Governing China's Population

"Reading Governing China's Population is like stepping through a window; it provides a view not completely available before. It is a view crafted by scholars with exceptional access to source materials that illuminate the political and human complexities of the most ambitious and extraordinary population policy of our day."—Population Studies

"This is an important book. Greenhalgh and Winckler tell a fascinating story about the past and present extent of the influence of China's population policies."—Studies in Family Planning

"Governing China's Population illuminations far greater complexity about birth policies than the debate in the United States ever recognizes, presenting for example the extent of internal Chinese debate about these inequities and efforts to correct them."—Conscience

"...this is an admirable piece of work, very informative and well organized..."—The China Quarterly

"Governing China's Population is an outstanding and thought-provoking accomplishment certain to inspire methodological and analytical innovation among students and researchers of China."—The China Journal

"...the most comprehensive and sophisticated exploration of the PRC's birth planning programme to date."—Pacific Affairs

"It is a deeply interesting source of information about the complex evolution of population policy in China. It will be very helpful in its own right, as well as forming the basis for a wide range of followup academic studies, particularly by Chinese scholars."—Population and Development Review

"In discussing the shifting approaches to governance that have conditioned the policy domain of birth planning, they combine the historical institutionalist approach of political science with the discursive-critical approaches of anthropology in order to understand how policy changes impacted the peasant family economy."—Reference & Research Book News

"China's transformation from high to very low fertility in less than a generation may be the most successful state social engineering project in history, but at the same time it constitutes an ethical nightmare. In this impressive volume, Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler lay bare as never before both the politics behind the evolution of mandatory family planning in China and its disastrous social consequences."—Martin K. Whyte, Harvard University

"In this highly informative book, Greenhalgh and Winckler demonstrate the changing ways in which the population as an object of state intervention has played a central, if changing, role in China's arts of governmentality. Extending Foucault's concept of biopolitics to a major new terrain, the book opens new understandings, new questions, and new challenges."—Paul Rabinow, University of California at Berkeley

"Governing China's Population offers a remarkably innovative and revealing interdisciplinary analysis of the emergence of China's population as a problem of government. The book's main argument—supported by both extensive documentation and exceptional ethnographic access—affirms Foucault's sense of the importance of 'population' as a central object of modern government, while confronting those who would hastily (and Eurocentrically) 'globalize' Foucault with a challenging and vividly described case of a quite different historical configuration of power."—James Ferguson, Stanford University

"It is not possible in the space of a short review to do justice to the richness of the tapestry woven in this book."—Economic and Political Weekly

"The rise of China is one of the most significant trends of the twenty-first century. Governing China's Population is a must-read for anybody who is interested in how Chinese politics and society are changing, and how the U.S. can engage China to move toward international rules and practices. The authors' groundbreaking work will change the way China's population policies and politics are understood in the United States."—Lee Hamilton, President, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and former Chairman, House Committee on International Relations