East Asia is one of the most important origins of government-led population control in the mid-twentieth century. The states in Japan (1946-62), mainland China (1958-73), Korea (1951-1961), and Taiwan (1949-1964) developed different discourses and intervening policies of population control. In particular, Japan witnessed a population regime of human resource paradigm aimed at higher labor quality in the early 1960s, while the Chinese government launched a Malthusian paradigm to accelerate capital accumulation by slowing down population growth in the early 1970s. The states of Korea and Taiwan also established the Malthusian paradigm in the 1960s and transferred it to the human resource paradigm in the 1980s. This dissertation seeks to explain why population problems were constructed as an economic crisis and how the process shaped different population policies. I argue that the population problems were constructed as an economic crisis through the elite conflicts for different industrial strategies. Population discourses contribute to elite conflicts in three ways, namely, the mechanisms of visualization, neutralization, and politicization. The role of elite conflicts in shaping population problems further explains the rise of different population paradigms in East Asia.This study contributes to the existing literature by historizing the population policy processes and exploring how the population discourses and policies were "locked in" the elite politics prevailing in the industrialization of East Asia. It also associates the literature on population history with the affluent theories of developmental states. My conclusion reveals the isomorphism between the Malthusian paradigm of population policy and the accumulative model of the East Asian developmental states. It helps to understand the extremely low fertility rate prevailing the contemporary East Asian countries and indicates the broad policy impacts of the East Asian economic model.

Shows how Japanese anxiety about overpopulation was used to justify expansion, blurring lines between migration and settler colonialism. This title is also available as Open Access.

View of the principle of population, by T. Malthus.

Essay from the year 2002 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Miscellaneous, grade: 1.1 (A), Oxford University (New College), 4 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus published his first Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 in order to refute the views expressed by utopian writers and philosophers who believed that society could be reshaped in a new form which would lead to a better life for all. Malthus thought that this would never work simply because there would never be enough food to support an idealistic society. In his works Malthus set up laws about society based on past and present evidence and he tried to make future predictions of populations. Although his work has been very influential, it was his fate to frame an analysis of the relationship between population, economy and society during the last generation to which it was applicable. There have been many studies to show whether Malthus was correct for his time and some limitations of his writings have been pointed out. Some of the main limitations of his works are concerned with his views of non-modern Western and non-modern societies.

An investigation of the cause of the present high price of provisions.--A letter to Samuel Whitbread, Esq., M.P., on his proposed bill for the amendment of the poor laws.--A letter to the Rt. Hon. Lord Grenville, occasioned by some observations of His Lordship on the East India Company's establishment for the education of their civil servants.--Observations on the effects of the corn laws.--The grounds of an opinion on the policy of restricting the importation of foreign corn.--An inquiry into the nature and progress of rent.--Statements respecting the East-India College.

Although Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is often cited as the founding text of the U.S. environmental movement, in The Malthusian Moment Thomas Robertson locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in twentieth-century adaptations of Thomas Malthus’s concerns about population growth. For many environmentalists, managing population growth became the key to unlocking the most intractable problems facing Americans after World War II—everything from war and the spread of communism overseas to poverty, race riots, and suburban sprawl at home. Weaving together the international and the domestic in creative new ways, The Malthusian Moment charts the explosion of Malthusian thinking in the United States from World War I to Earth Day 1970, then traces the just-as-surprising decline in concern beginning in the mid-1970s. In addition to offering an unconventional look at World War II and the Cold War through a balanced study of the environmental movement’s most contentious theory, the book sheds new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the rise of consumption, the growth of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the civil rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”

Malthus has prepared in this work the general rules of political economy. He calls into question some of the reasonings of Ricardo and attempts to defend Adam Smith.