International opposition to China’s one-child policy intensified under the leadership of American conservatives. However, it would be a contradiction to analyze the most famous of Chinese reforms as a maneuver of public coercion: when the Chinese leaders stopped exploiting the country’s fertility rate, the population followed suit.
Greenhalgh presents his book as an ethnography of the Chinese state, and more specifically of its population management program. Thanks to unprecedented anthropological work, the author analyzes this complex political project in light of the government’s objectives, as well as the norms and beliefs in force on the true role of governance and the means of implementing it. The analysis of the program in question also allows the author to shed light on important mechanisms of the Chinese state machine.
Greenhalgh’s book is based on a synthesis of two recent works to which she contributed: Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (2005) and Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (2008). The first offers an overview of population management by the communist government from 1949 to 2004. The second uses the one-child policy as a case study on the same process.
In Cultivating Global CitizensGreenhalgh therefore brings together the content of these two works to retrace the evolution of population management policy, which went through several conceptual phases included in a global project of modernization of China. It shows how this policy went from a situation of population governance, where the latter saw themselves reduced to an abstract statistical trend that had to be balanced by any means, to a situation of human governance, where we understand the population in terms of families, husbands, wives, children, elders, migrants, etc., that is to say in terms of specific identities each having desires and needs that the State strives to influence before satisfying them, so as to obtain the expected result.
The work has three chapters. Chapter 1 traces the institutionalization of population management issues in the Chinese political context. It deals with the framing of subjects, the definition of objectives then their management by the actors of the political system, the way in which the population management program is integrated into a more general reform project, as well as the cultural and technical logics which underlie this integration. In Chapter 2, Greenhalgh analyzes the relationship between this state program of population and society management, and briefly answers a series of questions. It determines the influence of this policy on the popular representation of the concepts of modernization and citizenship, on the way in which the population envisages its role and its duties, as well as the possibilities offered to it. She questions the effects of the program on the political freedom of the population, particularly from the moment it began to bear fruit on the economic and social level, as well as the effects that the decision had on the social level. to make population management the top priority of the country’s reform policy. In Chapter 3, Greenhalgh assesses the broader implications of the implementation of the program and its results with regard to the political legitimacy of the Communist Party, as well as the range of social issues that were raised in this context.
The perception of the one-child policy abroad
The strength of this work undoubtedly lies in its way of telling the history of the program. Attention to the ethnographic details of its formation and establishment allows the reader to understand its political implications in a much more concrete way than other works on the issue. For example, we can cite the way in which Greenhalgh traces the evolution of the perception of the one-child policy abroad. While the State very rarely used force to obtain the consent of Chinese society, it is nevertheless this strategy that we retain in the grand narrative that is made of child policy. unique abroad. According to Greenhalgh, it is American conservatives who owe this interpretation of the facts, because it served as a controversy against which to mobilize their anti-abortion voters in the mid-1980s. These masters of political framing had obviously failed to mention that in 1983, the United Nations Population Fund awarded the inaugural United Nations Population Prize to the architect of population issues in China, for the country’s contraceptive policy. Greenhalgh therefore explores the untold story of Chinese legislators, who were taken by surprise by the international community’s radical turnaround in the face of their political choice.
The three stages of the population management program
Greenhalgh also summarizes the complex history of the program in a clear and accessible way. She identifies three stages, each of which she associates with a conceptual shift, while punctuating her remarks with relevant asides. In the 1980s, it shows how the Party ends up confronting forecasts about the country’s demographic development. The stage she calls “ crisis suffocation » (crisis-crackdown) shows that it was because of the social engineering perspective adopted by the Party that legislators came to consider the population as an abstract data obtained through the application of a specific social model. In the 1990s, as everything suggested that the quantitative crux of the problem had been brought down to an acceptable level, the national reform policy gradually focused on the quality of a population posted on the front line in the battle for economic growth. based on export. Greenhalgh shows how the population management program immediately followed suit with its emphasis on the development of human capital.
To the extent that at the beginning of the 2000s, under the Hu-Wen administration, the country seemed on the way to achieving its objectives both quantitatively and qualitatively, the third stage of the program sought to mitigate its social and demographics. It was therefore a matter of identifying, then dealing with, the problems raised by the presence of a large population of migrants, by significant environmental degradation accompanied by population displacements, by an aging population and by a fertility crisis. There was also emphasis on the consequences that the one-child policy had had on welfare, and on criminal activity linked to the loss or theft of an only child. It was then that a new political discourse emerged on the issue, focusing on population security and reproductive security. Taken together, these three phases make it possible to identify a complete turnaround in the Party’s strategy, which ceased to conceptualize population management as an instrument used for economic purposes, and on the contrary envisage economic development as a stone brought to the well-being of the population and their personal development.
The results of the population management program also lead the author to relevant reflection on the current legitimacy of the Party. Greenhalgh’s data in fact contradicts the idea that the legitimacy of the Party-State is in decline, since its power extends even to the domestic sphere, even into the couple’s relationships of the Chinese, even into the uterus of Chinese women. country. The success of this program, attested by a stabilization of the birth rate and an increase in GDP per capita and social benefits, thus confirms the position of the Party in the eyes of the majority. For the supporters of the regime, the success of a political program as vast as necessary depended imperatively on the Party, which alone had the resources and the power necessary to put it in place.
Leninist neoliberalism and the management of subjectivity
The work stands out in particular by inviting its readers to consider the management of subjectivity as one of the essential components of the Chinese state’s strategy. Greenhalgh shows that the international representation of the one-child policy, which focuses on coercive measures employed by the Party, overlooks strategic tools that are much more relevant in the case of China. She draws attention to the fact that in the majority of cases, the state has actually succeeded in gaining acceptance for a policy that closely affects individual personal choices without resorting to violence or physical coercion.
For Greenhalgh, this management of subjectivity is an example of what she calls Leninist neoliberalism : the State has thus gradually abandoned any micro-management of population issues, to on the contrary create a broader framework within which it is the Chinese themselves who decide the course of action to follow. The one-child policy is perhaps the most striking example of this type of policy framing. Greenhalgh shows how the state is encouraging people to rethink the definition of a good mother, a good only child and a healthy family, while emphasizing that this is because it is leading people to make this choice voluntarily for the State to achieve its ends.
We can, however, wonder whether the Party will be able to continue to manage the subjectivity of the Chinese in this way in the face of a new generation of Chinese adults composed of only children who are more individualistic and more independent-minded than their parents. Likewise, one might expect that ever-increasing social inequalities would also undermine such a political strategy. Indeed, wealth becomes synonymous with freedom, since it makes it easy to pay fines in the event of non-compliance with the law, and to establish privileged relationships which encourage the Party to turn a blind eye to infractions. To the extent that Greenhalgh clearly presents the management of subjectivity as an essential component of the Party’s strategy, one would have expected a more in-depth analysis of the consequences that current demographic changes have on its effectiveness. But as it is a short work, just over 100 pages excluding the bibliography, it is not surprising that certain questions are not addressed in depth.