Article ID: CBB825490905

Biopolitical Knowledge in the Making: Population Politics and Fertility Studies in Early Cold War Taiwan (2016)

unapi

Like many developing countries in the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan experienced a social process of constructing and controlling population that relied on demography and fertility studies as essential governing tools. This article investigates population politics and biopolitical knowledge production in postwar Taiwan through synthesizing three bodies of literature that have just begun to comment on one another: histories of postwar population control, analyses of the technoscientific turn in Cold War history, and forensics into the production of social-scientific knowledge via science-study approaches. Along with the complexities of Asian biopolitics, three main social elements affecting the production of biopolitical knowledge at the time are discussed: (a) the historical backstage on which the Cold War and the civil war met, (b) the acting group of Taiwanese and US agencies and individuals who took part in the process, and (c) the three types of fertility studies and the data from them that ultimately expanded the focus of the process of population control from the population in general to the reproductive behavior of women. The complexities of Asia biopolitics are also discussed.

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Includes Series Articles

Article Darshi Thoradeniya (December 2016) Altruism, Welfare, or Development Aid? Swedish Aid for Family Planning in Ceylon, 1958 to 1983. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (pp. 423-444). unapi

Article Kayo Sawada (2016) Cold War Geopolitics of Population and Reproduction in Okinawa under US Military Occupation, 1945–1972. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (pp. 401-422). unapi

Included in

Article Susan Greenhalgh (December 2016) Cold War Population Science and Politics in Asia. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (pp. 469-474). unapi

Article Aya Homei (December 2016) Between the West and Asia: “Humanistic” Japanese Family Planning in the Cold War. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (pp. 445-467). unapi

Article DiMoia, John P. (December 2016) “Counting One’s Allies”: The Mobilization of Demography, Population, and Family Planning in East Asia, Late 1920s–Present. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (pp. 355-376). unapi

Article Homei, Aya; Huang, Yu-Ling (December 2016) Population Control in Cold War Asia: An Introduction. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (pp. 343-353). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB825490905/

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Authors & Contributors
Homei, Aya
Greenhalgh, Susan
Vittoria, Albertina
Tinn, Honghong
Nicholas Anthony Autiello
Lee, Sujin
Journals
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Technology and Culture
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Social History of Medicine
Public Understanding of Science
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Publishers
University of California, San Diego
University of Minnesota Press
Oxford University Press
Cornell University Press
Carocci Editore
Cornell University
Concepts
Cold War
Population control
Science and society
Family planning
Eugenics
Biopolitics
People
John F. Kennedy
Mao, Zedong
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
20th century, early
Places
Taiwan
United States
China
Japan
East Asia
Okinawa
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