ABSTRACT
Just over two hundred years ago, in 1798, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus published the first edition of his classic work, An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1 In it he argued that population growth had a constant tendency to outstrip food supplies, and he counseled policy changes in Britain that would discourage excessive childbearing, especially among the poor. Two centuries later, and fifty years into the reign of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), one might reasonably ask whether Malthus should rank just below Mao Zedong and Karl Marx on the list of those whose ideas had the greatest impact on China in the twentieth century. For it was China's fate in the twentieth century to be racked by Malthusian questions. How to feed, clothe, house, and employ the people; how to provide them with education, health care, and social security; how to alleviate poverty and backwardness; how to control the movement of the people and the rate of urbanization—these core questions were a constant part of the landscape for China's leaders. How the Chinese Communist regime responded to these questions left an indelible mark on Chinese society, giving it a shape that must now be managed by the leaders of the twenty-first century.
