Despite the need for and importance of a book on birth control, the obstacles to a successful volume are daunting and have, until this publication, served to limit the possibility of a thorough-going analysis. The reasons are numerous. Since 1949 there have been a series of policies initiated and then set aside. Every policy seems to have had some exceptions, sometimes written and observable, on other occasions intuited from reports in newspapers and interviews. Though the diversity of the country is well recognized, understanding how it plays out in actual policy trends is much harder to assess. Until the past decade, detailed information has often been scarce and demographic indicators have been viewed with some suspicion. It is against this background that Thomas Scharping, with a lengthy and distinguished record of research, has written a study designed to fill this gap in our knowledge of Chinese development. The English version reviewed here draws on his revised 1995 German-language volume.