Approaches to Persuasion: Broadcasts from India and China

Abstract

Several years ago, Robert Lapham and W. Parker Mauldin listed among 15 programmatic criteria crucial to the success of family planning programs the following two questions: Does the leader of the country speak publicly and favorably about family planning once or twice a year? and Do the mass media frequently provide family planning information? No other country would qualify for so resounding a yes on these questions as India and China. In both countries, top leadership has articulated ambitious population targets: Chairman Hua Kuo-feng's much-publicized objective of reducing China's population growth rate to 1 percent by 1980 is paralleled by Prime Minister Morarji Desai's objective of a birth rate in India of 30 per thousand by 1983. In China in recent years birth planning has enjoyed a virtually unprecedented prominence in the media and at every level of development planning. In India, after the setback the family planning program received with the electoral defeat of the Indira Gandhi government, there are increasing signs of its return as a major issue in the public arena. The two selections printed below-one a message delivered by Prime Minister Desai on 30 December 1978 over All-India Radio and Television on the occasion of the inauguration of family planning month, and the second an editorial broadcast on 3 December 1978 on Kwangtung Canton Provincial Radio Service-represent broadly similar approaches to a similar concern, namely a loss of momentum in the family planning program. Both set store by the power of exhortation to influence behavior; both seek to promote the practice of family planning; both refer to the two-child family as a goal; both follow the timehonored practice of designating a time period for an intensive drive: in India,