China's One-Child Policy
In September 1979, China’s Fifth National People’s Congress passed a policy that encouraged one-child families. Following this decision from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), campaigns were initiated to implement the One-Child Policy nationwide. This initiative constituted the most massive governmental attempt to control human fertility and reproduction in human history. These campaigns prioritized reproductive technologies for contraception [6], abortion [7], and sterilization [8] in gynecological and obstetric medicine, while downplaying technologies related to fertility treatment. In the late 1980s, one of the consequences was the reorientation of the rationality of governmental funding for research on human in vitro [9] fertilization [10] (IVF) and embryo transfer [11].
Population Control in Cold War Asia: An Introduction
On 29 October 2015, the state-run Xinhua news agency of the People’s Republic of China reported headline news: the Communist Party of China announced that the government would allow all couples in the country to have two children. According to an official communiqué released on that day, the decision, made in the Fifth Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Communist Party of China Central Committee taking place between 26 and 29 October, was intended to balance its population and to address the issue of an aging population presently confronting the country (Xinhuanet 2016). The Communist Party’s official announcement that year, immediately characterized by the broadcast media as marking the end of the so-called one-child policy (British Broadcasting Company 2015; Jiang and Cullinane 2015; Al Jazeera 2015) and by one journalist as “China’s most radical birth control experiment” (Fong 2016), vividly illustrates one of the defining features of population control in East Asia: the leading role that the modern state has assumed in intervening in people’s reproductive lives for the sake of governing its population. Indeed, as a number of English-language works on the subject have demonstrated, postwar national governments in the region actively participated in population control by enacting birth control policy and endorsing family planning programs (Homei 2016; Chen 2011; Huang 2009; DiMoia 2008; Greenhalgh 1994, 2008; Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005; Kuo 2002). Many of these works were inspired by the concept of biopower and governmentality advanced by Michel Foucault that clarified the intricate links between issues of individual reproductive conduct and issues of national power prevailed in the politics of population (Park 2008; Greenhalgh and Winkler 2005). Drawing on Foucault, these studies have paid attention to the attribute ofmodern state as a unit of governance and consider how the notion of individuals as members of a population and a population as an aggregate
Arab Uprisings and the Outstanding Return to Democracy: Tunisia as a Model
In the wake of the Middle Eastern crises, the Tunisian case in focus has been doted as a unique phenomenon being that it was the Genesis of the revolution that ultimately spread across the Middle East like wild fire, but has eventually heralded a new dawn as democracy has incidentally returned to the Empire. This literature therefore looks closely at the extent to which the ‘DignityRevolution’ has been instrumental in the Middle East uprisings, which have brought an end to dynastic autocracies. The literature zeros in on the Tunisian uprising which has attracted global concerns, sympathy and has sparked interests in the international arena. The literature finds that the people hold colossal prospect in the uprising and its resultant effect, as it paved the way for the revolutionist to generate, gather and disseminate information on the condition of the entire region to the international community. The people in this context were of utmost importance and played a very crucial role in the creation of awareness, mobilization of protesters and utmost determining the direction of the uprising and also ensuring a speedy return to democratic rule. The paper submits that the role of the people in ensuring that the ruins of the uprising is not left littering around and democracy restored is highly commendable and should be a model for all other Arab countries involved in the revolution.