Our review centers not on the one-child policy, but on the larger PRC project of state birth planning launched in Mao’s time and still in place today (though it operates differently now) (We use the language of “one-child policy” because it is more familiar to readers.) We focus on this project because that’s where the book’s problems mostly lie. We say many nice things about its discussions of the Republican era.
We were initially drawn to Reproductive Realities because it offered a junior scholar’s fresh contributions to subjects that each of us studies. As we read more deeply, though, we grew troubled by a set of substantive and methodological problems of likely concern to the larger community of scholars studying medicine, population/reproduction, and gender in China. Our review sought to draw out those larger issues and engage the author on them as a way of initiating wider conversations in the field.
