THE BIRTH OF THE CHINESE POPULATION: A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF GOVERNMENTAL LOGICS by Malcolm Thompson A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (History) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) June, 2013 © Malcolm Thompson, 2013 ABSTRACT It was only in the early twentieth century that China discovered that it had a population, at least if a population is understood not as a number of people but instead in terms of such features as relative levels of health, birth and death rates, sex ratios, and so on—that is, as an object with a specific rationality that can be managed and improved. In 1900, such a conception of the population did not exist in China; by the 1930s, it was utterly pervasive. How did this transformation take place? This dissertation argues that it occurred at the level of techniques of governing and systems of knowledge production, and explains it from the perspective of changes in the institutional and epistemological forms by which interventions into other people's activities are organized. The installation of populationist practices into China is tracked in four sites: 1. The problem of “race efficiency”—formalized in this period as the cost in “race energy” of producing a given increment to a population—and analyses of the effects of different kinds of social organization on the production of life. 2. The institutional division of population registration into censuses (“statics”) and vital statistics (“dynamics”)—in a word, the formation of a statistical system based on mechanics. 3. Public health, whose object of care is not patients but the collective life of the population and its conditions of existence. 4. The problem of the China's “rural surplus labour-power” in relation to the formation of a national economy. This dissertation shows how the privileged position of the population in political and economic reflection in Republican China carved out a field of governability by which it was possible to enchain a variety of previously disconnected fields of activity into a single logic, the axiom of which was the capitalist accumulation of life. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................................ii TABLE OF CONTENTS..............................................................................................................iii LIST OF TABLES..........................................................................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES.......................................................................................................................vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.........................................................................................................vii CHAPTER ONE—INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................1 Which “Population Problem”?..............................................................................................1 The Population–Family–Economy Nexus.............................................................................6 Toward a History of Governmental Logics.........................................................................16 Fields of Governability........................................................................................................20 Capital and Capitalist Governmentality..............................................................................28 Chinese Nationalism and Its Apparatuses...........................................................................36 “Agency”.............................................................................................................................40 Outline of the Dissertation...................................................................................................46 CHAPTER TWO—“RACE EFFICIENCY”................................................................................51 Introduction.........................................................................................................................51 The General Problem of Race and Efficiency.....................................................................53 The Racial Efficiency of the Chinese..................................................................................59 Ubiquitous Life....................................................................................................................68 Governing Indirectly...........................................................................................................76 The Nation as Entrepreneur of Itself...................................................................................83 The Logical Structure of Biopolitical Governing................................................................91 CHAPTER THREE—“THE BOOKKEEPING OF CHINESE...................................................96 HUMANITY”: LIVING CAPITAL AND VITAL STATISTICS Late Imperial Population Registration.................................................................................96 The Creation of Vital Statistical Capacity.........................................................................104 The Form of Vital Statistical Knowledge..........................................................................118 Living Capital....................................................................................................................128 V = $, or: Populationism and Capitalism..........................................................................137 CHAPTER FOUR: THE VIRTUAL OBJECT OF PUBLIC......................................................143 HEALTH, OR: THE PROBLEM OF LIFE Public Health as an Apparatus...........................................................................................143 iii The Manchurian Plague.....................................................................................................153 Research on Life and Death..............................................................................................159 The Apparatus of Environmental Management.................................................................163 The Nature–Population–Society Nexus............................................................................183 CHAPTER FIVE—“THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF CHINA'S................................................187 RURAL POPULATION” The Immanence of Health and Wealth..............................................................................187 Quantitative Economics, Equilibria, and Indifference......................................................192 Rural Economics and the Man-Work Unit........................................................................205 The Buck Survey and China's Rural..................................................................................210 Surplus Labour-Power Rural Statistics...................................................................................................................224 The Chinese Agrarfrage....................................................................................................232 “Harmonizing Labour and Capital”...................................................................................245 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................247 CHAPTER SIX—CONCLUSION.............................................................................................250 The Population as the Subspace of Governing..................................................................250 The Rebirth of the Chinese Population.............................................................................254 BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................................271 iv LIST OF TABLES 5.1 Basic farm and population data, Yangtze Rice-Wheat Area.............................................214 5.2 Total Man-Labour Requirements, Yangtze Rice-Wheat Area...........................................214 5.3 Ratio of population to ME by farm size, Yangtze.............................................................216 Rice-Wheat Area 5.4 “Adult Male Unit” conversion ratios................................................................................219 5.5 “Standard” vs. Chinese age distributions..........................................................................230 v LIST OF FIGURES 3.1 Location of vital surveys conducted as part of J.L. Buck's...............................................111 land utilization survey (1929–1933) 3.2 Organizational chart of the Nanjing Municipal Vital Statistics.........................................113 Coordinated Office 3.3 Group photo of the staff of the Nanjing Municipal Vital..................................................114 Statistics Coordinated Office 3.4 Nanjing Municipality, deaths by week, July 1934–June 1935..........................................125 3.5 Dot map, “Distribution of Plague, 1910”..........................................................................128 4.1 The microscopic scale of plague, the human scale, and the..............................................156 scale of the population. 4.2 Schema of an organic system............................................................................................166 4.3