Population Policy as a Means for Bio-Politics: The Cases of Romania and China

Abstract

After the discovery of “population” in modern society, domination over the body has been enacted by a set of interventions which are called regulatory control, or bio-politics by Michel Foucault. From the eighteenth century onwards, bio-politics has involved any kind of intervention which acts as means for forming the population according to the wills of those with power. This has led to an era of bio-politics in which fertility in particular has become regulated in accordance with political economy. Hence the body, especially the female body, has been reduced to an economic object by detaching her identity, personal aspirations and desires. In turn, sexuality becomes a subject of economic interventions through pronatalist and/or antinatalist politics. In either way, those interventions should be methodologically regarded as instruments of bio-politics. This paper specifically focuses on pronatalist and antinatalist politics as bio-political instruments in the well-known Romanian case and the Chinese case by drawing upon the Foucauldian perspective of bio-politics.