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China's one-child rule is unassailably one of the most controversial social policies of all time. In the first book of its kind, Susan Greenhalgh draws on twenty years of research into China's population politics to explain how the leaders of a nation of one billion decided to limit all couples to one child. Focusing on the historic period 1978-80, when China was just reentering the global capitalist system after decades of self-imposed isolation, Greenhalgh documents the extraordinary manner in which a handful of leading aerospace engineers hijacked the population policymaking process and formulated a strategy that treated people like missiles. Just One Child situates these science- and policymaking practices in their broader contexts-the scientization and statisticalization of sociopolitical life-and provides the most detailed and incisive account yet of the origins of the one-child policy

"Recent years have brought growing concern about the power of huge corporations to distort science for corporate benefit, often to the detriment of human health. This book unearths a kind of corporate science that the author, anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh, calls "soda science." Soda science was created not to combat obesity but to defend the soda industry from threats to profits posed by public health calls to see soda as a major contributor to the obesity epidemic. Greenhalgh unravels the project of the global food industry to assemble this new, industry-friendly body of knowledge in the US, spread it to key markets around the world, and get it embedded in official policies on diet-related chronic disease. She follows the "soda scientists"-industry executives, leaders of scientific nonprofits, influential American scientists, and top Chinese scientist-officials-as they made the science, carried it to China, and translated it into Chinese ideas and public policies. Soda science was a real if unconventional science, and it deserves attention because it had harmful effects that remain largely hidden, even today. In the US, soda science, which was widely circulated through public health campaigns and diet books, spread the idea that exercise is more important for weight loss than caloric restriction, a belief that remains pervasive in American culture. Soda science, in other words, was a key forerunner of the step-counting, weight-obsessed fitness culture of today."

Current accounts of China's global rise emphasize economics and politics, largely neglecting the cultivation of China's people. Susan Greenhalgh, one of the foremost authorities on China's one-child policy, places the governance of population squarely at the heart of China's ascent.

In this collection of essays ten anthropologists and two historians address the world-wide pattern of falling birth rates. Fertility has commonly been treated from a specialized demographic perspective, but there is today widespread dissatisfaction with conventional demographic approaches, which are criticized for neglecting the cultural, social, and political forces that affect reproductive behavior. For their part, anthropologists have only recently begun to apply their characteristic approaches to the study of reproduction. Drawing on new ethnographic and historical research and on a variety of theoretical approaches, the contributors to this book indicate some of the ways in which demography might take into account historical processes, political forces, and cultural conceptions

Focusing on the craft aspect of population research—the generally unremarked fact that behind our well‐turned‐out publications lie particular, historically situated humans using craft‐type techniques—this essay traces the history of the making of population knowledge about China by the author over some twenty‐five years. At least in this case, population research has taken the form not of a stable subdiscipline, but of a loose, flexible, opportunistic assemblage—of concerns, logics, techniques, methods, and ethics—that has been guided by some of the big questions posed by China's post‐Mao global rise. It suggests that, unlike disciplines and inter‐disciplines, population studies is a post‐disciplinary assemblage whose contents and boundaries are flexible, varying with the practitioner and the research question being explored. Recounting more individual histories of population knowledge‐making would help us see the strong shaping role of historical contexts and personal values in the crafting of population thought. Such insights would help us recognize the diverse pathways by which population knowledge is formed and the different purposes for which it is pursued.

This article traces the origins of China's one-child-for-virtually-all policy to Maoist militarism and post-Mao military-to-civilian conversion. Focusing on the work of Song Jian, leading missile scientist and scientific architect of the strict one-child policy, it shows how during 1978–80 the resources of defence science and the self-confidence of the elite scientist enabled him boldly and arbitrarily to modify the work of the Club of Rome and use that Sinified cybernetics of population to redefine the nation's population problem, create a radical one-child-for-all solution to it, and persuade China's leaders that his "scientific" solution was the only way out. Although the advent of "scientific decision-making" in the population arena helpfully broke a political logjam, allowing China's leaders to adopt a strong policy on population control, the making of social policy by an elite scientist/engineer from the defence world posed dangers for the Party and China's people. The case of population policy is important because it provides rare insight into the way scientists have sometimes shaped elite policy-making and because the social and political consequences of the one-child policy have been so troubling.

China's one‐child‐per‐couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one‐child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world‐in‐crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core—that China faced a virtual "population crisis" and that the one‐child policy was "the only solution" to it—as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge‐making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself.