ABSTRACTIn this paper, we utilize a rhetorically grounded textual analysis to study the Open Letter, the first publicized text sent out from the Central government to all the Party and Communist Youth League members on 25 September 1980. By reading through the text, we identify three individual figures – the ‘people’ as ‘the origin of problems,’ the people as ‘reasonable and considerate,’ and those charged with advocating compliance as ‘active propagandists and responsible educators’ – that have been crafted in the (...) text. We argue that by constructing three subject positions that served to identify the people via both language and social practices, the Central government in China after Mao Zedong’s death constructed the discourses of urgency and necessity of adhering to the one-child policy to both convince and compel people to exercise responsibility in having only one child. (shrink)