The Biopolitics of Population Control

Just One Child

For many years, Greenhalgh’s core project was to understand the Chinese state’s efforts to transform China’s “backward masses” into the modern workers and citizens needed to make China a prosperous, globally prominent nation, as well as their effects on China’s society, culture, and politics. Her focus was the notorious one-child policy, which urged all couples, with some exceptions, to produce but one, well-bred child. Her ethnographic fieldwork of 20-plus years took her all over the country, from the villages of Shaanxi, where she spent seven months talking to farm families, to family planning model sites in Anhui, to the offices of top scientific advisors to the regime in Beijing. The story of the one-child policy turned out to be a story of the making of post-Mao China.

Three books published between 2000 and 2010 ask different questions about the policy and its role in governing and cultivating China’s society.

In 2015, with fertility falling to historic lows, China’s leaders finally abandoned the one-child rule, replacing it with a two-child (2016) and then three-child (2021) policy. Will the new policies persuade educated, ambitious young women and men to have more kids? It seems doubtful, but the government’s promotion of Confucian familism, and its expectation that women will (once again) save the nation by putting their own ambitions behind those of their country, will have deep social and cultural effects. Greenhalgh’s analysis suggests that the politics the new policies are now unleashing could remake China in ways we can scarcely imagine today.

Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford, 2005, co-authored with political scientist Edwin A. Winckler) traces how, since around 1980, China’s population was brought under the control of the party-state and other social agents (“governmentalized”), and charts the corresponding rise of a vast new field of biopolitics involving power over the production and cultivation of life itself.

The book documents how the state’s concern to reduce the quantity of China’s people (via the one-child policy) intersected with concerns to enhance their bodily and mental quality (by quasi-eugenic means) to stimulate the development of a gigantic apparatus of population surveillance, management, and control unparalleled in the world. It also traces a profound shift in governance from state to market or, in our terms, from Leninist biopolitics, based on direct coercive controls, to an increasingly neoliberal biopolitics that uses indirect state regulation and devolves governing functions to local society.

This study shows how the process of governmentalizing China’s population not only restratified society, inducing social suffering on a staggering scale. It also created new kinds of Chinese persons (“the good mother,” “the quality single child”), strengthened the party-state, and reestablished China’s global position in complex and contradictory ways.

In 2008, Greenhalgh was invited to deliver the annual Reischauer Lectures at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Published under the title Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China (Harvard, 2010), the lectures trace the connections between the state’s massive project to govern its population and cultivate its society, and the nation’s rise to global power.

Centering the decade 2000-10, the book argues that population governance has evolved into a broad project of social governance, which has been a major site for adoption of new, more indirect, human-centered techniques of governance. Like the neoliberal methods of good governance used elsewhere, such techniques work in part by promoting more entrepreneurial, self-directed private selves. By helping transform China’s rural masses into modern workers and citizens, by working to strengthen, techno-scientize, and legitimize the party-state, the governance of the population has been vitally important to the rise of global China.