Seeing like a Population Indicator: Shifting Cultural Schemas behind China's Changing Fertility Dynamics

How are people’s cultural understandings towards fertility linked with aggregate-level demographic dynamics? And how do institutional efforts to promote fertility by foregrounding the indicator of “fertility intention” paradoxically lead to its opposite? Extant scholarship on fertility culture addresses China’s fertility decline by solely focusing on the content of an essentialized “fertility tradition” replaced by its more “modern” counterpart under the second demographic transition; far less is learned about how the ways in which fertility is framed by different population indicators or demographic discourses shape people’s cultural understandings towards fertility and then aggregate-level fertility patterns. This article brings these institutional “framings” of fertility back in and takes a culture and cognition approach to exploring the shifting cultural schemas regarding fertility behind China’s changing fertility dynamics since 1950s. Through a textual analysis of archival data collected from governmental documents, media discourse and public narratives on fertility within a period spanning over 70 years, this article demonstrates that several schema shifts took place whereby the schema on fertility as an “individualized intention” has replaced previous ones as family obligations or collective missions. This transformative process is paradoxically brought by the complicity between state intervention and demographic knowledge-making. When the state attempted to reverse the trend of fertility decline by measuring people’s fertility intentions and designing solutions on turning these intangible intentions into fertility behaviors, people, especially teenagers, internalized the individualized schema implicated in this indicator and further mobilized a narrative that centers on their autonomy or free will to choose whether to have children or not, since fertility has been framed as an “individualized intention”. This article demonstrates a performative relationship between demographic knowledge-making and demographic realities; it reveals population indicators themselves as not simply describing or measuring realities but performatively shape the ways people see themselves related to broader demographic patterns.