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Davis, Kingsley. 1967. Population Policy: Will Curren t Programs Succeed? Science 158:730-

739.

Leys, C. 1969. The Analysis of Planning. Pp. 249-250 in C. Leys (ed.), Politics and Change in Developing Countries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindblom, Charles. 1963. A Strategy of De-

eision. Glencoe: The Free Press. Morrison, Raymond L., Jr., and Jack D. Salmon. 1973. Population Control in China: A Reinterpretation. Asian Survey, September:873-890. Orleans, Leo. 1969. Evidence from Chinese Medical Journals on Current Population Policy. The China Quarterly 40:137-146.

REPLY H. Yuan Tien Department of Sociology. The Ohio State University

Neither Aird nor Salaff, unlike Borrie, has taken a fair note of the volume's stated objectives. Nor have they given even perfunctory attention to the impressive record of China's population struggle under the most formidable circumstances. Of course, China's accomplishments in the management of its demographic affairs dwarf the significance of whatever anyone may say from a distance. But, as mention was made of the fact that I recently visited China, and given the enormous importance of the topic, I must continue the dialogue. Let me then first confess that I was thoroughly puzzled by Aird's preoccupation with irrelevant evidence. For example, he himself admitted that the net effects on population distribution of students and cadres going to the countryside are hard to estimate because of their reverse migration, but insisted, with no sound reasons given, that I should have paid more attention to them. Apart from the fact that the book is not about migration, I gave extensive consideration to "educated youth on the move" in the context of occupational re-orientation in Chapter 7. This is a far more important dimension than their see-saw migration across space in Chinese society at this juncture. Furthermore, in Aird's review, the outpouring of words seems to represent a deliberate effort to obscure the fact

that one of the aims of the book is simply, as Borrie observed, to present the materials as seen through Chinese eyes. The organization of the materials is based on the approximate order of actual events in China since 1949, and the analytical approach is in terms of the development rather than static description of Chinese demographic measures. That Malthusianism and Neo-Malthusianism are, for historical, political and other reasons, unacceptable in the People's Republic of China is undeniable fact. This circumstance is a major component of China's population policy rationale, politics, and decisions. If the messenger is to be faulted for the message, so be it. In the book itself, however, not only did I specifically comment on the murkiness of the issues centered around Malthus (p. 184), but I also placed the population debate in China in the context of Hutchinson's summary of the development of conflicting population theories in the West (pp. 224-225, and Hutchinson, 1967). The use of long quotations was judicious in the sense that the distillation of original pronouncements according to any preconceived formulas would do violence to the spirit of the debate. With the exception of major documents, the great majority of the translations from Chinese publications were my own. In each and every case, the original Chinese text was

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read, and the changes made were both necessary and major in the sense that frightfully different constructions would (and could) otherwise be made from some translations not of my own labor. I accept full blame for any technical errors of omission of the sources of a small number of translations of some of the post-1949 Chinese documents. As regards Aird's criticism that I was often more of an advocate than analyst, it seems that had I shared his views or used the evidence according to his logic and preference, I would have been spared this honor. But, I do not agree with his brand of analysis. In fact, I find his rhetoric and phraseology repugnant, misleading, and full of ethnocentrism insofar as post-1949 developments in China are concerned. Aird began with the statement "The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party came to power with firm philosophical commitments [This is an undocumented premise, and I know of no pre-1949 publications or utterances of this kind that Aird imagined to exist] that precluded any recognition of intrinsic population problems in a socialist society. . . . Therefore, Mao insisted in September 1949 that China's large population was a "very good thing" and no cause for pessimism. [Aird distorted the meaning of this statement by failing to mention the fact that it was made in response to Dean Acheson's remarks of August, 1949. It was a political statement rather than a philosophical pronouncement. ] Within the next ten years, Mao's confidence was shaken, restored, and shaken again, [How Aird learned of this, he did not say; nor did he make clear what restored the allegedly shaken confidence] and by the end of twenty years family limitation was an established national priority bearing Mao's personal endorsement. This spectacular about-face would not have occurred except under extreme circumstantial pressures."

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It should not go without emphasizing that had Chairperson Mao's confidence been as easily shaken as Aird fantasized, the Chinese revolution would not have succeeded. In any event, recent visitors to China have come away, without exception, highly impressed by China's economic stability and progress. The addition of some 200 million people to the population has, contrary to all predictions, neither bankrupted the country nor pushed China into renewed chaos, disorders, impoverishment, and external expansion. And confidence in the country's future has never been higher. There were obvious economic difficulties during the years in question. It is also elementary that economic factors influenced population decisions in China. In numerous places in the book, I so stated. In connection with population transfers and land reclamation, for instance, I specifically pointed out that it would be short-sighted policy if traditional patterns of land use were not changed (p. 161). Beside the fact that the feeding of the population has been the first concern of the government, little would be gained by belaboring the obvious, especially in view of the fact that the institution of planned reproduction ~~~~sMt~ilie~~offu

years. Aird himself said, "the suspension of birth control activities . . . followed the launching of the Leap Forward and continued through the food crisis period." Furthermore, following the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1969, much publicity was given to marital postponement and birth limitation within marriage. By all accounts, the years 1970-1973 were positively good years. It is also well known that birth control activities received minimal notice during the worst years, 1959-1962.It is in this context that the importance of ideology and politics is major. It would be more so if economic difficulties are assumed to have been constant during the entire period. It is logically absurd to argue that constant

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circumstances can produce the ebb and flow of open promotion of planned reproduction. In the arena of politics and ideology, there was give-and-take exchange. And there was also differing opinion within and outside the Party before, during, and after the Leap Forward. The quotation of Wang Ya-nan (p. 223) is an example of the many statements about the superiority of the socialist system. It would have been redundant to quote other similar pronouncements made during the Leap Forward. On the question of Leap and China's fertility control program, I observed: ". . . the deflation of birth control campaign was gradual rather than abrupt, given the need to work out, and implement other policy substitutes. Therefore, it does not seem merely a coincidence that the Great Leap Forward and the People's Commune followed closely, though somewhat overlapped with, the all-out national attempt at mass contraceptive education. Nevertheless, the basic decision on population that was made in 1956 has not been supplanted. Fertility control remains a national policy, though there have been fluctuations in public emphasis and direct action" (p. 231). Nor has its rationale undergone any change. Here let me mention a significant development that occurred just before my visit to China in 1973. At the April 16th meeting of the Committee of the Whole of ECAFE in Tokyo, Chi Lung, the Chinese delegate, stated: Population increase in a planned way is China's established policy. We follow such a policy not because the question of 'overpopulation' exists in China. In China, social production is carried out in a planned way and this requires that the population increase is planned, too. It is also necessary to have a planned population increase in order to promote the thorough emancipation of women, care for mothers and

women and children and bring up and educate the younger generation well, and improve the people's health and bring about national prosperity. Such a policy conforms with the interests and aspirations of the broad masses (Peking Review, 1973, p. 17). This is the first formal statement on population delivered by a high Chinese official at an international conference since 1949. Of equal significance is the fact that, in another part of the speech, the same message first enunciated by Chairperson Mao Tee-tung more than a quarter of a century ago was reiterated: We hold that, of all things in the world, people are the most precious. People are the decisive factor in the social productive forces. They are first of all producers and then consumers. As producers, they ceaselessly concentrate on production in breadth and depth and can produce more products than they consume. Under certain sociohistorical conditions, some problems may arise as the population increases. This is caused by various obstacles blocking the developments of the social productive forces. The entire progress of history shows that people are always able to sweep aside obstacles in the way of advance, promote the steady development of the social productive forces and create more and more wealth for society. Those views which regard people as a negative factor, that people are purely consumers and that growth in.population means an obstacle to economic development do not correspond to the historical facts in the development of mankind (Peking Review, 1973, p. 16). Were one to follow Aird's astounding logic that is implicit in his comment, one would have to label this a "twist" [or is it a "turn?"] in policy. But the highly complex issues in the process of China's population policy-making cannot, as Aird insisted, be viewed simply in terms of Marx vs. Malthus. Even though a visible dimension of the decision-making was so shaped (which, as I have documented in the book, was temporarily

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counter-productive for the planned reproduction program based on maternal and infant welfare), the situation requires a far more sophisticated approach than this. As a consequence of the recent trip, I myself have come to appreciate more than ever before the duality of the framework of China's demographic pronouncements and population decisions. The Revolution and the actual achievements that have followed and are continually unfolding have caused the rendering of statements such as the omnipotence of people and the superiority of the socialist system logically proper and experientially true in the Chinese situation, on the one hand. On the other hand, the requirements of socialist construction and economic development necessitate efforts to diffuse planned reproduction under China's existingcircumstances. All this is consistent with the observation that there has been no revision in China's population policy premises since the mid-1950's. By the same token, fluctuations in the visibility of birth control activities cannot properly be taken as evidence of policy shift. They must be, as I have done in the book, placed in the context of politics. And this is why I deleted the inappropriate characterization of Chairperson Mao's remarks that I had inadvertently used in my Milbank article. Aird insisted that the results of the 1953 census influenced the decision on birth control and brushed aside the approval given to regulations governing contraception and abortion in August, 1953. As is well known, population figures not too dissimilar to those of the 1953 census had been published in China immediately after 1949 and before the returns from the census were released in November, 1954. Shao Li-tzu made his speech two months before the release in September. Given these facts and the sequence of their occurrence, I stand by my conclusion that the inception of the campaign to promote birth control was

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much more innocuous than this widely publicized speech or the 1953 census. It seems that Aird himself was overinterpreting the slim evidence toward spurious conclusion, evidently under the spell of the Malthusian bug. In the case of Wu Ching-chao and Chen Ta, my statement that a constant rate of reproduction was assumed throughout their analyses is not incompatible with their discussions of the possibility of (not the prospects for, as Aird indicated) fertility reduction. The discussion was in connection with their advocacy of governmental programs for disseminating contraceptive information and devices. In making a case for it, the assumption in question was implicitly incorporated in their prognosis on China's demographic future in the absence of direct and deep-reaching interventions. Perhaps, Aird's charge that I misrepresented Wu and Chen was a case of misreading the evidence on his part. In the case of Fei Hsiao-tung et al., two brief passages from the book warrant attention here: (1) te• • • in terms of intellectual freedom and academic discussion, a staunch defense should and can be made on behalf of Wu, Chen, Fei, and associates" (p. 229). (2) "There is ample justification for [the] case for an expansion of demographic research [in China]; no planning, shortor long-term, can be founded on a total demographic void. And, demography is also an important scientific discipline in its own right" (p. 210). But, my discussion of the role of Fei and associates in the fertility controversy was centered around the question of fertility control as a national policy and based on the premise that population policies are also politics. In fact, almost all of the participants in the dispute were either members of the People's Political Consultative Conference or deputies to the National People's Congress. They were not simply academicians uninvolved in the politics of the times. And in politics

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there may be little academic freedom. (I wonder if Aird has criticized Nixon's refusal to honor the findings of the President's Commission on Population.) Nor is demographic research entirely free of political restraints. (As a case in point, consider the recent Congressional clamor over the types and number of questions that could be included in the 1970 Census of the United States.) Aird's naivete in this regard surprises me to no end as he must know well, after having served in the federal government, that academicians by the scores have left Washington, D. C. (where Aird has been for nearly two decades) for reasons not dissimilar to those with which Fei and associates were charged. Consequences of policy dispute in government can be personally disastrous. In my discussion of the acrimonious repercussions that occurred after the Malthusian threat was unnecessarily invoked, I did specifically mention Fei's "Admission of Crimes" in the Complete Report of the 4th session of the First National People's Congress (p. 231). There were, indeed, "argument overruns" under the circumstances as there had been massive actions in the area of family planning education and services. The public confessions by Fei and others followed, also indeed, an identifiable pattern that has evolved in the politico-legal system of justice in the People's Republic of China. I would remind Aird of the fact that the world is made of highly diverse political and social systems. Confession of errors is also formally and informally part of all systems of political and legal justice (e.g., a plea to lesser charges in the United States is its equivalent). In short, the practice of lifting sentences out of context and pontificating from a narrowly constructed baseline permeates Aird's comments. His remarks about professional detachment and intellectual integrity sound hollow and only typify the essence of what is embodied in the Chinese proverb of "hanging lamb

head, but selling dog meat." On the question of rural-urban migration in the 1950's, for instance, he argued that I neglected certain evidence. My argument is that this recent migration should not be lumped together with "peasant flight" from the land in traditional China or even with that of as late as the 1930's and 1940's. Natural calamities then abounded but, more importantly, were made worse by corruption, exploitation, and wars. In the 1950's, peace was restored and efforts were made to prevent natural calamities. Land reform and agricultural cooperativization did bring far-reaching changes in the countryside, but these were not schemes for personal gains, but part of the socioeconomic reorganization. The various facts cited by Aird were exhortations to better administrative performance on the part of the cadres involved. As such, they cannot be translated into migration estimates. The impact on rural out-migration of these circumstances was probably minor in comparison to the elements newly introduced into the situation (i.e., the onset of industrialization and improved and expanded transportation networks). In any event, I also related the point that the under-employment of the peasants was the principal cause of their outmigration, and the negligence of local cadres a chief contributing cause (p. 45). Incidentally, it seems that Aird must have been wearing some darkly tinted glasses because I find nothing "grimly pessimistic" in the quotation from Chairperson Mao on page 188 of the book as Aird described. He also conveniently overlooked the sentences that read: "... in the present transitional period of tremendous social change we are still beset by many difficult problems. Progress and difficulties-this is a contradiction. However, all contradiction not only should, but can be resolved." The assessment here cannot be more honest, and there is nothing here or elsewhere that makes Chairperson Mao a pessimist.

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Aird's interpretation of China's effort to manage its demographic affairs is illfounded; it remains an unvarnished version of the previously concocted exigencies of the Cold War. While past sins are excusable, Aird would presently have acted more in keeping with his own highsounding words if he had severed the umbilical cord to that unfortunate era. After all, professional detachment is not a license to viciousness. Nor is intellectual integrity a term empty of humility. What China has done, is doing, and may do, can hardly be comprehended if one is under the influence of self-righteousness and oblivious to the diversity of approaches to population control. Unlike a self-serving monologue in which one is engaged, a dialogue derives its meaningfulness from its exchange character. In exchange, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding can only go forward through open-mindedness. Moreover, and more importantly, a dialogue is not all Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach but also may include Red Detachment of Women or the Yellow River Concerto. The sky is bigger than a frog can see from the bottom of a well, to paraphrase an old Chinese saying. Time has changed, and it is now safe to come out of the well. Turning now to Salaff's contribution, I will limit myself to a few brief remarks. First of all, nowhere in the book did I say, as she alleged, that one of my objectives was to provide material on the Chinese geographical setting as background to policy. Secondly, she faulted me for having provided insufficient information after the early 1960's (Aird made a similar point, but should have known better). As I carefully warned at the end of the Introduction, only a few references have been made to the more recent years, even though the timeperiod covered was 1949-1969. Partly, this was due to the unavailability of information; but, principally this was because there had been no known changes in China's population policy. After the

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late 1950's and before 1970, the only large and relatively systematic flow of data that was germane to discussions of population policy issues was in the area of postponement of marriage. This body of information was in print in the first half of the 1960's, to which extensive reference was made in the book. Other information was too fragmentary to warrant inclusion, particularly when nothing of a controversial character was revealed therein. I would be the first one to agree with Salaff that there are numerous gaps in our knowledge and would love to get hold of more concrete evidence on relevant developments in the area of population policies during the 1960's. But, one's wish alone does not enable one to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Unless Salaff knows of the place where the relevant data can be found (I presume that she would not consciously mislead others), it would save her a lot of embarrassment and others Ii lot of postage, if she would be good enough to acknowledge that China has not placed detailed information for the 1960's in the public domain. Thirdly, quite contrary to what Salaff said, Chapter 6 discusses not three methods of fertility limitation, but the controuersies surrounding their incorporation into China's program for planned reproduction. For this reason, and because the book is not concerned with specific birth control techniques, no reference is made to vacuum aspiration without electricity or sterilization by fusing the Fallopian tube without major surgery. Their noncontroversial nature disqualifies them from consideration; improvements in conception and birth control techniques as such are not policy issues, however interesting they may be in their own right. Fourthly, Salaff's misconstruction of the book's aims as well as her distortions of some of its contents are so rampant that I suspect she had less than sufficient time to read and to reflect on what is

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between its covers. Her remarks about the Second Five-Year Plan, for example, completely missed the point under discussion. My point was simply that what actually happened in the growth of the number of workers and employees in various enterprises and government agencies could not have significantly affected migration to Sinkiang. The degree of its implementation was totally irrelevant here, for migration could not have been nearly as high as other writers have claimed even if the plan had been fully implemented. Similarly, the reference on pages 312-314 was not to the 1956-1967 National Agricultural Program, but to a proposal made by the All China Democratic Women's Federation. It pertains to the list of activities that the Women's Federation urged rural women to undertake in connection with the possible implementation of the Plan. Almost all of these activities, as I made clear in the book, remain the same agricultural and related pursuits that have been followed in Chinese villages for centuries. That Chinese women performed these tasks before, during, and after the years referred to in the Agricultural Plan is undeniable and the significance of the list is simply that it makes evident the absence of profound change in women's work in the countryside. Again, the lack of implementation of the 1956-1967 Agricultural Plan made not even an iota of difference in either their circumstances or the point made in the book. Fifthly, I did not hazard that "the reasons for the decline in debate [in fertility limitation] were due to acceptance

of it in principle." What I actually said was that other policy measures overshadowed, but not supplanted, the largescale birth control activities of the late 1950's. The illusive structural impediments were not barriers to the social revolution in China and can hardly be so to demographic transition in any lasting sense. Furthermore, in China, planned reproduction is an integral part of China's effort to foster social structural changes. Here, not only was Salaff careless with the details of the book, but she also compounded her own delinquency by suggesting ostensibly plausible "interpretive possibilities" that are factually and logically nonsensical. There is not, for instance, a shred of evidence that the less visible emphasis on and action in fertility control after 1957 could have possibly resulted from the so-called "disillusionment." The invocation of the concept of "synoptic" planning was more snappy than sound in reasoning. The notion that the decline could have come about because of the lack of support in the local social structures smacks of heedless heckling; for it is well known that fertility control activities were being carried on all through the 1960's and have been intensified in the last several years. REFERENCES

Chi, Lung. 1973. China Explains Her Views on the Population Question. Peking Review 16:16-17. Hutchinson, E. P. 1967. The Population Debate: The Development of Conflicting Theories Up to 1900. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.