Thompson, Malcolm (2012). “Foucault, fields of governability, and the population-family-economy nexus in China”. History and theory, 51 (1), p. 42-62.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2012.00611.x
Abstract
It was only in the early twentieth century that China discovered that it had a population, at least if a population is understood not as a simple number of people but instead in terms of such features as variable levels of health, birth and death rates, age, sex, dependency ratios, and so onas an object with a distinct rationality and intrinsic dynamics that can be made the target of a specific kind of direct intervention. In 1900, such a developmentalist conception of the population simply did not exist in China; by the 1930s, it pervaded the entire social and political field from top to bottom. Through a reading of a series of foundational texts in population and family reformism in China, this paper argues that this birth of the Chinese population occurred as a result of a general transformation of practices of governing, one that necessarily also involved a reconceptualization of the family and a new logic of overall social rationalization; in short, the isolation of a population family economy nexus as a central field of modern governing. This process is captured by elaborating and extending Foucault’s studies of the historical emergence of apparatuses (dispositifs) into a notion of fields of governability. Finally, this paper argues that the one-child policy, launched in the late 1970s, should be understood not in isolation from the imposition of the family-responsibility system in agriculture and market reforms in exactly that period, but as partmutatis mutandis of a return to a form of governing that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century.
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