Making population policy in the Global South: Chinese and Indian family planning during the Cold War

This article maps convergences and divergences in Cold War population planning in Communist China and ‘non-aligned’ India, with particular attention to the Chinese context. Due to their differing political ideologies, these countries initially adopted divergent population policies. Yet, in the 1950s China and India engaged in exchanges of family planning expertise. Diplomatic relations declined in the 1960s, but these earlier interactions paved the way for dialogue and cooperation in the 1970s and ’80s. This research suggests that Cold War political contingencies and material realities enabled demographic knowledge to temporarily cut across ideological boundaries with more significant long-term implications for India.Footnote11 Thank you to Kavita Philip, Arunabh Ghosh, Aya Homei, Mytheli Sreenivas and Aprajita Sarcar for their guidance as I researched and wrote this article.