Abstract
To refer to the single-child policy of China is to imply a well-structured programme of unambiguous meanings and mutually exclusive regulations. Its implementation also assumes a singular and authoritative political agent, the state, and by implication willing objects of policy, couples of child-bearing age, who will co-operate by abrogating their fertility decisions to designated others. What a study of the single-child policy and its implementation since its inception in 1979 suggests, however, is that the policy itself constitutes an unstable configuration of meanings constructed and reconstructed over time and space, generating variation and even confusion in the message that is officially formulated and the message that is received by couples or households. Both messages lack specificity and uniformity of sanction. The constituents of the official message are dependent on the formal role of the state and its local representatives and are also mediated by the fluid roles of informal others, be they either peer or volunteer. Moreover, the variety in fertility behaviour responsive to the official message is determined or influenced by the immediate household and family location of the reproductive couple, which have themselves been reconstituted in the same ten years. Indeed what gives the single-child family policy particular interest and significance are the simultaneous changes in representations of the state, coinciding with a decline in state power, and the reconstruction of the household and family as central economic, social and political institutions in post-reform China.1
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Notes
For a definition and explanation of the Social, see Donzelot, Jacques The Policing of Families (Hutchinson & Co, London 1979).
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See Sichuan Regulations in Family Planning, SWB 16 March 1979
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See Gui Shixin; ‘Population Control and Economic Policy’, Zhexue Shehui Kexue Ben [Philosophy and Social Science], Shanghai Teaching College, 25 April 1980
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See Croll, E. ‘The Single-child Family in Beijing: A First Hand Report’, in Croll, Elisabeth, Davin, Delia and Kane, Penny, China’s One Child Family Policy (Macmillan, London 1985).
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See for example ‘A Survey of Single-Child Families in Hefei, Anhui Province’, by the Population Research Office, Anhui University, 1980, ‘One-Child Family Becoming Norm in Beijing West District’, Renkou Yanjiu [Population Research], 1 January 1981.
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For full discussion on this theme, see Elisabeth Croll, ‘Production versus Reproduction’. A Threat to China’s Development Strategy’, World Development, vol. 11 no. 6, pp. 67, 481, 1983.
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For an elaboration of this thesis, see Elisabeth Croll, The Politics of Marriage in Contemporary China, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
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© 1991 Gordon White
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Croll, E.J. (1991). The State and the Single-Child Policy. In: White, G. (eds) The Chinese State in the Era of Economic Reform. Studies on the Chinese Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11939-4_13
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