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
Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China’s One-Child Policy
Table of Contents for Only Hope List of Tables Acknowledgements Introduction 1. "The Next Few Months Will Determine Your Future": Eight Teenagers' Stories 2. Great Expectations: Singletons as the Vanguard of Modernization 3. Heavy is the Head of the "Little Emperor": Pressure, Discipline, and Competition in the Stratification System 4. "Beat Me Now and I'll Beat You When You're Old": Love, Filial Duty,s and Parental Investment in an Aging Population 5. "Spoiled": First World Youth in the Third World Conclusion: Making a Road to the First World Appendix: biographical Details of People Quoted or Mentioned in this Book Notes Works Cited Index