UC Irvine

Since its enactment in 1979, the One Child Policy—which in theory limited Chinese couples to one child each—has made global headlines and been the focus of publications in a wide array of fields from public health to political science. Nevertheless, the majority of these works privilege the perspective of the state. Such accounts give little consideration to the decades leading up to the policy’s implementation and reaffirm the monolithic official narrative that radical state intervention was critical for reducing population growth and enabling rapid economic development.

This dissertation seeks to emphasize the part played by individuals in shaping their own reproductive futures, granting users of birth control agency in a scholarly discourse dominated by top-down policies. Drawing on both archival and oral history, I examine birth control and abortion practices in the longue durée, beginning with the consolidation of Nationalist Party rule (1927-1949) and ending with the 2015 implementation of the Two Child Policy, which allows for two children per couple. In particular, I focus on the 50-year period preceding the enactment of the One Child Policy, drawing on the lived experience of birth control and abortion practices in three cities to complicate and challenge official narratives.

My findings reveal that birth control and abortion had been utilized in urban China from at least as early as the Republican period (1912-1949), and that throughout the twentieth century, contraceptive practices differed according to class, location, gender, and other markers of identity. Furthermore, despite the introduction of an elaborate matrix of mechanisms to deepen state control over reproduction both before and during the One Child Policy era, this process was fraught with obstacles and inconsistencies. The result was that individual and familial considerations continued to shape reproductive decisions even amidst intensifying family planning campaigns. Contributing to interdisciplinary studies of medicine, the history of reproduction in China, and gender and sexuality studies, I highlight the coexistence and syncretism of traditional, Western, and folk contraceptive methods, reliance on abortion as a primary form of contraception, and the endurance of gendered reproductive responsibilities.