Tina Johnson (Saint Vincent College, PA), “100 Years of China’s Population Strategies: From Sanger to the Three-Child Policy”

Online, via Zoom. Register to attend by clicking here

2022 marks the 100th anniversary of Margaret Sanger’s first visit to China.  Her visit prompted public discussions of birth control in the service of improving China’s population that continue to the present day.  These conversations and subsequent policies expanded to include many aspects of reproductive health like screenings for sexually transmitted infections and cervical cancer.  They also corresponded with conflicting policies through the 1960s, as (primarily) women’s calls for more control over reproduction clashed with paternalistic pronatalism.  China’s restrictive population policies in the following decades have today given way to incentivizing birth to balance an aging population, with the “three-child policy” announced in May 2021.  In all cases, the Chinese state’s focus on women’s fertility and their reproductive health is the fundamental method of implementing population policy.