Writing a Chronicle History of China’s One-Child Policy: Three Books by Susan Greenhalgh

Abstract

Writing a Chronicle History of China’s One-Child Policy:Three Books by Susan Greenhalgh Xiying Wang (bio) Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler. Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 412 pp. Hardcover $27.95, isbn 978-0-8047-4880-3. Susan Greenhalgh. Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. xxii, 404 pp. $34.95, isbn 978-0-520-25339-1. Susan Greenhalgh. Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 156 pp. Hardcover $32.50, isbn 978-0-674-05571-1. An Unexpected Experience In March 2013, I was attending the fifty-seventh Commission on the Status of Women, which was organized by the UN in New York and attended by over four thousand participants from around the world. Among thousands of panels, we Chinese delegates (including five to eight scholars, feminist activists, and women’s federation cadres) also organized a one-and-a-half-hour panel titled “Feminist Approaches to Address Gender-Based Violence in China,” mainly discussing the practices and strategies that Chinese feminists adopted to tackle this social problem after the 1995 Beijing conference, and the accomplishments achieved so far. Around thirty participants attended the panel, and all five presentations went well. However, the Q&A session turned into something beyond our imagination. Nobody asked any questions related to the issue of domestic violence. Instead, all the questions were addressed to the one-child policy—mainly challenging us, as Chinese feminists, “how can you tolerate such a coercive policy violating women’s bodies and rights?” A large poster sat on the conference room table with the bold title “Help Chinese Government to Stop Coercive One-Child Policy” with bloody pictures of girl killing and dead bodies as background. Under such [End Page 237] conditions, any explanation of the policy that we might have offered or endeavors to answer the questions would have been treated as defending the “coercive communist PRC regime,” and its absolute otherness from the Western world. One of our scholars and one questioner almost ended up arguing. This incident forced me to reflect on how to develop a feminist movement in the global world. Chinese feminists have to face historical and social issues like the one-child policy, the Cultural Revolution, and the 1989 students’ democracy movement, which have affected Chinese society deeply with trauma and violence. Confronting these inerasable dimensions of memory in China, rather than only focusing on more politically acceptable topics such as domestic violence, seems to some to be escapist. Moreover, how can Chinese feminists develop a unique standpoint with a feminist vision, viewpoint, and identity, and, at the same time, maintain a critical stance toward both China party-state discourse and Western ideology? To accomplish this end, the one-child policy is one of the biggest challenges that we face. Encountering Greenhalgh’s Books Fortunately, Greenhalgh’s three books are accessible and provide Chinese feminists (and others) with better knowledge and skills to tackle the issue of the one-child policy. She refutes the coercive story1 as the only way of understanding China’s population politics in the West by providing a more comprehensive and complicated chronicle history of governing China’s population since the establishment of the PRC. Greenhalgh’s twenty-five years of scholarship have mainly focused on answering one major question: “how China governs its population and to what effect” (2008, p. 41). This is “one of the most difficult” topics in the population field and a “hypersensitive” issue in the study of contemporary China (2010, p. 1). With ten years of experience in the leading international NGO Population Council as an anthropologist and China specialist (2008, p. 42), Greenhalgh was able to establish a reputation as a “friend of China” and “a constructive critic” within the high-profile inside circle of Chinese population experts and officials. She conducted 140 interviews with China’s population specialists and officials, and accessed extensive documents, articles, and books on the history of Chinese population science and policy, including many labeled as neibu (for internal use only) or even jimi (extremely secret). Her writing...