Susan Greenhalgh

Susan Greenhalgh is an American anthropologist specializing in the intersections of science, the state, governance, and society in contemporary China. She is John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society Emerita at Harvard University.

She is best known for her work on the one-child policy, Chinese science and technology, the politics of the obesity epidemic, and the corporate distortion of science.

In 2016, She was named a Guggenheim Fellow and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow at Harvard University. She is also the recipient of the Joseph Levenson Book Prize and the Rachel Carson Prize.

Early life and education

Greenhalgh earned her B.A. in psychology from Wellesley College in 1972. A six-month journey to Nepal, where she lived for months in a rice-growing village, followed by extensive travel throughout India, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe convinced her to study anthropology and work on issues of third world poverty and underdevelopment. She received her M.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1982) in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University, where she also earned a certificate from the East Asian Institute of the School of International and Public Affairs.

Career

Greenhalgh began her career as a postdoctoral fellow at the Chinese Studies Center, University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently worked at the Population Council in New York as a Berelson Fellow, associate, and senior research associate (1983-1994). She was a visiting scholar at Xi’an Jiaotong University (1988) and taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School on separate occasions in 1993 and 1994.

From 1994 to 2011, Greenhalgh was on the faculty of the University of California, Irvine, where she served as associate professor and later professor of anthropology. She was faculty-in-residence for the University of California Washington, D.C. program.

In 2011, she joined the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where she was Professor of Anthropology and held the John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Professorship of Chinese Society. She became research professor in 2018 and professor emerita in 2023. She has also held visiting appointments at Academia Sinica in Taipei and at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Research

Greenhalgh's scholarship addresses critical issues of the day through the lens of anthropology. Her early research focused on the dynamics of gender and family entrepreneurship in Taiwan's rapid postwar development.

With the 1980 launch of the one-child policy, she turned her attention to state reproductive and population policies. Greenhalgh spent over two decades studying the origins, implementation, and broad effects of China’s one-child policy.

Moving beyond conventional analyses of population policies, her work applied concepts of biopolitics and governmentality to state-directed population control projects, adapting ideas based on Western experiences to fit the Chinese context.

Her book Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (with Edwin A. Winckler, 2005) charts the construction since around 1980 of a gigantic apparatus for optimizing the quantity and quality of the population, the rise of a vast new field of biopolitics, and the historic shift from hard Leninist to softer, market-oriented forms of population governance.

Her work Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (2008) traces the roots of the one-child policy to Western cybernetics and Chinese missile science, documenting the mutual construction of science and policy at a time when modern science and technology were being celebrated as the keys to China's modernization.

Her book Global Citizens (2010) shows how, by transforming China's rural masses into more modern, entrepreneurial, self-directed workers and citizens, the governance of the population has helped foster China's global rise.

During the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, when the coercive nature of the one-child policy was the focus of intense debate in American politics, Greenhalgh was actively involved in educating the American public, media, and congress about the policy. She served as policy analyst for the U.S. Immigration and Nationalization Service and spoke before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Congressional-Executive Commission on China. In 1993 she served on a crucial delegation of experts sent to China by the United Nations Population Fund to investigate the causes of a decline in fertility so rapid it raised many questions.

Through her frequent visits to Chinese universities and chairship of the Committee on China Study and Exchange within the Population Association of America (1986-1992), Greenhalgh was instrumental in establishing formal ties between the population study associations of the United States and China.

Her later work broadened to examine science and technology as instruments of governance. Foregrounding the notion "governing through science," the edited collection Can Science and Technology Save China? (with Li Zhang, 2020) shows how science and technology have been critical to the making of Chinese society, but not in the ways party leaders had hoped.

In recent years Greenhalgh has focused on the culture and politics of the rise in unhealthy weights. Her book Fat-talk Nation: The Human Costs of America's War on Fat shows how the epidemic of obesity has produced a parallel explosion of "fat-talk" that is damaging the bodily and emotional health of young people, and disrupting families and intimate relationships.

Since 2013, Greenhalgh has turned her attention to [or: investigated] the subtle ways corporations sometimes distort science to protect profits, focusing on the influence of Western food and beverage multinationals on obesity science and policy. Her book Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola (2024) examines how corporate-funded researchers created a "soda-defense science" (or soda science) that shifted attention from diet to exercise as the key factor in obesity prevention (a view few share), shaping public health approaches in both the United States and China.

Awards

She was named a Guggenheim Fellow (2016–17) and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow at Harvard University (2016–17). Her book Just One Child won the 2010 Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies and the Rachel Carson Prize of the Society for the Social Study of Science, and received honorable mentions for the Gregory Bateson Book Prize and the American Ethnological Society’s Senior Book Prize.

Other honors include the Clifford C. Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement from the Population Association of America and the Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for Excellence in Writing and Editing in the Population Sciences.