Constructing Population Crises: Governmentality and Discursive Shifts in Chinese Official Media,1946–2024
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How has the population been constructed as knowledge and mobilized as a tool to legitimate the social control of bodies in China over the past eight decades? Using computational text analysis on People’s Daily—the most authoritative government newspaper in China, the study traces the thematic changes surrounding population issues. Theoretically grounded in Foucault's “governmentality,” this research views government narratives as a discursive infrastructure of social control, which produces “truths” about the population to justify interventions into private life in the service of national goals. This study also concerns state legitimacy through flexible discourse, sustaining authority even as narratives are historically contingent and, at times, contradictory. By tracing these discursive shifts, this research shows how knowledge about the population both shapes and is shaped by governing priorities, configuring the interpretation, problematization, and governance of the population across changing political contexts.
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