A Knock at the Door

He Qinglian is probably not unfamiliar to the generation of Chinese who experienced the ideological enlightenment and cultural debates of the 1980s. Her first book, entitled >i>Population: China's Sword of Damocles>/i> [Renkou: Zhongguo de xuanjian], was published in 1988, and, although it won Ms. He some attention, all eyes at that time were on the issue of ideological enlightenment and cultural fever that produced some positive effects though more fundamental issues such as those discussed by Ms. He were left on the back burner. And while these cultural issues are in fact still quite trendy today, to her credit, He Qinglian has been largely unaffected by them. Instead, her book on population cut right to the core of China's current dilemma: the enormous constraints on social development posed by the increasingly unfavorable balance between population and natural resources. Hers was a wake-up call to many people that forced them to sit down and consider whether issues other than the usual fruitless and interminable discussion of the all-embracing cultural "origins" of all our problems need to be seriously addressed. Following publication of her first work, Ms. He moved to Shenzhen in southern China where she sought more concrete experiences and personal reflections that went beyond her eight years of scholarly training. For three or four years, she wrote and said little, until she began to produce cogent and thought-provoking articles for some of China's most avant-garde journals, in which she focused on actual conditions in our country rather than the fancy theories promoted by perfume-parlor pundits that so often fill these publications. And now, eight years since publishing her first work, she has once again won our attention with a new "knock on the door" that we cannot ignore. Indeed, we would be derelict if we dismissed the contribution she has made to the realm of ideas in China in the new and provocative work that follows.