Green revolution, demographic revolution: Planning (re-)production in rural Taiwan, 1950–79

Abstract This paper investigates modernisation policies for agricultural production and human reproduction in postwar Taiwan and their internal contradictions. The main actor was the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR). The first half of the paper discusses how the JCRR allied with American experts to overcome military opposition to family planning by highlighting the economic burden of population growth. The second half of the paper studies how, as population control gained wider support in the 1960s, the JCRR embedded family planning in the extension network while, ironically, facing the challenge of rural exodus induced by its own policy. By 1980, Taiwan’s family planning programme was declared a success, but rural decline cast a shadow over its food security. By scrutinising the synergy and contradiction between the two policies, this paper illustrates the ambivalent legacies of modernisation and the entangled politics of land, food, and population.