Cultivating Global Citizens

Current accounts of Chinars"s global rise emphasize economics and politics, largely neglecting the cultivation of Chinars"s people. Susan Greenhalgh, one of the foremost authorities on Chinars"s one-child policy, places the governance of population squarely at the heart of Chinars"s ascent.Focusing on the decade since 2000, and especially 200409, she argues that the vital politics of population has been central to the globalizing agenda of the reform state. By helping transform Chinars"s rural masses into modern workers and citizens, by working to strengthen, techno-scientize, and legitimize the PRC regime, and by boosting Chinars"s economic development and comprehensive national power, the governance of the population has been critically important to the rise of global China.After decades of viewing population as a hindrance to modernization, Chinars"s leaders are now equating it with human capital and redefining it as a positive factor in the nationrs"s transition to a knowledge-based economy. In encouraging "human development," the regime is trying to induce people to become self-governing, self-enterprising persons who will advance their own health, education, and welfare for the benefit of the nation. From an object of coercive restriction by the state, population is being refigured as a field of self-cultivation by Chinars"s people themselves.