Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, its political leaders have been greatly concerned with demographic developments and have looked for ways to govern the reproductive behaviour of the population (Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005). The logical consequence, to make a thorough register of the people and draw up census data as a basis for social-political decisions, was not a communist invention, but originated in the first half of the twentieth century. At that time, European and American scientific ideas of Malthusian-influenced demography, Social Darwinist race-biology, and statistics combined with older, late Imperial Chinese notions of collecting population numbers (Lee and Wang 1999; Dikotter 1995: 102–121).
