Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China is an important work by anthropologist and science studies scholar Susan Greenhalgh, based on more than two decades of research on population politics in the People's Republic of China (PRC). In the rapidly growing body of literature on the one-child policy, Greenhalgh found few satisfactory answers for questions such as where the radical idea of strict fertility control came from in the late 1970s and what the PRC leaders' rationale was in establishing such a strict social policy. Drawing on interdisciplinary analytical approaches—policy problematization, policy assemblage, and the micropolitics of science making and policymaking—Greenhalgh identifies various actors, institutions, and sciences/knowledge that participated in the process. Herein, the conceptual tools of science studies, such as credibility contests, boundary work, and coproduction of science and politics, are empirically employed in assessing the activities and discourses of science making and policymaking. Greenhalgh's main argument is that " the one-child policy was a product of a new kind of scientific sense-making within the regime that emerged in a historical context in which the embrace of science was politically essential to the regime's survival" (xvii).
