Dan Wang characterizes China’s one-child policy as a defining example of the engineering state’s attempt to control population through technocratic management. The policy, implemented in 1980 and maintained for 35 years, represents one of the most ambitious and damaging social engineering projects in modern history.

Wang traces the one-child policy’s origins to the aftermath of Mao Zedong’s rule. Mao, who believed large populations deterred imperialist invasion, promoted births and dismissed concerns about overpopulation as bourgeois Western thinking. However, after Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping and other leaders discovered China’s population had reached nearly one billion people, shocking them into action.

The policy’s architect was Song Jian, a missile scientist trained in cybernetics who applied mathematical control theory to demographic projections. Using linear calculations that assumed unchanging fertility rates, Song predicted China’s population would reach 4.5 billion by 2080 without intervention. He determined China’s optimal population was 700 million. Despite the flawed methodology—Song failed to account for natural fertility declines accompanying economic development—his computerized projections and status as a trusted military scientist convinced China’s leadership to implement the one-child policy.

Wang describes the brutal enforcement mechanisms. General Qian Xinzhong organized “shock brigades” that conducted mass campaigns of forced sterilizations and abortions. In 1983 alone, authorities sterilized 16 million women and performed 14 million abortions. Local officials used browbeating, detention, fines, property seizure, and physical force to meet quotas. Women in their third trimester were subjected to forced abortions, sometimes resulting in live births that were killed through suffocation or exposure. The 1991 incident in Guandong County, known as the “Slaughter of the Lambs,” mandated zero births during a hundred-day period (109).

The policy created severe social consequences. Rural families, preferring sons for economic security, resorted to female infanticide and sex-selective abortion, resulting in approximately 40 million “missing” women. Child trafficking and abandonment increased dramatically. Over 150,000 children, mostly girls, were sent abroad for international adoption. Some local officials allegedly kidnapped children to profit from adoption donations.

Rural families bore the harshest burden, while urban residents navigated the system more easily through paperwork and occasional bribes. Resistance included fleeing to other villages, hiding pregnancies, bribing officials, and occasionally violent retaliation against family planning officers. The bureaucracy employed over 500,000 workers and collected $200 billion in fines during its existence.

Wang argues the policy was unnecessary. China’s fertility rate had already declined from 6.0 children per woman in 1970 to 2.7 by 1980 through less coercive measures and economic development. Over its lifetime, China performed 321 million abortions and sterilized 134 million people. The true drivers of fertility decline—urbanization, education, and economic growth—occurred naturally in neighboring countries without such extreme measures.

Now facing population collapse, Xi Jinping’s government attempts to reverse course through pro-natalist messaging and social pressure. Women face stigmatization for remaining single past age 27 and constant pressure from officials to marry and have children. However, decades of conditioning women to have only one child have proven difficult to undo. Wang remains skeptical that engineering state methods can successfully increase birth rates, noting that women who grew up under the one-child policy show little interest in bearing multiple children despite government incentives and harassment.