Martin King Whyte

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. “We are going to do an exercise,” Teacher Jo, an Australian psychologist and spiritual counselor, announces as he distributes pillows to the assembled. “You are going to hold the cushion at the ends, and you are going to express frustration…I want to feel a big wind coming towards me!” What he gets is a hurricane-force gale: people scream at the top of their lungs and lash out at their pillows like boxers pummeling a punching bag.

For many centuries China had the world’s largest population, and in the years since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, the number of Chinese nearly tripled, to today’s 1.41 billion. However, starting in the 1970s China began a concerted effort to place mandatory limits on births, culminating in coercive enforcement of China’s one-child policy for thirty-five years, starting in 1980.

Martin King Whyte Professor of International Studies and Sociology Emeritus, Harvard University In one of the great ironies of China’s communist revolution, Mao Zedong, a son of the soil and leader of a rural revolution, imposed on China’s peasants a system of subjugation that could be called "socialist serfdom." From the end of the 1950s until Mao’s death in 1976, the vast majority of villagers (more than 80% of the population) were bound to the soil like medieval serfs, forbidden to...