Comments on: One-Child Policy as History

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 18:51:22 +0000

I largely agree, though I think we have to distinguish between the value of personal experience and the extent to which we can draw conclusions from them. Also the extent to which we can draw conclusions about intent from effect, and the tendency to assume that large-scale developments are foreseeable.

By: JOHN PATTERSON

JOHN PATTERSON — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 10:47:16 +0000

Some proofing was in order wasn’t it? Sorry.

The end of sentence 1 should read: “synergy between politics, economics, education, custom, etc., in regard to this policy.”

In sentence three: “..amoebae.”

In the last sentence: “…is not important.”

By: JOHN PATTERSON

JOHN PATTERSON — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 10:40:21 +0000

I too wanted to impose my interests on Vanessa Fong. I was looking for research about synergy between politics, economics, education, custom, etc., intereacted in the first place in regard to this policy. What she actually decided to do is fascinating and valuable to me. I think her work is important in part because her field study is so personal. She’s not one of those researchers who believe that applying the scientific method to the study of society is exactly equivalent to working with test tubes and amoebas. It can’t be. Personal involvement and personal response is a necessity for cultural anthropology and she is acute and rigorous enough to create something I feel I can trust. What seemed to me to be an elementary mistake from the start of OCP was the assumption by planners that they could choose to re-organize just one area of Chinese life without taking into consideration its general effects on the body of the society. That’s the kind of thinking that emanates from dictatorships where there are no vocal interest groups to challenge or contribute to policy formation. While there may be an appearance of benefits now—greater investment in women’s education, a better educated populace—the great question is what happens to the minds, spirits, ethics, and morals of the people. Given the political structure, with OCP the planners created one more ideal setting for bribery, personal violence, intensifed destruction of privacy, and general corruption. Do the benefits of reduced population balance out those destructive social consequences? My speculative answer is not iimportant; that the government should have done such thinking to start with is.

By: Jack Brown

Jack Brown — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 21:18:34 +0000

Interesting thought…

From Frog in a
Well comes this post
about this
book that suggests China
had more than just population…

By: James A.

James A. — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:22:58 +0000

I always ascribed the One Child Policy as a reaction to the famines of the 60′s – and projections that China wouldn’t be able to feed itself by 1990 if growth continued at previous rates. The enormous cost of education for 1/2 a billion children was also a factor – and while parents DO pay for part of it, the government covers the bulk.

By: Alan Baumler

Alan Baumler — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 12:17:23 +0000

Yes, it is too bad, at least for me, that she does not deal with the politics of it, although that would involve getting into an entirely different set of sources and probably being a different scholar. I’m always a bit reluctant to take people to task for not doing the type of scholarship I would have done in their place.

Still, if you are going to make broad statements about intention you should have something to back them up. I would particularly like to see how the politics plays out, since her informants clearly do accept her reading of the goals of the plan, partly because it is now justified that way in urban areas and in part, as you point out, because as in Japan one-childism is being driven by economic changes. One of the things that interests me most about one-child is that it is one of the last of the old coercive ‘Maoist’-type policies that is still around and still has considerable popular support. Can you think of many 1974 propagada posters that could be re-used today?

Her arguement is that there is a de-facto two child policy in the countryside, where the promise that the policy will lead in short order to a First World life has little resonance. This would seem to indicate that that party is offering the policy as part of one social contract with urbanites and a somewhat different policy as part of a different contract with the rural areas

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 07:47:23 +0000

Thanks! Two thoughts: describing China in the 1970s as a “periphery” really stretches the categories, since it wasn’t a periphery of any particular metropole.

And it sounds as though she’s making the leap from a pretty vague rhetoric of modernization to justify a somewhat crisis-driven policy to theoretical structures that makes sense to her in the context of the policy as she understands it.

By: Alan Baumler

Alan Baumler — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:26:47 +0000

Having read your take on the book and the review I went and checked it out. As far as I can tell she has no evidence at all for her assertion that the policy was “designed ‘to create a generation of ambitious, well-educated children who would lead their country into the First World” She does not discuss high-level debates about the policy, and in the discussion of the state’s motivation for the plan (pp.70-75) she admits that the initial impulse behind the policy was “to conserve national resources and increase the efficiency of economic planning.” Later at least some people in the bureaucracy came to justify the policy on the grounds that it would lead to more resources being lavished on fewer children and thus a better quality of people. She does not really explain, or even discuss, how or if this shift in the justification of the policy came about. Fong talks about the policy as part of an attempt to move China from a Wallerstienian periphery to a core, which may or may not be a good way of looking at it, but I find it very hard to imagine Chinese policy-makers in the 70’s thinking like that. She makes it pretty clear that one-child was justified to her urban informants as a tool of modernization, however, and that they liked this explanation. Rural areas are apparently different, although she does not talk about them much.

Although she does not really get into the politics of population policy there is a lot of nice ethnographic description in here. You would find the whole exam thing very Japanese. I also enjoyed the fact that she met up with informants by offering free English lessons.