Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stevan Harrell is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington and coeditor of Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era (California, 1993).

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Using local studies to answer global questions, this compilation from eight scholars takes on traditional notions concerning historical Chinese population trends. Provoking rather than defining, these studies challenge some of the prevailing theories on demographic rates and family structure in late imperial China; they challenge the ideas that the Chinese were a low-fertility population and that population growth in the late imperial period was interrupted by severe mortality crises. Using local and primary materials - genealogies, epitaphs, and household registers - this collection examines and explores the important issues of fertility, mortality, family structure, and migration patterns. With the family-level data from those unique sources, this book investigates and illuminates the demographic processes behind late imperial China's population growth.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chinese Historical Microdemography

University of California Press

The study of Chinese historical demography is still in its infancy.1 Since the publication of Ho Ping-ti's impressive summary work, Studies on the Population of China , in 1959, however, a sort of "standard model" of what happened has been accepted in most Western scholarship. This model sees a gradual but bumpy rise in population, from about 50,000,000 in the Han dynasty to over 430,000,000 in the mid-Qing, and the numbers rise and fall with the fortunes of the dynasties (Ho 1959:27778).

This model has recently been challenged explicitly from two directions. Bielenstein (1987) has asserted that the whole idea that mortality crises were serious enough to cause declining population for more than a few years is one that does not make sense either in terms of what we know about demographic rates or in terms of the figures we can derive from censuses and tax-registration records throughout various dynasties. He sees instead a curve that although bumpy is always rising, with changes in slope but never an actual turn downward. At the same time, Skinner (1987) has challenged the standard model from a different direction: he has shown through an internal statistical analysis that some of the records thought to be among the most accurate used by Ho and others to formulate the standard model are in fact based not on any kind of empirical population counts but on a simple algorithm applied annually to the previous year's records. Skinner's demonstration was for Sichuan in the mid-Qing only, but if those records are spurious, Skinner asks, how can we trust other records from remoter times based on even more obscure methodologies?

There is also a third, and more implicit, challenge to the standard model: a challenge that accuses the model less of inaccuracy than of incompleteness and oversimplification. The standard model has been accepted on the rather naive assumption that processes were similar everywhere in the country, that

the effects of the dynastic cycle were similar within and across regions. But we now know from the grand conceptual model put forth by Skinner (1985) and from various locally based empirical studies that the economic conditions faced by different regions, or by core and peripheral areas within the same region, were in fact different in their nature and in their timing. We would expect regions to be affected differentially not only by factors that raise or lower fertility and mortality but also by migration, as indeed Ho pointed out in his original work (Ho 1959:13668). But as in the case of other factors, migration has been studied from data that purport to portray its aggregate results rather than from descriptions of its actual process.

If the standard model stands challenged, then, it is more than anything because it is based on aggregate figures compiled by governments for taxation and land-registration purposes rather than on any kind of population records built upon life histories of individuals. The great advances made by European historians of population in the last two decades have been based on individual records, upon the detailed analyses of small populations taken as representative of a particular section of the larger whole. For certain European populations we now know not just aggregate counts but also the fertility, nuptiality, and mortality processes that have contributed to these counts. (See Stone 1981.) If we are going to understand population process in China, we are going to have to study the process at the individual and family level. A start has been made in this direction for the twentieth century. The articles published in Hanley and Wolf (1985) represent the beginning of historical microdemography in China. In their introduction to that volume, for example, Wolf and Hanley develop the idea that there was a "Chinese regime" of demographic process, with basic features of early and universal marriage, moderate to high marital fertility,2 and joint (or grand) family organization.3 They contrast this regime with the "Japanese regime" of later marriage, low fertility involving conscious fertility limitation, and stem family organization, as well as with the northwestern European regime described by Hajnal (1965), in which marriage is late and not universal, merital fertility high, and family organization primarily nuclear (Wolf and Hanley 1985: 16).

There has been particular progress in recent decades in understanding one aspect of this demographic regimethe developmental cycle of the Chinese family. Beginning with the work of Maurice Freedman in the postwar period (1958, 1966) and proceeding to the empirical studies of Arthur Wolf (1985a),Wolf and Huang (1980), Myron Cohen (1968, 1970, 1976), Burton Pasternak (1983), and others, we have gained an understanding of the demographic and ecological/economic conditions under which the Chinese joint family system does or does not reach full fruition. We find in general that prosperity itself encourages the development of joint families, both by increasing fertility and by delaying family division, and that

certain economic conditions, particularly those that encourage pooling of either labor or capital, also delay family division (Cohen 1976; Harrell 1982). We have come, in fact, to the point of challenging earlier assertions by anthropologists Francis L. K. Hsu (1943) and Fei Xiaotong (1939), who surmised that the joint family was an exclusive preserve of the elite. Wolf (1985a) in particular has shown that opportunities to form joint families extended to all but the poorest strata of the population in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Lee's recent work (Lee and Eng 1984, Lee 1990) has demonstrated a developmental cycle for nineteenth-century Liaoning farmers in which families commonly grew to the joint stage of married brothers and their wives living together, and often even beyond that.

These initial steps toward understanding the actual processes behind China's population history are very useful, but they also lack something vital to the whole enterprise: historical depth. That their detailed analyses are based entirely on late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century records leaves open the possibility that something very different might have been going on in earlier periods. If we wish to understand the bumps in the long-term population curve, we need to extend to earlier periods the study of the same factorsfertility, nuptiality, mortality, family organization, migrationthat have made at least provisional sense of the twentieth-century data.

The conference that gave rise to this volume was suggested by Professor G. William Skinner on the basis of his hope that the study of genealogies (and secondarily other available historic microsources) would be able to bring the detailed examination of particular cases to bear on the general problems of China's population history. All of the papers represented in this volume approach Chinese population history from this perspective: they consider detailed evidence for small populations in order to observe trends in the regional history of...