Cultivating Global Citizens

Current accounts of Chinas global rise emphasize economics and politics, largely neglecting the cultivation of Chinas people. Susan Greenhalgh, one of the foremost authorities on Chinas one-child policy, places the governance of population squarely at the heart of Chinas ascent. Focusing on the decade since 2000, and especially 200409, she argues that the vital politics of population has been central to the globalizing agenda of the reform state. By helping transform Chinas rural masses into modern workers and citizens, by working to strengthen, techno-scientize, and legitimize the PRC regime, and by boosting Chinas economic development and comprehensive national power, the governance of the population has been critically important to the rise of global China. After decades of viewing population as a hindrance to modernization, Chinas leaders are now equating it with human capital and redefining it as a positive factor in the nations transition to a knowledge-based economy. In encouraging human development, the regime is trying to induce people to become self-governing, self-enterprising persons who will advance their own health, education, and welfare for the benefit of the nation. From an object of coercive restriction by the state, population is being refigured as a field of self-cultivation by Chinas people themselves.