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.