This special issue of EASTS makes clear why the management of population is so central to global history and why the sciences of population are so central to projects of population management. Perhaps nowhere and at no time were these truths more evident than in Asia during the Cold War era. In this commentary I highlight the signal contributions of the articles in this special issue to larger themes in Asian studies, science studies, and population studies and then map out some directions for future research.
By focusing on Asian population politics and science, these articles have uncovered a fresh domain in which Asia has reshaped the post-World War II world. As the editors Aya Home and Yu-Ling Huang point out in their introduction to this special issue, Asia was a key terrain in the Cold War battle between East and West. It was not just a central target in the global population control movement, though; geopolitical and demographic factors made it the most important target and, in turn, the core arena for negotiations over what would count as family planning. Situated in the backyard of what was known as Red China, where hot-war skirmishes erupted again and again, the noncommunist nations of Asia were hotly contested areas, with many Western actors striving to influence their postwar development for various ends. The sheer numbers of people living in the region greatly magnified its importance. In 1950, Asia (East, South Central, and Southeast) made up 54.2 percent of the global population, and those numbers were growing rapidly. By comparison, Africa represented 9 percent of the world's population, while Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for a mere 6.5 percent (US Census Bureau 2015). For historical agents seeking to contain the spread of communism and to coax more nations into the so-called democratic capitalist camp, Asia was the big prize. For scholars today interested in exploring the interplay of geopolitics and biopolitics (understood as state projects to manage populations in the name of optimization), Asia is indubitably the place to look.
