This chapter broadens the scope of the analysis to assess whether blunt force regulation is unique to China. It reveals that blunt force regulation is a widespread political phenomenon found in both advanced industrial environments (like the UK) and weak institutional environments (like India and the Philippines). When political leaders confront urgent or overwhelming enforcement problems, they sometimes resort to unreasonable, one-size-fits-all measures to ensure that enforcement actions are effective. Through analyzing these cases, this chapter concludes that blunt force regulation is one of a set of potential responses to the inevitable principal–agent problems of regulation. However, the character of blunt force regulation – including how forceful or indiscriminate it is – is shaped by institutional features such as a state’s resource capabilities and coercive capacity.

In the wake of the Great Leap Forward, the State Council ordered the establishment of community family planning programs. Taking up the call for “birth planning,” officials sought to weave birth control into the local cultural fabric through plays, exhibitions, and focus groups while countering the traditional preference for large families. Yet, resource shortages, contradictory messages from the state about the efficacy of traditional medicine, and individual distrust or dislike of birth control continually undermined efforts to more systematically monitor and control reproduction. In this context, contraceptive practices involved ongoing negotiation among diverse actors: provincial and local birth planning authorities, as well as individuals and their families.

This chapter tests the theory proposed in Chapter 3: that blunt force regulation is used not to scare polluters into respecting pollution standards, but to scare bureaucrats into respecting central orders. It begins with process tracing on a case of blunt force regulation from southern China to show that two common explanations for this phenomenon – deterring excess pollution and reducing industrial overcapacity – fail to account for local authorities’ indiscriminate shutdown of polluting industries. Instead, the sequence of events reveals how local officials undertook blunt force regulation in response to sudden scrutiny from higher-level officials. Quantitative methods are then used to test this theory on a national scale. Results demonstrate that cities in which local officials were underenforcing pollution regulations were more likely to be subjected to blunt force pollution regulation than those with high levels of pollution or industrial overcapacity. These findings reveal that blunt force regulation is undertaken as a form of bureaucratic control.

Chapter 2 focuses on the praxis of birth control and abortion during the Republican era. Although sterilization and abortion were criminalized, contraception was neither explicitly endorsed nor banned. Yet, at times, local police cracked down on those who sold or consumed these products. In spite of the law, a wide range of contraceptive and abortive techniques were available to women in urban China. Grounded in folk practices, traditional Chinese healing, and Western medicine, abortion was the most prevalent form of fertility regulation that appeared in the historical record. Tiaojingyao – patent drugs and homemade herbal decoctions that blurred the line between abortifacients and emmenagogues designed to induce regular menses – were also particularly common, and by their nature, difficult to police.

The chapter tests a further observable implication of the theory that blunt force regulation does reduce pollution. Regressing pollution levels on blunt force measures, this chapter shows that this type of regulation is effective at overcoming enforcement failures; indeed, it is associated with much greater reductions in pollution than conventional regulation. These findings challenge a common conception that blunt force regulation is mere political theater, in which the government uses highly publicized spectacles to convince the public it is doing something about pollution. Drawing on interviews with national and local regulators, this chapter further illustrates that far from mere performance, blunt force measures are the result of high-level government planning, enlist the efforts of several government agencies, and constitute part of a concerted, multiyear strategy to reduce pollution levels across the country.

In the past decade, the Chinese government has resorted to forcibly shuttering entire industries or industrial areas to clean up the air. These “blunt force” measures are often taken as a sign of authoritarian efficiency; the state uses its coercive powers to swiftly eliminate polluting industries and then silence social dissent. This chapter introduces an alternate perspective: that blunt force regulation is a sign of ineffective bureaucratic control. When institutions are too weak to hold bureaucrats accountable, central leaders increase oversight by drastically reducing the number of steps and resources required to produce a regulatory outcome – resulting in blunt force measures. Through an overview of the causes and consequences of China’s blunt force pollution regulation, this chapter challenges the tenets of authoritarian environmentalism, forcing us to rethink what it means to be a “high-capacity” state.

Chapter 6 traces the One Child Policy’s lifespan from its introduction in 1979 until its replacement with the Two Child Policy in 2015. I show that the extent to which the One Child Policy was actually enforced and the ways in which it was received differed significantly in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Luoyang. For some couples, particularly those in more economically developed cities like Shanghai and Tianjin, the policy simply affirmed personal convictions that smaller families are more economical and allow children to have better educational opportunities. In smaller cities like Luoyang, however, policy violations were more common as family size – as well as the existence of a male heir – remained more important than the opportunities allocated to those children. This chapter also interrogates the renewed interest in eugenics among parents wishing to “optimize” the qualities of their one and only child, as well as the limited scale and scope of sex education, a trend that exacerbated the reliance on abortion as premarital birth control.

This chapter explores how China’s authoritarian underpinnings may affect the trajectory of its environmental regulation. It examines whether rising environmental consciousness and a shift in social and economic norms will push China towards an era of greener growth, even if institutions take time to catch up. It then assesses how the regime’s current preference for a flexible, adaptive mode of governance will impact the future of pollution control. Will this spur on a process of “coevolution,” where local policy experimentation eventually produces an unexpected but effective set of institutions that can enforce sustainable solutions to pollution? Or will the regime’s deep-rooted principal–agent problems – combined with the bureaucracy’s growing wariness of experimentation – drive the leadership towards a pervasive “short-termism” in environmental governance?

Li Xiaoping was a credit officer at a small bank branch and a married woman. One day in 1956, Chen Xu, the director of a nearby military camp, visited the bank. Soon after meeting, the two began having an affair. However, when Chen professed his love to Li and asked her to leave her husband for him, she refused. Not long after, Li realized she was pregnant and that Chen was the father. Knowing that adultery was punishable by law and an out-of-wedlock pregnancy provided the most indicting evidence of infidelity, Li decided to abort the fetus using a method she had heard about that involved consuming quinine tablets. Today quinine is used to treat malaria, but for much of the twentieth century taking an overdose to deliberately terminate a pregnancy was relatively common in China and other parts of the world.1 Though not technically banned at the national level, local authorities frequently charged and convicted people who underwent, performed, or facilitated home abortions.2 Knowing this, Li had to convince her doctor to prescribe quinine for another illness. In the end, she successfully aborted the pregnancy, and the affair was not discovered for another two years.3