James Lee
Wang Feng
Shorenstein Reports on Contemporary East Asia
Number 19
May 1998
The 1997-98 Shorenstein Seminars on Contemporary East Asia presented a public lecture based on a book by James Lee and Wang Feng. The talk took place at the Institute of East Asian Studies on Tuesday, May 5, 1998.
James Lee is an Associate Professor of History at the University Institute of Technology. He has written extensively on topics relating to comparative historical demography, immigration, food supply and population growth. His latest book, with Cameron Campbell, is Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Population and Social Structure in Liaoning 1884-1873. He also records segments on the Voice of America about contemporary Chinese population issues, and is active in organizations like the International Union for the Scientiic Study of Population's subcommittee on Asian Population and the Eurasian Population and Family History Group.
Wang Feng is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California at Irvine. He has edited several books on demography in Asia, and published numerous articles on topics including the one-child policy in China, fertility of the Qing nobility and the relationship between gender and migration.
In their paper Professors Lee and Wang reexamine the assumptions of classical and Malthusian social theory, particularly the belief that population control requires social constructs specific to the West, in the context of China's population history from 1700 to 2000. In light of new demographic data and methods, they construct a stylized model of the Chinese demographic system to contrast with the "ideal" model first proposed by Malthus. Their paper suggests that the Chinese demographic system not only provides an alternative to the Malthusian model, but that the supposed universality of Malthusian binarism needs qualification, as does the current understanding of Chinese society and the Chinese economy during the last three centuries.
As one of the first social theorists to compare the affluence of modern Western society to non-Western societies by linking the differential to specific population processes, Malthus has had a powerful influence not only over Western social theorists, but even over Chinese policy makers. For Malthus, family planning required a uniquely Western ability to calculate consciously the costs and benefits of having children and to decide deliberately to delay or curtail marriage. Malthus termed this kind of behavior the preventive check in contrast to populations that grew uncontrollably until increasing poverty led to rises in mortality, which Malthus called the positive check and identified with the non-Western world. In his theoretical framework, therefore, prosperity was the product of Western individualism and Western rationality. In such a framework, non-Western social formation and economic processes are subsumed under the antimodern category of a universal binary order. Malthus specifically identified China as the prime example of a society dominated by the positive check and virtually devoid of any preventive check.
Lee and Wang argue that China, in particular, is singled out as the personification of this other -- partly as a consequence of its size, partly as a consequence of its better-documented history. Yet, as Lee and Wang point out, the extensive scholarship on Chinese history conceals a paucity of empirical knowledge about Chinese society and population. Superficial eighteenth-century observations have consequently become time-honored truths; Malthusian hypotheses have become accepted theories.
New data as well as new methods reconstructing the population history of virtually all 1.7 billion Chinese alive since 1950 and 0.5 million of the three to four billion Chinese alive in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries are beginning, however, to support a critique of these hypotheses. Although recent research in Chinese demography is only beginning to uncover regional variations in Chinese population behavior, Lee and Wang point out that the broad contrasts with Western and Malthusian-predicted population behavior are already apparent. Specifically, they identify four distinctive aspects of Chinese population behavior that persist today, that are different from Western population behavior, and that qualify the Malthusian understanding of comparative population behavior in general and China in particular.
Lee and Wang contest the characterization of China popularized by Malthus and maintained by contemporary historians. In the typical account, low wages and poor nutrition cause a low standard of living in China. The prevalence of universal and early marriage reduces most people to a level of subsistence, while a custom of partible inheritance dooms even the rich. Finally, extreme misery encourages the common practice of infanticide. Malthus thus concluded that Chinese population processes were dominated by the positive rather than the preventive check, noting that "famines were the most powerful and frequent of all positive checks to the Chinese population." Population processes inexorably doomed China to poverty and worse.
Lee and Wang, however, bring to our attention recent evidence suggesting that Malthus' understanding of mortality in China, especially infanticide, needs qualification. In China, the distinctive effect of mortality on population was not through famines or epidemics, but through individual proactive interventions. Various individual efforts produced a specific pattern of mortality that was highly differentiated by age, class, sex, and residential group. The use of infanticide in particular meant that survivorship was also determined as much by endogenous decision making as by exogenous fortune.
Chinese parents practiced infanticide to regulate the number and sex of their children. Son preference, dating back to the origins of ancestral worship in the second and third millennia B.C., and hypergamy meant that daughters were not only culturally considered inferior, they were also perceived by most families as a net economic and emotional loss. While infanticide declined spectacularly in China during the early twentieth century, sex ratios continue to be biased toward males, implying the continued practice of infanticide and neglect. As a result, not only was Chinese marital fertility in the past lower than Western marital fertility, the average number of female children surviving to adulthood was particularly low compared to female survivorship in the West.
Excess female infant and child mortality therefore produced the second distinctive feature in nuptiality, an unbalanced marriage market in terms of sex. Females married universally and early. Males married later, if at all. Lee and Wang point out that in this respect, the Malthusian model of universal Chinese marriage is not empirically borne out. Male bachelorhood seems to be a universal Chinese phenomenon regardless of time and place. From the sixteenth through the late nineteenth century, 20 percent of all men were consistently unmarried. Whereas male marriage in China has always been restricted, female marriage has always been universal. This is in stark contrast to Western Europe, where female, like male, marriage occurred late if at all.
The third and perhaps most striking distinction in China's population history is the pattern of its fertility rates. Because of the low level of fertility within marriage, persistently high nuptiality did not inflate Chinese fertility. Contrary to the perception of Malthus and his contemporaries that Chinese fertility was relatively high, overall fertility was probably not much higher than European fertility, while marital fertility was significantly lower. Lee and Wang show that European marital fertility was, in fact, much higher than Asian, especially in the younger age groups; on average, a man married by age 20 in China rarely had more than six children if he remained in a married state to age 50. Equivalent figures for European populations were eight to nine children. Moreover, when fertility declined, it declined far faster in China than in the West. Although fertility in both China and the West has fallen to or below replacement level -- 2.1 children per couple -- the decline in Chinese fertility took less than a quarter of a century, while the Western fertility decline took more than half a century.
The fourth distinctive feature of Chinese demographic history is the importance of fictive kinship. Consistent with the surprising low fertility and survivorship rates, Lee and Wang point out that Chinese parents, ironically, resorted frequently to fictive kinship to replace biological productivity. In consequence, the Chinese developed high rates of fictive kinship indirectly through a variety of marriage forms or directly through adoption. The entitlement to children, and most important, to a patrilineal male descendant, was so important, in other words, that it even overrode the limitations of human and social biology.
The Chinese demographic system, in other words, was characterized by a great deal of human agency and individual choices that balanced marital passion and parental love with arranged marriage, the need to regulate coitus, the decision to kill or give away children, and the adoption of other children. Chinese families constantly adjusted their demographic behavior according to their familial circumstances to maximize their collective utility. Such demographic adjustment allowed them to prosper even under stress, if at the cost of considerable individual sacrifice. This deliberate decision making thus gave rise to low female survivorship and low marital fertility, which in turn enabled China to maintain low population growth at the aggregate level until modern times.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, the first of two periods of population growth took off. Between 1750 and 1950, China's population almost tripled, from 225 million to 580 million. Then between 1950 and 2000, China's population doubled, from 0.58 billion to 1.2 billion. This dramatic rise in China's population has, in turn, awakened the Malthusian concerns of Chinese leaders, but not until the 1960s. Only then did the government begin to encourage family planning in urban China, and it was not until the late 1970s that a forceful government population-control policy was formulated and enforced nationwide.
These policies from the Maoist era were then reinforced by Deng Xiaoping in the interests of the overriding objective of raising per capita living standards as rapidly as possible to levels commensurate with other world powers. Current Chinese goals to limit population to 1.2 billion or so by 2000 are directly derived from an explicit policy target to quadruple Chinese living standards to $800 per capita by that time. The result was the creation and implementation of one of the most draconian family-planning policies in world history. Population control, concomitant with economic reform, has become a primary formal state policy. Whereas previously families adjusted their own demographic behavior to economic realities despite natalist government policies, the current government enforces family planning in spite of some individual family resistance.
Because of their strong desire to raise China's living standards to levels comparable those of Western industrialized societies, the Chinese leadership escalated their policy goals in 1979 to reach replacement fertility as rapidly as possible under the slogan of one child per couple. This slogan became the basis for a mass mobilization campaign on the same scale as land reform in the 1950s and economic reform in the 1980s. In so doing, they made population policy for the first time in world history a central component of not only the national agenda, but also even national ideology. As a result, the implementation of the Chinese national family-planning program has been more insistent and more compulsory than family-planning programs elsewhere. This has led to the well-known excesses of the sterilization campaign of 1983, when cadres used and supplemented mass mobilization to force many people to undergo abortion and sterilization.
Government intervention largely accounts for the acceleration of the Chinese fertility decline; nevertheless, the Chinese fertility tradition is fundamentally a consequence of new collective institutions and collective goals, not the innovation of new ideas. In contrast to the Western fertility transition, which required a revolutionary extension of individual decision making from marriage to fertility, the Chinese fertility transition required only the extension of collective control from the family to the state. For Chinese, deliberate fertility control has long been within the "calculus of conscious choice." China's unusually rapid fertility transition may, therefore, be attributed to the fact that the Chinese people did not require a change in attitude, only the establishment of new goals and institutions, along with the diffusion of effective technologies.
Lee and Wang thus contrast the European fertility transition with the more complex Chinese path. As Malthus would have predicted, the transition in Western European society followed a path from low fertility control to high control, while maintaining a late marriage age. By comparison, fertility transition in most developing countries requires both a postponement of marriage age and fertility. Lee and Wang argue that China, however, followed a path different from that of most developing countries as well as from that of Western Europe. Fertility was originally highly controlled, but with the rise of economic opportunities in the eighteenth century and the deterioration of familial authority in the twentieth century, Chinese fertility control relaxed, resulting in two stages of population growth. The second state of population explosion then generated a collective consciousness and state resolve to renew population control and consequently produced the current family-planning program, which delays the marriage age and increases fertility control.
Lee and Wang conclude that, planning demographic events has always been an important part of Chinese lives. Decisions have always entailed careful considerations of collective needs, whether they are of the Chinese family or of the Chinese state. Rational decision making in this context is a process of negotiation that takes into full consideration hierarchical prerogatives and collective interests. What matters is not just individual preferences, but the person's sex, birth order, and relation to the household head within the family as well as occupation, residence type, and political status in the society.
Summarized by Lily Tsai.
