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...

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

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.

Marc Blecher, Oberlin College:

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.