China's Longest Campaign

In the late 1970s, just as China was embarking on a sweeping program of post-Mao reforms, it also launched a one-child campaign. This campaign, which cut against the grain of rural reforms and childbearing preferences, was the culmination of a decade-long effort to subject reproduction to state planning. Tyrene White here analyzes this great social engineering experiment, drawing on more than twenty years of research, including fieldwork and interviews with a wide range of family-planning officials and rural cadres.White explores the origins of China's "birth-planning" approach to population control, the implementation of the campaign in rural China, strategies of resistance employed by villagers, and policy consequences (among them infanticide, infant abandonment, and sex-ratio imbalances). She also provides the first extensive political analysis of China's massive 1983 sterilization drive. The birth-planning project was the last and longest of the great mobilization campaigns, surviving long after the Deng regime had officially abandoned mass campaigns as instruments of political control.Arguing that the campaign had become an indispensable institution of rural governance, White shows how the one-child campaign mimicked the organizational style and rhythms both of political campaigns and economic production campaigns. Against the backdrop of unfolding rural reforms, only the campaign method could override obstacles to rural enforcement. As reform gradually eroded and transformed patterns of power and authority, however, even campaigns grew increasingly ineffective, paving the way for long-overdue reform of the birth-planning program.

"Tyrene White knows as much about the one-child policy in China as anyone around. The narrative of China's Longest Campaign is presented in rich yet always pleasurably readable detail, and the research on which it is based is solid and comprehensive. White's analysis is cast, cleverly, in terms of a compelling set of puzzles: why would, and how could, the state undertake so unpopular a policy at a time of considerable political uncertainty, flux, and retrenchment? She offers an important, insightful correction to some of our best grassroots-centered theories of resistance and political change.", "Tyrene White's careful reading of documentary evidence from the 1950s leads to a nuanced and interesting picture of internal debates within the Chinese leadership and among intellectuals about birth-control issues in a period prior to mandatory family planning. When discussing changes in mandatory family planning in the 1980s, White is able to rely on local evidence she collected, particularly in rural Hubei, on changes in the implementation of the policies she describes."

Tyrene White is Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at Swarthmore College.