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6. This village study – combining anthropology and demography – was conducted in 1993 and covered 471 households and 2,104 people. The village was chosen based on an investigation of background information of its county, which ensured that it was not exceptional and that findings could also be useful in understanding other parts of rural China. For detailed information on the methodology of the study and the county and the village setting, see Zhang, Weiguo, Economic Reforms and Fertility Behaviour: A Study in a Northern Chinese Village (The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 1998).Google Scholar

7. Mosher, (A Mother's Ordeal and Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese (London: Robert Hale, 1983))Google Scholar and Aird (Slaughter of the Innocents), however, present an image of family planning cadres as coercive, merciless figures who are manipulated by the state and all behave in the same way. For a criticism of articles that have appeared in Western periodicals presenting Chinese family planning issues in a simplistic and distorted fashion, see Jeffrey, Wasserstrom, “Resistance to the one-child family,” Modern China, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1984), pp. 345–374.Google Scholar

8. Greenhalgh, “The peasantization of population policy in Shaanxi.”Google Scholar

9. Greenhalgh, “Controlling births and bodies in village China.”Google Scholar

10. There should be three cadres because the village has more than 1,000 members (personal communication with the county, township and village cadres).Google Scholar

11. From my interviews, several leaders of the residential groups confirmed that they quit after “too difficult work and too little payment.”Google Scholar

12. Wasserstrom, “Resistance to the one-child family.”Google Scholar

13. Condoms are available in the village shops; however, it seems that they are sold as toys for children rather than as contraceptives for adults.Google Scholar

14. Some residents who live in the village but hold non-agricultural household registrations usually get their contraceptives from their work units. For those couples with husbands working outside the village and holding urban household registrations and wives in the village with the village's rural household registrations, it is assumed that responsibility for the couple's family planning lies with the husbands' work units, and not with the village family planning commission. However, work units find it difficult to monitor family planning of those families, and village cadres simply do not interfere.Google Scholar

15. Taken from fieldwork notes, 1993.Google Scholar

16. This was a county-wide activity. In other townships, the Party secretary, governor of the county and other county-level cadres together with township cadres held the same type of village meeting.Google Scholar

17. It would be impossible to present a comprehensive account of each family planning campaign here. I will present only my own observations from the fieldwork.Google Scholar

18. Village cadres told me (and this was confirmed later by township cadres) that a neighbouring village collected 400 yuan in fines for illegal or early marriage – 100 yuan more than the village. Although the neighbouring village was smaller, and was thus considered “easier” in terms of carrying out family planning work, village cadres need not match their performance, but can make their own policy according to their own situations. Concrete measures in the implementation of state policy can vary from village to village.Google Scholar

19. This refers specifically to the promises village cadres made that couples accepting sterilization would not be fined for previous extra births.Google Scholar

20. Through the loudspeaker system, village cadres informed households with family planning problems that they should remain in the village during the family visits, or cadres would break in and take household property away as collateral.Google Scholar

21. Taken from fieldwork notes, 1993.Google Scholar

22. This was 300 yuan, but was not specified in the decision made by village and township cadres.Google Scholar

23. According to township regulations, the village had to pay its expenses by requesting the township family planning implementation team to assist the family planning campaigns.Google Scholar