S16: Only Children

Misinformation and China

February 11, 2026

Key questions

Classroom in a Beijing High School, 1972
  • One child policy: Why? How did a missile scientist come to be in charge of demographic planning?
  • Seeking truth from facts: How does science become social policy?
  • Science and politics: Speaking truth to power?

Science vs ideology

Four Pests Campaign Poster

Debates during May Fourth Movement

Billboard promoting one child policy
  • Modern science and technology as fundamental to the survival of China as a nation-state
  • But what constitutes “science”?
  • Where, how, and for what purpose is “science” practiced?
  • Who counts as the proper practitioner and authority?
  • What are the standards of “science”?

Science as Method

Scale the peaks of science to contribute more to the realization of the Four Modernizations
  • Science as method and practice: root of modern civilization
  • Science as handmaiden to politics: not source of enlightenment, but servant of authoritarianism
  • Science or scientisim? Methods of natural science as explanation for society and source of infallible policies

Mao’s China: Not simply anti-science

New models of the Four Modernizations
  • “Combining indigenous methods with foreign methods”
  • Emphasis on “home-grown policies”: local inventions and experimentations

Mass Science: Yuan Longping

Yuan Longping (1930–2021), inventor of the first hybrid rice varieties and pioneer of the Greeen Revolution
  • Pioneering scientist who developed the world’s first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s and contributed to the Green Revolution
  • Increased rice yields significantly, helping to alleviate hunger and improve food security.
  • Advocated for the importance of sustainable farming practices alongside high-yield crops.

Mass Science: Tu Youyou

Tu Youyou, pharmaceutical chemist who discovered artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria
  • Discovered artemisinin, derived from the sweet wormwood plant, in the early 1970s.
  • Developed dihydroartemisinin, a more potent derivative of artemisinin, significantly improving malaria treatment.
  • Received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015; the first Chinese woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science.
  • Continued her research and advocacy for traditional medicine and its integration with modern science.

Farewell to Revolution

High School Students in Beijing, 1972
  • 1976-12: Death of Mao Zedong
  • 1978-12: Third Plenum of 11th Central Committee
  • Rise of Deng Xiaoping and reform-minded leadership; Hua Guofeng effectively stripped of powers
  • Change from Maoist class struggle to economic development

Four Modernization

Realize the nation’s Four Modernizations, strive for more glory
  • Agriculture
  • Industry
  • Science and technology
  • Defense

Discuss: Seek Truth from Facts

Deng Xiaoping
  • Why aren’t people’s minds emancipated? How can they be emancipated?
  • “We need unified and centralized leadership, but centralism can be correct only when there is a full measure of democracy.” Why? Is this a contradiction?
  • Explain: “Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth”.
  • What shall be done? Discuss the following areas: law, bureaucracy, and economic reform.

Deng on democracy: Antidote to Misinformation

One thing a revolutionary party does need to worry about is its inability to hear the voice of the people. The thing to be feared most is silence. Today many rumours — some true, some false — circulate through the grapevine inside and outside the Party. This is a kind of punishment for the long-standing lack of political democracy. If we had a political situation with both centralism and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both unity of will and personal ease of mind and liveliness, there wouldn’t be so many rumours and anarchism would be easier to overcome.

Discuss: One Couple, One Child (1980)

Carry on the revolutionary tradition and devote yourself to realizing the Four Modernizations - Commemorate the 65th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement - 1919-1984
  • What concerns does the article raise if the population is not brought under control?
  • How did Beijing explain, justify, and enforce the one child policy?

Discuss: Just One Child

School children danced using colorful scarves in Beijing in 1980. Credit Michel Lipchitz/Associated Press
  • What is the “sinified cybernetics of population”? Where did they get their ideas?
  • How did cybernetic theories come to shape population question?
  • Who is Song Jian? What role did he play in the passage of One Child Policy?
  • “One couple, one child”: How did universal one child become the “most ideal scheme”?

Meet Paul Ehrlich

Book cover: Population bomb
  • Joined Stanford faculty in 1959, promoted to professor of biology in 1966
  • Entomologist specializing in Lepidoptera (butterflies) by training
  • Published The Population Bomb (1968)

Paul Ehrlich on The Tonight Show (1980)

Limits to Growth

Book Cover: Limits to Growth
  • Lead author Dr. Donella Meadows: Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth
  • Prediction of environmental and economic collapse within a century if “business as usual” continued

Zero Population Growth

The earth can’t handle many more birthday parties, Zero Population Growth, Inc., Library of Congress 2016649241

Feel crowded? Consider zero population growth, Zero Population Growth, Inc., Library of Congress, 2015648435

World’s greatest discovery : the two-child family!, Zero Population Growth, Inc., Library of Congress, 2016648135

ZPG Movement: View from India

Sterilization program banner
  • India: Mass sterilization drive of 1976
  • Introduced during the Emergency under Indira Gandhi
  • Estimated 6.2 million men sterilized
  • Gender focus shifted: 46% of all sterilisations in 1975–76; 91.8% in 1989–90

ZPG Movement: Support from the US

National Security Study Memorandum NSSM 200 Implications of Worldwide Population Growth For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (THE KISSINGER REPORT) December 10, 1974

In many countries today, decision-makers are wary of instituting population programs, not because they are unconcerned about rapid population growth, but because they lack confidence that such programs will succeed. By actively working to demonstrate to such leaders that national population and family planning programs have achieved progress in a wide variety of poor countries, the U.S. could help persuade the leaders of many countries that the investment of funds in national family planning programs is likely to yield high returns even in the short and medium term.

ZPG Movement: Support from the US (continued)

National Security Study Memorandum NSSM 200 Implications of Worldwide Population Growth For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (THE KISSINGER REPORT) December 10, 1974

No single effort will do the job. Only a concerted and major effort in a number of carefully selected directions can provide the hope of success in reducing population growth and its unwanted dangers to world economic will-being and political stability. There are no “quick-fixes” in this field. […] We cannot simply buy population growth moderation for nearly 4 billion people “on the cheap”.

Trailer: One Child Nation

Poster: One Child Nation (2019)

Future of Chinese demography

China: Total population project

Three Child Policy Cartoon

Peak Humanity?

World Population Growth

Discuss: Just One Child

A decaying mural promoting China’s family-planning policy suffers from neglect along a back street in Beijing, from October 1996. Will Burgess/Reuters
  • The world population has increased more than tenfold over the past 250 years, and is expected to continue growing, but at a slower rate before peaking at around 10.4 billion by the end of the century.
  • What is needed for this looming demographic transition?