ABSTRACT:

Over the past few years, family planning policies in China have undergone a dramatic about face. After decades of state-led efforts to prevent births through a ‘one child policy’ involving nationwide contraception, sterilization and abortion programmes, family planning officials have now embarked on a national drive to increase fertility by relaxing family planning restrictions and incentivizing birth. Yet, projected policy-change targets of around 20 million annual births have fallen spectacularly short with 9 million births registered in 2023. In this talk, I show how the ongoing reconfiguring of China’s comprehensive reproductive complex has been generative of a series of ‘fertility figures’ – ”leftover women” (sheng nu 剩女), ”bare branches” (guang gun 光棍) and “DINKs” (dīnɡkè yìzú 丁克一族) –  have come to circulate through scholarship, films, literature, popular journalism, commercials, social media and more. Such fertility figures have emerged as quantified demographic changes and projections come to be personified and stereotyped in speculations about the future.

BIO:

Ayo Wahlberg, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen