Planned births, unplanned persons: "Population" in the making of Chinese modernity

In this article I suggest that "population" operates as a capacious domain of modern power, with its own imaginaries, discourses, bureaucratic apparatuses, and social effects. Taking China, home to the world's largest population, as my ethnographic case, I examine the role of "birth planning," China's distinctive Marxist-Leninist-Maoist approach to population control, in the construction of "Chinese socialist modernity." I trace the historical, political, and bureaucratic process by which the state's planned birth project, designed to create a modern, planned population, produced not only a large group of planned persons but also a huge outcast group of unplanned, "black" persons who, as legal nonpersons, exist on the margins of society, lacking citizenship rights and state benefits. With its gargantuan population and fearsome birth planning program, China offers striking evidence of the social power of governmental projects of population control—to create new classifications of social life, new types of personhood, and new forms of social and political exclusion, [population, modernity, personhood, China] A t the heart of China's renowned population control program lies a modernist binary that cries out for analytic and political attention: the planned-unplanned birth. At the dawn of the 21st century, China is full of images of the poster child of the nation's future. Invariably an urban child, it is the planned progeny, the well-educated, well-dressed, healthy, "quality" child who is playing and laughing as it graces the cities' pleasure spots. Elsewhere—never in the same frame—are cultural images of the unplanned child who is not supposed to exist. Usually the offspring of rural migrants in the cities, it is the uneducated, ragged, unhealthy child who is crying or fighting, disrupting social order, and generally polluting the cities' margins. These two images are never seen together, but they belong side by side, for the creation of the planned child— the marker of modernity, the savior of the nation—has entailed the simultaneous creation of the unplanned child—the sign of backwardness, the obstacle that keeps China from attaining its rightful place on the world stage. Official and scholarly neglect of the unplanned child—its numbers, its socioeconomic plight, its subjectivity—adds to the importance of attending to it. State-created, bureaucratically elaborated social categories participate in the construction not only of cultural images but also of social reality. Inspired by Foucault's (1975, 1978, 1979, 1991) writings on social normalization and government rationality in modern society, a new body of work on the anthropology of modernity has traced the modernist discourses and governmental technologies through which such normalizing categories are formed and made effective (Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1990; Gupta 1998; Holston 1989; Horn 1994; Mitchell 2000; Rabinow 1989; on classification more generally, Bowker and Star 1999). In the post-World War II era, the dominant domain of such modernist discourses and technologies in Third World countries such as China is "development." (Here and below, I use quotation marks to highlight the discursive construction of terms.) The anthropological work suggests that development is not merely a rise in economic productivity and living standards. It is also a field of power, with its own imagined futures, modernist discourses, governmental institutions and practices, and social effects (e.g., Arce and Long 2000; Cooper and Packard 1997; Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1990; Gupta 1998; Pigg 1992). Development is also a form of government rationality, a American Ethnologist 30(21:196-215. Copyright © 2003, American Anthropological Association. Planned births, unplanned persons • American Ethnologist logic of state whose object is the population and whose aim is normalization of society in the name of optimizing the health, welfare, and usefulness of the population (Foucault 1991; Rabinow 1989; on governmental reasoning and technologies generally, Dean 1999; Gordon 1991; Rose 1999). Ethnographic research suggests that the discourses and apparatuses of development are highly productive—but rarely in the ways the planners intend (esp. Ferguson 1990; Holston 1989, 1999). Once bureaucratically embedded in society, the discursive and material practices of development have far-ranging, often unanticipated, effects on the distribution of material goods, the allocation of social power, and the subjectivities of human beings. Like the discourses of modernity generally, the discourses of development break reality down into discrete sectors—agriculture, industry, public health, urban planning, and so forth (Escobar 1995:60). One developmental sector that has largely escaped the gaze of critical students of modernity is "population."^ The growing literature in demographic anthropology (e.g., Basu and Aaby 1998; Kertzer and Fricke 1997; Schneider and Schneider 1996) represents an anthropological engagement with (both critique of and elaboration on) demography. As an interdisciplinary conversation with population science, demographic anthropology has not found it especially useful to make the reflexive move of turning its object of study, population, into a figure of discourse, "population." Medical anthropology has devoted substantial attention to reproduction in Third World contexts (recent contributions can be found in DavisFloyd and Sargent 1997; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Lock and Kaufert 1998). This work, however, has tended to take a bottom-up look at women's resistance and accommodation to the biomedicalization of childbearing. What is missing is a top-down perspective on states and human scientists as agents in creating the discourses and programs, which women may embrace or contest (an exception is Kligman 1998). Although the contours of the population sector of development discourse and practice remain sketchily mapped in anthropology, a glance at the large public health and demographic literatures on family planning programs leaves the impression that population operates as a vast field of power, with its own imaginaries, discourses, institutional apparatuses, political technologies, and social effects. The field of "population" merits much more attention, for population is an especially naturalized category (Clarke 1998; Horn 1994). The taken-for-granted character of population has discouraged inquiry into the biopolitical dynamics and sociopolitical effects of governmental projects of population management, despite the pervasiveness of such projects in modern life. "Population" and modern power: Classifying life, producing the political Emerging perspectives on governmentality give us analytic purchase on the mentalities, techniques, and effects of population (Dean 1999; Foucault 1991; Rose 1999). Focusing on more or less rationalized schemes and programs to shape conduct according to specific norms so as to achieve particular ends, such approaches allow us to link "big" questions of government to "little" questions of individual identity and to see the historicity and contingency of the political world we take for granted. This work highlights the fundamental role of knowledge (or systematic thought) and its classificatory schemes in the making of the political. It enables us to see how governmental rationalities (plans, problematizations, visions, know-hows) become constitutive of government itself, defining such things as its object, its strategic rationale and aims, and the categories into which life is sorted for purposes of administration and optimization. This emphasis on classificatory schemes for life directs our attention to the social categories embedded in governmental technologies for population surveillance, management, and restriction. Such technologies include the census, the survey, and the family planning program. Though seemingly neutral, and purportedly even beneficent, the categories embedded in state projects for population counting and control ("over" versus "underpopulated," "high" versus "low fertility," and so forth) are designed to effect direct interventions in the domain of the social. Once built into population projects, such categories are likely to be politically and culturally productive, redistributing resources and social power, transforming existing subjectivities and social groupings, and, perhaps, even creating new forms of personhood.' The efficacy of population categories emerges with particular force in socialist countries, whose states enjoy exceptional power to reshape social life through their extensive control over the resources and institutions of society (for more on the nature of socialism, see Verdery 1991, 1996). Gail Kligman's (1998) study of "political demography" in Ceaucescu's Romania provides powerful testimony to the destructive as well as productive potential of demographic engineering carried out in the name of building socialism. Although socialism has been proclaimed dead, throughout the postsocialist world, but especially in late socialist regimes still dominated by communist parties, substantial chunks of socialist discourse and practice remain to shape, if not condemn, the transitions to the "posts" (Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Stark and Bruszt 1998). The classifying activities of both classical and late socialist states are especially interesting because they are rooted in a Marxian variant of the development and planning discourses dissected by the scholars discussed above. Though constructed as their binary opposite, Marxian discourses of development share