Speaker: Malcolm Thompson, An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow
Discussant: Gail Hershatter, Professor of History, UC–Santa Cruz

Abstract: What kind of problem is “the population problem” in China? That it would be a problem, or at least an issue, seems clear, but this tells us little about how, or why, it was specifically problematized there for the first time in the 1920s and 1930s. This talk—which is based on a book project of the same name—will seek to explain the sudden emergence of the population problem in China in this period not as a realization of something obvious, but as part of a general transformation of governing as a social practice.