Lasting from 1979 to 2015, China's One Child Policy is often remembered as one of the most ambitious social engineering projects to date and considered emblematic of global efforts to regulate population growth during the twentieth century. Drawing on a rich combination of archival research and oral history, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez analyses how ordinary people, particularly women, navigated China's shifting fertility policies before and during the One Child Policy era. She examines the implementation and reception of these policies and reveals that they were often contradictory and unevenly enforced, as men and women challenged, reworked, and co-opted state policies to suit their own needs. By situating the One Child Policy within the longer history of birth control and abortion in China, Reproductive Realities in Modern China exposes important historical continuities, such as the enduring reliance on abortion as contraception and the precariousness of state control over reproduction.

Sarah Mellors Rodriguez explores how ordinary people navigated China's shifting fertility policies before and during the One Child Policy era.

China today is never out of the news: from human rights controversies and the continued legacy of Tiananmen Square, to global coverage of the Beijing Olympics, and the Chinese 'economic miracle'. It seems a country of contradictions: a peasant society with some of the world's most futuristic cities, heir to an ancient civilization that is still trying to find a modern identity. This Very Short Introduction offers the reader with no previous knowledge of China a variety of ways to understand the world's most populous nation, giving a short, integrated picture of modern Chinese society, culture, economy, politics and art. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Gender and sexuality have been neglected topics in the history of Chinese civilization, despite the fact that there is a massive amount of historical evidence on the subject. China's late imperial government was arguably more concerned about gender and sexuality among its subjects than any other pre-modern state. How did these and other late imperial legacies shape twentieth-century notions of gender and sexuality in modern China? Susan Mann answers this by focusing on state policy, ideas about the physical body and notions of sexuality and difference in China's recent history, from medicine to the theater to the gay bars; from law to art and sports. More broadly, the book shows how changes in attitudes toward sex and gender in China during the twentieth century have cast a new light on the process of becoming modern, while simultaneously challenging the universalizing assumptions of Western modernity.

Student~ interested in world populations and demography inevitably need to know China. As the most populous country of the world, China occupies a unique position in the world population system. How its population is shaped by the intricate interplays among factors such as its political ideology and institutions, economic reality, government policies, sociocultural traditions, and ethnic divergence represents at once a fascinating and challenging arena for investigatIon and analysis. Yet, for much of the 20th century, while population studies have developed into a mature science, precise information and sophisticated analysis about the Chinese population had largely remained either lacking or inaccessible, first because of the absence of systematic databases due to almost uninterrupted strife and wars, and later because the society was closed to the outside observers for about three decades since 1949. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, things have dramatically changed. China has embarked on an ambitious reform program where modernization became the utmost goal of societal mobilization. China could no longer afford to rely on imprecise census or survey information for population-related studies and policy planning, nor to remaining closed to the outside world. Both the gathering of more precise information and access to such information have dramatically increased in the 1980s. Systematic observations, analyses and reporting about the Chinese population have surfaced in the population literature around the globe.

Behind the Silence is the first in-depth work in any language to explore the diverse perspectives of mainland Chinese regarding induced abortion and fetal life in the context of the world's most ambitious and intrusive family planning program. Through his investigation of public silence, official standpoints, forgotten controversies from the imperial era, popular opinions, women's personal stories, doctors' narratives, and the problem of coerced abortion, Nie Jing-Bao brings to light a surprising range of beliefs concerning fetal life and the morality of abortion, yet finds overall an acceptance of national population policies. China's internal plurality, the author argues, must be taken seriously if the West is to open a fruitful cross-cultural dialogue. Visit our website for sample chapters!