Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China

摘要

Just One Child is an empirically rich account of one of China's most controversial and understudied policies. Drawing from 20 years of intensive fieldwork and utilizing over 140 interviews with key figures of the Chinese population planning establishment, Greenhalgh shows how cybernetic engineers from the Seventh Machine Ministry discursively dominated the policy formation process and paved the political pathway for the One-Child Law that was officially promulgated in 1980. Her epistemic perspective provides an illuminating vantage point, demonstrating how policy arenas are contested spaces with different interests vying for legitimacy by aligning themselves with "truth." In her study, she shows how Marxian statisticians, advancing a "go-slow one-child" policy; Marxist humanists, advocates of a "two-children, but widely-spaced" policy; and cybernetic engineers, proponents of a strict one-child policy, competed for epistemic ascendancy as the one, ture "science" that could solve China's population crisis.