Biopolitical Knowledge in the Making: Population Politics and Fertility Studies in Early Cold War Taiwan (2016)
Huang, Yu-Ling (Author)
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Volume: 10
Issue: 4
Pages: 377-399
Publication date: 2016
Language: English
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.
...MoreArticle 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).
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).
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).
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).
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).
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).
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