ABSTRACT
The scale of the problems mentioned above, the coyness of demographic data and the lack of publicity for many aspects of Chinese birth planning have all combined to produce some noticeable gaps in scholarly literature. Earlier studies on Chinese population problems after 1949 did not enjoy access to the wide array of sources existing today. Written in an environment hostile to balanced academic work but eager for impassioned ideological debate, they were all too often limited to theoretical discussion or had to pursue an art that has been aptly described as a blend of social science and archaeology. Similar to other economic and social policy arenas, the few available population figures had to be stretched to the utmost in order to derive projections for the many gaps in the record. Information on the political process in birth planning remained patchy, too. With the exception of lengthy Marxist critiques of Malthusianism, not one major book on demographic issues was published in China. Among the better Western works from that period are Chandrasekhar (1959), Aird (1961, 1968), Orleans (1972, 1979) and Tien (1973, 1980). Focusing on the first Chinese birth-control efforts from 1954 to 1978, they had to ply the difficult trade of collecting the refuse from heated internal debates smothered in terse Party pronouncements. The gap between the state of knowledge then and our information now may be measured by comparing these works with White (1994), a first reworking of Chinese population policy in the 1950s.
