the population “sector” of the Chinese party-state. Although population politics was not a conventional topic of anthropological research, because the stakes in China’s population project were so high, I developed a keen interest in creating a distinctively anthropological approach to “population” as a field of power and politics. After moving to the University of California in 1994, I continued to pursue these issues, trying to make intellectual, political, and ethical sense of what I had seen in China. The most compelling account of the historical rise of population was provided by Michel Foucault, who alone among major social theorists recognized the centrality of population politics to the making of the modern world. Foucault’s work on the disciplines of the individual body had attracted considerable anthropological interest, but his
writings on the regulations of the population as a whole had been largely ignored. That was the work that caught my attention. Though created for the West, suitably adapted, this account proved highly illuminating of the Chinese case as well, bringing out features of the politics of population in that country that had not been brought to light. In anthropology a handful of others had begun to look at Chinese population affairs through Foucauldian lenses, but their emphases were different. They focused on the discourses and, to a lesser extent, the practices of population circulating within society, especially in the cities (Anagnost 1988, 2004; Rofel 1999; also Sigley 1996 in politics and Dikotter 1995, 1998 in history). Although I had worked on population discourse, practice, and politics in the villages, my central concern was to track the production of population as an object of science and governance within the regime, where it had been born, and then to trace its broad, mostly unplanned effects on China’s society and politics. Foucault’s provocative theses on biopolitics and governmentality provide fresh ways to understand the rise of population as an object of Chinese governance and the significance of that development for China and its people. In contrast to the liberal perspective, the governmentality analytic focuses on power beyond the state. It emphasizes the historical shift in regimes of power from statecentered “sovereignty” to more multi-centered “biopolitical governance,” each with distinctive politics of life and death. Foucault’s writings view modern power not only as negative but also as positive and productive, circulating widely in and through the state, the disciplinary institutions of modern society, and society itself. These frameworks direct our attention to features of China’s governance of its people that have largely escaped attention. First, they call attention to the logic behind modern power, suggesting that the rationales of science and the market might be as important to population governance as those of the communist state. Second, they point to shifts in the locus of power over life, proposing that, with the expansion of capitalism, power to regulate the production and cultivation of human life tends to devolve from the state to professional disciplines (in such fields as health and education) to the market to individuals themselves. Third, they emphasize the importance of subjectivity, suggesting that it is here, in the creation of individual subjects, that we can see how the large-scale organization of power connects up to individual bodies, selves, and lives. By studying shifts in the mode of subject-formation we can see what shifts in larger formations of power mean for individuals, families, and communities. In Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (2005) political scientist Edwin A. Winckler and I draw on unusual access to the makers, implementers, and evaluators of China’s population policy to trace the rise of Chinese biopolitics and shifts in governance from the vantage point of both state (Winckler’s contribution) and society (mine). Drawing on our own fieldwork and documentary research conducted over some 20 years, as well as a broad review of published studies and press reports, we explore three aspects of the “governmentalization” of Chinese life: the historical emergence of an institutionalized politics of life (when and how the production and cultivation of life come to be major foci of organized power and social control); shifts in the power
to regulate and discipline life; and the (mostly unexpected) social and political effects of the governmentalization of life. Arguing that China presents the world’s most striking contemporary case of rapid governmentalization of human life, we document both the rise of a biopolitical regime in the 1980s and the shift from what we call Leninist biopolitics in the 1980s to an increasingly neoliberal biopolitics in the early 2000s. The topic of population governance is far too big to cover in one short article. In this chapter I draw on several sources-my own research, material from Governing China’s Population, and the research of other anthropologists-to sketch in broad outline the shift from sovereignty to biopolitical governance that has raggedly accompanied China’s post-1978 entry into global markets. Although all the arguments I develop derive from ethnographic research, because of limits on space I can provide only a few ethnographic details that, I hope, might serve to hint at the fieldwork that supports my conclusions. The first section clarifies key terms. The second details the logic behind the birth of Chinese biopolitics, emphasizing the centrality of science-both the scientization of politics and the biologization of society-to the state’s new project to govern human life. The third and fourth sections discuss the twin projects of quantity restriction and quality enhancement, showing how the shift from quantity in the 1980s to quality in the 1990s and 2000s entailed larger transformations in regime of power and mode of subjectification. The final part places China’s biopolitical project in comparative perspective, arguing that China presents a distinctive configuration of modern power. Compared to the better known cases of Western Europe, in China power is more state-centered, the macro and micro levels of population governance are more densely connected, and racism is supplemented by gender as the major means of differentiating “good” from “bad” biologies.
