The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World

by Charles C. Mann

Inspired by The Limits to Growth approach, Song Jian, a Chinese specialist in ballistic-missile control, formed a research team in 1978 to create, in effect, a Chinese version of the Limits model. Not one member of his team had experience in demography. This didn’t stop the group from using China’s defense-industry computers to churn out population projections. Swooping curves on graphs showed China’s population reaching 4 billion in 2080, an impossible burden. Borrowing methods from Dutch computer scientists, Song’s team calculated the desired trajectory for population as if it were aiming a missile. Out came the answer, as inexorable as fan-folded paper unfurling from a dot-matrix printer: the sole route that would allow China to stave off disaster would be for all Chinese couples to have but a single child, beginning immediately. Sneering at dissenting social scientists as useless hand-wavers, Song pushed for the one-child program that was adopted by the government in 1980.