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One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities

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... A degree holder could 21 Chinese genealogical books record only legitimate births, but illegitimate births (out-of-wedlock births) were rare in China. Lee and Wang (1999) mention that in the historical population of China the share of illegitimate births was nearly zero. Bastardy existed, as demonstrated in Sommer (2015), but only among extremely poor people. ...
... As the upper-class and the prolific men would be more likely to be recorded with the information, examining the full sample could lead to spurious coefficients. Thus, to avoid the potential biases, I primarily examine child mortality based on the sub-sample of fathers who had such records. of the Chinese historical demography (Lee and Wang 1999). To provide additional evidence, I use a sub-sample drawn from fathers who had both sons' and daughters' records to test the correlation between social class and the son/daughter ratio. ...
... The mean number of wives for polygynous men in the six lineages is 2.2, and the number barely changes over the entire period from 1350 to 1900. 28 This may largely account for the universality of adoption in pre-modern China mentioned inLee and Wang (1999). Numerous males with no heir could not afford to remarry; therefore, to continue their own family lines, they would have chosen to adopt a brother's son. ...
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This study uses the genealogical records of 36,456 men from six Chinese lineages to test one of the fundamental assumptions of the Malthusian model: Did higher living standards result in increased reproduction? An empirical investigation of China between 1350 and 1920 finds a positive relationship between social status and net reproduction. Degree and office holders, or the literati, produced more than twice as many surviving sons as non-degree holders. The analysis explores the impact of social status on both the intensive and extensive margins of fertility—namely, reduction in child mortality and better access to marriages. The high income and strong kin network of the literati greatly contributed to their reproductive success.
... Another reason is about the traditional views: women are requested to do the laundry, the dishes and the cooking, while men drive to work. This discrimination against women has produced a stereotypical image of women, leading to the low status and unimportance of women, who account for more than 50% of population all over the world [2], [4], [5]. In this research, the discrimination against women is particularly prominent in the following three aspects: ...
... This society lack of the recognition of females. From the origins of ancestor worship in the second and third millennia BC, China has had a great preference for males [4]. The researcher further defines that during the imperial state the patrilocal and patrilineal familial systems developed strengthened this eccentric because only a son can award an identity to the new-born child and look after the old parents as well as offer economic support for them [6] [7][8] [9]. ...
... Both males and females can have the same right and chances to get to school [12]. The Constitution of the People's Republic of China, the fundamental law of the state, clearly states in its general provisions that women enjoy equal rights with men in all aspects of political, economic, cultural, social and family life [4]. 2) Classes and lectures on equality between men and women should be set up in the society, with the purpose of making people change the dregs of traditional views. ...
... They argued that these and other patterns were consistent with deliberate behaviour to delay births and cease childbearing. These findings were the basis of the claim in Lee and Wang (1999) that contrary to the beliefs of Malthus and his successors, a fertility-based preventive check played an important role in the population dynamics of China before the 20th century, and that the rapidity of fertility decline in the 20th century in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong reflected a historical legacy of adjusting fertility according to economic and other circumstances that primed the population to respond quickly when new technologies for fertility limitation became available. A vigorous debate with advocates of a Malthusian interpretation of China's historical population dynamics ensued . ...
... Early descriptive analysis of infant and child mortality led to an examination of female infanticide that became one of the foundations of the critique of Malthusian interpretations of China's historical population dynamics in Lee and Wang (1999). Lee, Campbell, and Tan (1992) and Lee and Campbell (1997, pp. ...
... The camaraderie that grew out of frequent, sustained interaction with others working with data like ours and on similar topics was also important for our own morale. We have especially fond memories of our fruitful two decade-long collaboration with Feng Wang which produced a number of discrete studies as well as Lee and Wang (1999) and Tsuya et al. (2010) and our collaborations with Tommy Bengtsson and Noriko Tsuya, which involved reciprocal visits by us in Lund and Tokyo and by them in Pasadena. ...
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The Lee-Campbell Group has spent forty years constructing and analysing individual-level datasets based largely on Chinese archival materials to produce a scholarship of discovery. Initially, we constructed datasets for the study of Chinese demographic behaviour, households, kin networks, and socioeconomic attainment. More recently, we have turned to the construction and analysis of datasets on civil and military officials and other educational and professional elites, especially their social origins and their careers. As of July 2020, the datasets include nominative information on the behaviour and life outcomes of approximately two million individuals. This article is a retrospective on the construction of these datasets and a summary of their findings. This is the first time we have presented all our projects together and discussed them and the results of our analysis as a single integrated whole. We begin by summarizing the contents, organization, and notable features of each dataset and provide an integrated history of our data construction, starting in 1979 up to the present. We then summarize the most important results from our research on demographic behaviour, family, and household organization, and more recently inequality and stratification. We conclude with a reflection on the importance of data discovery, flexibility, interaction and collaboration to the success of our efforts.
... Although China's fertility level is similar to those of most European countries at present, the fertility pattern and family system of imperial China have consistently been treated as complete contrasts to their European counterparts (Malthus 1826;Hajnal 1982). However, as pointed out by previous scholars (see for example, Lee and Wang 1999a;, this impression is to some extent misleading. Hence, this thesis is interested in providing an in-depth micro-demographic analysis of human fertility in pre-modern China. ...
... The number is highly under-recorded in the genealogies. Although Lee and Wang (1999a) consider female infanticide to be a key strategy for controlling the number of births, this chapter does not view infanticide as a birth control method and, in order to report the rate of non-regulated marital fertility, does not take it into account. 21 Thus, I approximate the number of daughters by using the "natural" sex ratio at birth, 105 boys to 100 girls. ...
... In fact, the precise frequency of the practice in pre-modern Chinese families is still uncertain, despite the fact that cases of "drowning girls" (ni nv, 溺女) are commonly recorded in county annals, local gazetteers, officials' pleas to the Court, and folklore in Ming-Qing China. 79 Lee and Wang (1999a) believe that about one-tenth of the newborn female children were murdered in the Qing imperial lineage between 1700 and 1830; in the farming population in Northeast China, the proportion was about twenty to twenty-five per cent in the period 1774-1873. 80 Although in Chapter 2 of this thesis, what I intend to show is the "true" number of children that was ever born for each married female, the missing analysis on the "true" number of daughters who survived infancy still prevents the research from revealing the complete pattern of fertility. ...
Thesis
This thesis is a micro-demographic analysis of human fertility from Chinese genealogies in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. It exploits a new genealogical dataset comprising 72,861 individuals from six lineages to account for the fertility decisions taken in Chinese families. Following the comprehensive micro-level analyses of a small population, the thesis demonstrates the main features at an individual level of the fertility patterns and the relationships between demographic outcomes and social outcomes in imperial China. This thesis consists of three substantive chapters. The first constructs the marital fertility levels and provides the ongoing debate with quantitative evidence on whether the Chinese consciously practised fertility controls in the pre-modern era. The second substantive chapter shows the social gradients in fertility and examines the mechanisms through which social status affected fertility. The third expands the reproductive success story of a single generation into a multi-generational one, focusing on the process of transmitting fertility choices across generations and the effects of family size on the quality of the children. The three chapters together exhibit the micro-demographic dynamics in Chinese families from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. The thesis shows that Ming-Qing China had a moderate fertility level, with no deliberate fertility controls. Throughout the entire period, climbing up the social ladder could significantly increase men’s net reproduction through increasing their marriage chances and the number of marriages they could have. Moreover, elites in traditional China also managed to transmit reproductive success to their offspring, mainly by passing on their high social outcomes. Family size could also affect the quality of the offspring, but the effect was not powerful enough to bring about any change in parents’ fertility choices.
... While, in principle, the chances of having male and female births are about equal in the human population (Fisher 1930), in reality, the sex of children is often 'selected' depending on parental preferences for specific parity and sex composition of surviving children (Drixler 2013;Lee and Wang 1999;Lee, Wang, and Campbell 1994;Choe, Hao, and Wang 1995;Smith 1977;Sandström and Vikström 2015;Hank 2007;Anderson et al. 2006;Drixler and Kok 2016;Reher et al. 2017;Manfredini, Breschi, and Fornasin 2013). The observed sex ratio of young children is particularly skewed among many contemporary and historical Asian populations (Zeng et al. 1993;Sen 1992;Das Gupta 1987;Coale and Banister 1996;Park and Cho 1995). ...
... The observed sex ratio of young children is particularly skewed among many contemporary and historical Asian populations (Zeng et al. 1993;Sen 1992;Das Gupta 1987;Coale and Banister 1996;Park and Cho 1995). With modern contraception and sex detection techniques, child sex selection is primarily prenatal, but in the past it was mostly postnatal, through infanticide and neglect (Hrdy 1987;Lee and Wang 1999;Lynch 2011). Explanations of the skewed offspring sex ratio from an evolutionary perspective emphasize biased investment of parents in accordance with their conditions, probably best exemplified by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis (Trivers and Willard 1973). ...
... However, empirical studies of selected human populations provide inconsistent evidence (Kolk and Schnettler 2016;Cronk 2007;Freese and Powell 1999;Gaulin and Robbins 1991). Moreover, sex selection is found across socioeconomic strata (e.g., Lee and Wang 1999). Thus, in addition to general evolutionary and biological mechanisms we may need to consider specific social and cultural contexts. ...
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Background: Child sex is often 'selected' due to parental preference, especially in historical East Asia. Postmarital residence shapes coresident kin availability and conjugal power hierarchies, which may influence the couple's preference and selection on child sex. Empirical evidence, however, remains limited. Objective: We examine whether postmarital residence influences the sex of births and how such influence interacts with coresident kin, sex composition of surviving children, household landholding, and local economic fluctuation. Methods: We analyze annual panel data of 1,045 wives, transcribed from household registers recording the entire population of two villages between 1716 and 1870 in northeastern Japan, where both virilocal and uxorilocal residence were common. We use discrete-time event-history models via binary and multinomial logistic regressions, with either clustered standard errors or random effects at individual level, to examine the effects of selected factors on the probability of having a male, female, or no birth in the next year. Results: Compared with virilocal marriages, uxorilocal marriages are more likely to have a first birth in the next year, especially a female first birth when the household is wealthy. As for second and later births, uxorilocal marriages are less likely to reproduce males in the next year when surviving children are all females, but more likely to reproduce females when surviving children are all males. Conclusions: This study is among the first to provide systemic evidence on how postmarital residence shapes child sex selection. Unlike the common perception of 'missing girls' in East Asia, shaped by specific reproductive context, both girls and boys can be missing in early modern Japan.
... Section 5 concludes the paper. 4 These studies suggested that Chinese families, influenced by the unintended consequence of their children competing for limited household resources, engaged in postnatal abortion (i.e., infanticide) and other contraceptive methods to control their fertility rates (Lee & Campbell, 1997;Lee & Wang, 1999). However, Chen (2002, 2003) pointed out that infanticide due to budget constraints cannot fully explain the dramatic decrease in male children during this period, since the Chinese preference for male offspring led to male infanticide being comparatively minimal. ...
... In this study, the data used comes from the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset-Liaoning (CMGPD-LN), a large-scale dataset that comprises triennial household register data covering the period of 1749-1909; it was collected by the Imperial Household Agency, digitalized by James Lee and Cameron Campbell, and its features have been discussed in Lee and Campbell (1997) and Lee and Wang (1999). 11 Compared with other historical datasets from China, the CMGPD-LN provides accurate information on the sociological and demographic variables required for this study, including important individual data on reproduction and education, household factors such as basic information on family members, and village-level characteristics. ...
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We paint a detailed picture of whether the trade-off between human capital and fertility decisions was shaped in a pre-industrial society during the Qing dynasty. Using data from the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset-Liaoning (CMGPD-LN), we investigate 16,328 adult males born between 1760 and 1880 in Northeast China. We control for birth-order effects and for a rich set of individual-, parental-, household-, and village-level characteristics in regression analyses on individuals from different household categories (elite vs. non-elite households). Our findings suggest that sibship size, as instrumented by twins at last birth, starts to have a substantial negative effect on the probability of receiving an education, indicating the emergence of a child quantity-quality trade-off for large parts of the population belonging to the Eight Banner System in Liaoning around the mid-Qing dynasty. Our results provide supportive evidence for the unified growth theory, showing that the decreased fertility rates in pre-transition China could be a result of rational behaviors perpetuated by households in response to higher educational returns and accessibility.
... While the concept of familial patriarchy plays a fundamental role in the literature on the 'missing girls' phenomenon among South and East Asian societies (Dong, 2016;Pande & Astone, 2007;Li et al., 2007;Attane & Guilmoto, 2007;Guilmoto, 2009Guilmoto, , 2012Das Gupta, 2010;Das Gupta et al., 2003;Arokiasamy & Goli, 2012;Miller, 2001;Greenhalgh, 2013;Quanbao et al., 2011;Lee & Wang, 1999;Malhotra et al., 1995;also Banister, 2004;Grogan, 2018;Derosas & Tsuya, 2010), the potential impact of patriarchal cultural formations on the neglect of female children in historical Europe has so far been little explored, either theoretically or empirically. This research gap is at odds with the significant variation in the manifestations of the patriarchal bias across European societies , and with recent discoveries of gender-discriminatory practices in infancy and childhood in Southern and Eastern Europe (e.g., Beltrán Tapia, 2019), which raise the question of whether the geographies of female neglect may not be accompanied by gender (and generational) asymmetries. ...
... The dowry system may further strengthens negative attitudes towards girls, since enabling their marriages is a drain on household resources (Bhalotra et al., 2020;Jayachandran, 2015;cf., Kaplan, 1985). Therefore, in rigidly patrilineal and patrilocal settings, the survival biological advantage of girls is frequently offset by the perceived economic and emotional utility of boys in conjunction with the perceived inferior status of girls, which can result in higher mortality among girls in infancy and/or during early childhood (Das Gupta, 1987, 2010Dyson & Moore, 1983;Lee & Wang, 1999;also Rosenzweig & Schultz, 1982;Den Boer & Hudson, 2017;Lee et al., 1994). The marginalised position of women, and the privileges accorded to male children for economic, social, and cultural reasons that such a system entails, can influence the extent to which couples are willing to take certain stepsincluding female infanticide or post-natal mortal neglect -to prevent daughters from flourishing in the family, and in the broader society (Banister, 2004;Guilmoto, 2012, p. 37). ...
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Although recent findings suggest that gender-discriminatory practices unduly increased female mortality rates during infancy and childhood in historical Europe, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe, there is little research on the conditions that triggered these practices. Relying on child sex ratios (the number of boys per hundred girls in a particular age group) as a cumulative measure of sex-differential mortality around birth, infancy, and childhood, this article explores whether the notion of patriarchy – i.e., varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequalities – helps to explain the variation in such discriminatory practices. For our analysis, we rely on the NAPP/Mosaic census database, which provides detailed information on more than 300 populations in historical Europe and western Siberia. Using a range of harmonised variables from the combined Mosaic and NAPP data, our results show that the Patriarchy Index, a recently developed composite measure of gendered and generational power relations in marital and family dynamics, is positively associated with child sex ratios across Europe. More specifically, we find that patrilocal norms, a low female age at marriage, and a direct measure of son preference – namely, the prevalence of having a boy as the last child – are strongly correlated with higher child sex ratios.
... China has a long tradition of universal marriage and a low level of divorce. In traditional China, marriage was parent-arranged, and its primary function was deemed to be continuation of the family line by the procreation of sons (Lee & Wang, 1999). Under traditional legal systems, divorce was only allowed under a handful of conditions, the most important of which was a wife's failure to have sons (Wong, 1982). ...
... Preference for sons has been an enduring feature of the Chinese family. In the past, son preference resulted in high female infant and child mortality (Lee & Wang, 1999). Since the introduction of the One Child Policy, persistent son preference has manifested in a widespread practice of sex-selective abortion in favour of boys. ...
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Using data for women from the 2010, 2012 and 2014 Chinese Family Panel Studies, this study investigated several aspects of children’s effects on the risk of marital dissolution, including the number of children, their age and sex composition, and the timing of conception relative to marriage. Because these explanatory variables are potentially endogenous, marital dissolution was jointly modelled with the processes of marriage formation, marital childbearing and nonmarital childbearing, and the sequencing of events and unobserved correlation across processes accounted for. The results demonstrated that childlessness significantly elevates the risk of divorce whereas the first child has the strongest marriage stabilising effect. Reflecting the strong son preference in rural China, having boys was shown to markedly reduce the risk of parental divorce among rural women. Whether a child is conceived within or out of wedlock has no significant causal effect on marital dissolution insofar as it belongs to both parents. However, positive residual correlation between the processes of divorce and nonmarital childbearing suggests the potential selection of women with non-traditional family behaviours into marital dissolution.
... The 1CP took place in a society with long history of son preference culture. Given that sons and daughters were often treated differently in traditional Chinese families and parents tended to allocate more resources and pay more attention to sons (Lee and Wang 2001), it is reasonable to expect that the only-child effect on cognitive development may be different among girls than among boys, and that girls may benefit more from being only-child than boys. ...
... With respect to gender difference in the only-child effect, Chinese parents tend to invest more heavily on boys than on girls mainly because of the traditional son preference culture (Gupta et al. 2003;Lee and Wang 2001). However, such practice only makes sense if there are multiple children in the family, especially when both boys and girls are present. ...
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Using data from a recent national survey of approximately 20,000 Chinese middle school students, we tested the difference in cognitive development between only-children and children with siblings using non-parametric matching method. We took advantage of the massive increase in involuntary only-child families in China under the one-child family planning policy (1979–2015) to reduce the bias introduced by the otherwise pervasive human tendency to avoid having only one child. Our average treatment effect for the treated estimates indicates no significant cognitive difference between only-children and children with siblings. Further subgroup analyses, however, suggest that such average effect estimates can conceal important population heterogeneities because the only-child effect on cognitive development changes drastically between subgroups of the same population. Among other potential moderating factors, birth order and gender play particularly important roles in this process.
... This work generally attributes the p e r s i s t e n c e o f m a l e -b i a s e d s e x r a t i o s t o a s t r o n g p r e f e r e n c e f o r s o n s r o o t e d i n patriarchal traditions (Das Gupta and Li 1999;Ebenstein 2014;Ebenstein and Leung 2010;Greenhalgh 1988). Although there is evidence of advocacy against the practice (Mungello 2008), families of all social strata used female infanticide and abandonment to control family size and composition (Greenhalgh 1988;King 2014;Langer 1973;Lee and Wang 1999b;Mungello 2008). Some accounts suggest that 10% of female births may have ended this way, with rates as high as 40% reported among some subgroups (documented among Imperial families during specific periods, for example) (King 2014;Wang 1999a, 1999b). ...
... Infanticide and postnatal neglect has a long and well-documented history in many cultures, including China during the late Imperial period and during times of political and economic instability in the 20 th century (Das Gupta and Li 1999;Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005;King 2014;Langer 1973;Lee and Wang 1999b;Mungello 2008;White 2009;Wolf and Huang 1980). This paper provides quantitative measurements of the practice during the 1970s among a small, but quantitatively important, subset of couples. ...
Article
OBJECTIVE Most research on population sex imbalance in China has focused on the One-Child Policy era. However, because much of China's fertility decline occurred during the 1970s, we investigate the possibility that sex ratios began rising during this period (as predicted by theory) before the One-Child Policy. RESULTS Analyzing sex ratios between 1960 and 1987 by birth order and sibship sex composition, we find that among the subset of couples expected to have the greatest demand for sons (those at higher parities without previous sons), sex ratios at birth reached 115-121 boys per 100 girls during the 1970s - implying approximately 840,000 to 1,100,000 girls missing from Chinese birth cohorts during the 1970s. Importantly, these results do not appear to be driven by differential under-reporting of living girls, or instances of adoption. Given the absence of ultrasound technologies prior to 1979, they imply the presence of postnatal sex selection in China during the 1970s. CONTRIBUTION Our work makes several important contributions to existing literature. First, we focus on the subset of couples among whom the demand for sons is predicted to be the strongest: higher parity couples not yet having a boy. Second, we estimate sex ratios by single year of age (from birth to age 4), distinguishing differential rates of infant death from more gradual neglect of girls as they age throughout childhood. Third, we combine graphical and multivariate statistical analyses to test for meaningfully imbalanced sex ratios. Finally, we measure potential irregularities in the reporting of living girls, including the adoption of girls, and we generate new estimates of unreported females.
... The shortage of women in Ming-Qing China, caused mainly by female infanticide and polygamy, made the marriage market seriously unbalanced . Marriage served as an especially "sensitive measure of privilege" because the ability to marry was contingent on having access to resources (Lee and Campbell, 1997; Lee and Wang, 1999). A substantial proportion of males, especially males from impoverished families and low-social-status males, failed to ever marry. ...
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In unified growth models, a key to achieving sustained economic growth is the evolving nexus between population dynamics and technological change. This paper uses the genealogical records of 36,456 males to investigate the nexus—the intergenerational transmission of reproduction and human capital—within six Chinese lineages from 1350 to 1920. By examining the relationship between reproduction and long-run reproductive success, the empirical results reveal that the optimal level of reproduction exceeded the sample median. This finding suggests that greater reproduction in each generation was conducive to long-run reproductive success. In exploring the mechanisms through which reproduction affected long-run reproductive success, I investigate the relationship between child quantity and quality. The results indicate an absence of quantity-quality trade-off of children in the six lineages. This paper concludes that, in Ming–Qing (1368–1911) China, opting for larger families conferred definite advantages upon high-status men, enabling them to produce a greater number of high-quality male descendants across successive generations. JEL Classification I25, J13, N35, O15
... A strong preference for sons has always been part of Chinese culture. The longstanding social norm of sons being generally preferred to daughters (Lee & Wang, 2001) is deeply rooted in the thinking of Chinese society with its ancient agricultural civilisation. First, China's kinship system always manifests itself as rigidly patrilineal. ...
Article
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The preference for sons transcends many cultures, making it an issue with local and global dimensions. This article explores if and how married women’s preferences in relation to their children are influenced by a shift in their economic status. Our results show that female employment had a significant effect on son preference. Specifically, women’s participation in the labour market reduces son preference by 15.7 per cent, and a 10 per cent increase in wages leads to a further 0.05 per cent reduction in the preference for having sons rather than daughters. The results also support the view that economic factors are sufficient to change deeply entrenched norms regarding gender preferences. We attribute the positive effect of labour participation on female bargaining power to shifts in the allocation of intrahousehold resources. The article conducts a cross-regional test to illustrate that the developmental gap between rural and urban communities partly explains China’s increasing sex imbalance. It thereby shows why the phenomenon of ‘missing women’ has played out so differently worldwide.
... Parents' commands and matchmaker's words were obeyed. Marriage was parentarranged and occurred early and almost universally (Lee & Wang, 2009). People did not have the liberty to choose their partner; instead, they needed to comply with the choice of their parents and relatives. ...
Article
Chinese modernization influenced public views on marriage. Improved education, democratization, women's emancipation, economic development, and the new emphasis on one’s self-actualization were the main factors that influenced marriage relationships. Changing attitudes and behaviors are a challenge to societal stability. Young people seem to turn away from previous traditions, conceiving marriage as an economic alliance, and look for romantic love and intimacy. Using the data from the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) of China, this paper explores the resulting gender disparities, the improvements in education and the parallel increase in divorce rates, decrease in marriage rates and birth rates, as indicators of the changing conceptions on intimate relationships and marriage.
... This static phase was followed by dramatic population growth in the mid-to late nineteenth century (in the case of China, growth was significant but steady in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and exploded in the early twentieth century; in Japan and Korea, growth began to accelerate in the late nineteenth century). More significant are findings regarding fertility: early modern China, Japan, and Korea were characterized by relatively low fertility as compared to European countries; see comparative statistics in Wang, Lee, and Campbell 1995, p. 385; see also Lee and Wang 2001. On Japan's demographic profile, see Hayami 2009 and 2015; see also Drixler 2013. ...
... In sum, adoption among the Manchu enabled families to find an heir, to obtain financial aid from the government, and to facilitate social and economic mobility. Moreover, according to the authors, this demonstrates that adoption functioned as a safety valve and was in that way an integral part of the Chinese demographic system in the past, which varied according to the levels of mortality and fertility (Lee and Feng, 1999). In a more recent study on Korea, similar conclusions were drawn (Kim and Park, 2010). ...
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L’adoption a été historiquement une stratégie familiale importante en Asie de l’Est pour assurer la continuité de la famille. Cependant, l’adoption d’enfants hors du foyer peut également être considérée comme une stratégie pour faire face aux enfants en surnombre. Ce sujet est au centre de notre article, qui étudie qui est donné en adoption et pourquoi à Taiwan durant la période 1906-1945. La base de données historique des registres des ménages de Taïwan (THHRD), qui peut prendre en compte l’évolution de la composition des ménages dans le temps, est étudiée à l’aide d’analyses univariées et d’analyses de régression de Cox. Les résultats montrent que le sexe, la position à la naissance parmi les frères et sœurs du même sexe et la variation dans le temps et l’espace sont les facteurs les plus importants expliquant la probabilité d’être adopté pour tous les enfants. La position socio-économique joue également un rôle important et la présence d’un grand-père et d’une grand-mère diminue la probabilité d’être adopté, surtout pour les garçons, alors que seule la présence d’une grand-mère a le même effet pour les filles. En outre, si l’on examine plus spécifiquement les risques d’adoption pour les filles, l’âge, le sexe et le statut d’adoption des frères et sœurs dans le ménage semblent également avoir un rôle important dans la mesure où la présence de jeunes frères et sœurs d’âge similaire, augmentent la probabilité d’être adoptées pour les filles. Ces résultats soulignent que la prise de décision des ménages en matière d’adoption est plus complexe que le simple fait de donner des enfants nés tardivement et qu’il est important d’accorder également plus d’attention aux raisons et aux motivations des ménages qui donnent des enfants en adoption. Cette étude ouvre une perspective plus large sur les pratiques d’adoption et sur la manière dont les enfants circulaient des ménages qui en avaient trop vers ceux qui en avaient trop peu et comment cela profitait aux deux.
... First, the long-standing social norm of son-preference in China is patrilineal as only sons could carry the family name and inherit the family patrimony (Bernhardt, 1995;Lee and Wang, 1999). Patrilineal son-preference is a rigid linear system along with patrilocal patterns which, leads to allocation of a larger proportion of family budgets to education of sons . ...
Article
Using survey data from China (1989–2015), we investigate the impact of the number of siblings and treated water on educational attainment of children and its effect on their earnings when they join the labor force. Instrumental variables (IV) estimation shows that increase in the number of male siblings can increase the educational attainment of females. However, the effect of an increase in the number of female siblings on educational attainment of either males or females is statistically insignificant. Access to treated water during the childhood period (0-16 years) has a positive effect on educational attainment of boys. The estimated returns to education for females (6.6%) are higher than males (5.3%). The low fertility rate in China since the introduction of one-child policy led to fewer brothers which contributed to a decrease in educational attainment of females. Improved public facilities (e.g., availability of treated water in rural areas) can increase the educational attainment of boys and thus reduce the gender earnings gap. With higher returns to education, extension of the compulsory education to senior secondary stage and loosening of the one-child policy is likely to yield relatively higher benefits to females.
... 10. All of these could have brought an adoptive son (bu tshab) or daughter (bu mo tshab) into the household, a viable solution throughout the Tibetan world where the adoptee is typically the child of patrilineal kin who becomes the household heir, as is common in Japanese and Chinese societies (Kurosu & Ochiai, 1995;Lee & Feng, 1999; see also Bedreag, 2014 on Moldovia). Interviewees confirmed the existence of such a custom in Kyirong but detecting actual cases within the register was difficult because an adoptee would simply be listed as son (bu) or daughter (bu mo). ...
Article
Despite decades of scholarly interest in the Tibetan marital practice of fraternal polyandry, very little is known about how the Tibetan family system operated in historical contexts. This study, based on a 1958 household register from Kyirong, a former district in Tibet, reconstructs nuances of family dynamics through the aid of interviews with people who were listed in the document. Kyirong’s family system is shown to be very flexible. Although patrilocality was preferred, matrilocality was a viable contingency, and although polyandry was favored, monogamy and polygyny were acceptable. Despite the heterogeneity of Kyirong’s family households, case studies demonstrate how people strove to achieve the monomarital stem family through polyandrous marriages in successive generations. Because polyandry created a surplus of marriageable women, joint families often arose, at least in form, when unmarried women remained with their natal families and had children, or when men discontent with their polyandrous unions moved into an adjunct house with a partner of choice. However, the offspring of these people had no rights of inheritance and thus were not integral to family continuity, so joint families in form functioned more like stem families in practice. Therefore, a discrepancy between etic definitions of form and emic understandings of process emerges when family typologies developed to facilitate cross-cultural research are incompatible with the way people actually understand rights and privileges associated with succession. The data and analysis demonstrate that Kyirong represents a unique version of a stem family society with an unambiguous stem family ideology.
... A történeti termékenységi mintázatok kontinuitására jobban reflektáló spacing jelentőségére vonatkozóan ld.Anderton and Bean, 1985;Lee and Wang, 1999;van Bavel, 2004. ...
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A demográfiai átmenet elméletét a társadalomtudományok egyik legismertebb modelljeként tartják számon. A tanulmány a nyugati diskurzusok kritikai elemzésével ismerteti az átmenet-elmélet keletkezésének körülményeit, valamint felvázolja a felívelésének megágyazó szellemtörténeti, kulturális és politikai kontextust. Mindezzel együtt sor kerül a modell teleologikus, valamint a modernizációs paradigmára építő jegyeinek dekonstrukciójára. Ugyanakkor a tanulmány részletes irodalmi áttekintéssel a demográfiai hagyomány átmenetiségre vonatkozó gondolkodási sémáit is körvonalazza. Ennek során bizonyítást nyer, hogy az európai termékenységi projekt (EFP) során episztemológiai alapként alkalmazott természetes termékenység gondolatköre hogyan betonozott be egy dichotomikus demográfiai korszakolást, és a demográfiai időfolyam ilyetén szakaszolása hogyan vezetett a termékenység és halandóság kauzális viszonyának felállításához. A tanulmány végkövetkeztetése szerint az átmenet-elmélet a homeosztázis keretezésében csak egy mély intellektuális diskurzus precízebb és szabatos formába öntését jelentette, amely már létrejöttének pillanatában minden téren a nyugati népességpolitikai igényekhez igazodott és a későbbi évtizedekben is ezek mentén konzerválódott.
... Thus, in eighteenth-century China even common people drank only boiled water. The city waste (including human feces) was immediately removed and used as fertilizers (Lee and Feng 1999). ...
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This book presents the history of globalization as a network-based story in the context of Big History. Departing from the traditional historic discourse, in which communities, cities, and states serve as the main units of analysis, the authors instead trace the historical emergence, growth, interconnection, and merging of various types of networks that have gradually encompassed the globe. They also focus on the development of certain ideas, processes, institutions, and phenomena that spread through those networks to become truly global. The book specifies five macro-periods in the history of globalization and comprehensively covers the first four, from roughly the 9th – 7th millennia BC to World War I. For each period, it identifies the most important network-related developments that facilitated (or even spurred on) such transitions and had the greatest impacts on the history of globalization. By analyzing the world system's transition to new levels of complexity and connectivity, the book provides valuable insights into the course of Big History and the evolution of human societies.
... This static phase was followed by dramatic population growth in the mid-to late nineteenth century (in the case of China, growth was significant but steady in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and exploded in the early twentieth century; in Japan and Korea, growth began to accelerate in the late nineteenth century). More significant are findings regarding fertility: early modern China, Japan, and Korea were characterized by relatively low fertility as compared to European countries; see comparative statistics in Wang, Lee, and Campbell 1995, p. 385; see also Lee and Wang 2001. On Japan's demographic profile, see Hayami 2009 and2015; see also Drixler 2013. ...
... Although migration has different effects on children of different age, here we stress that health is a gendered process and outcome with large variabilities between sexes. China has a strong tradition of son preference that was supported by the imperial state and Confucian ideology (Lee & Wang, 2001). Despite profound social and economic changes over time, son preference persists in China especially in rural areas. ...
Chapter
With unprecedented migration taking place in China, millions of children are profoundly affected. Using a sample of 916 children (aged 5–18) of migrants and the life course perspective, this chapter examines the impact of parental migration on children’s health. Results show that migration has a complex impact on children’s health. While migrating to cities itself does not benefit children, poor housing conditions in cities have a negative impact on their health. The timing of parental migration is important, as preschoolers migrating with parents and teenagers left behind by parents have significantly worse health than others. Migration also has a gendered effect, as teenage boys benefit from migrating to cities while suffer from being left behind when compared to teenage girls.
... This static phase was followed by dramatic population growth in the mid-to late nineteenth century (in the case of China, growth was significant but steady in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and exploded in the early twentieth century; in Japan and Korea, growth began to accelerate in the late nineteenth century). More significant are findings regarding fertility: early modern China, Japan, and Korea were characterized by relatively low fertility as compared to European countries; see comparative statistics in Wang, Lee, and Campbell 1995, p. 385; see also Lee and Wang 2001. On Japan's demographic profile, see Hayami 2009 and 2015; see also Drixler 2013. ...
... This static phase was followed by dramatic population growth in the mid-to late nineteenth century (in the case of China, growth was significant but steady in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and exploded in the early twentieth century; in Japan and Korea, growth began to accelerate in the late nineteenth century). More significant are findings regarding fertility: early modern China, Japan, and Korea were characterized by relatively low fertility as compared to European countries; see comparative statistics in Wang, Lee, and Campbell 1995, p. 385; see also Lee and Wang 2001. On Japan's demographic profile, see Hayami 2009 and 2015; see also Drixler 2013. ...
... Thus, in eighteenth-century China even common people drank only boiled water. The city waste (including human feces) was immediately removed and used as fertilizers (Lee and Feng 1999). ...
Chapter
Various parts of the early modern world developed in remarkable synchrony. For most regions, the sixteenth century was marked by a significant increase in population, GDP, number of cities and their inhabitants, trade volume, and so on. This growth was energized by intense contacts between the Old and New Worlds and the respective global diffusion of valuable resources (such as silver) and domesticates. Conversely, the seventeenth century saw a full-scale crisis across almost the whole of the Afro-Eurasian space, which had repercussions in the New World as well. The novelty of early modern dynamics, however, was in that the observed synchrony was related not only to “traditional” exogenous (climatic) factors but also to endogenous (global connectivity) factors acting in the global World System. When the Global Crisis ended, the structure of the global World System began to reconfigure, as the economic, social, and technological development of the Global North increasingly outpaced the Global South. This process laid the foundations for the Great Divergence of the nineteenth century, which has had a significant impact on the structure of the World System up to the present day.
... This rationality is a mechanism that can promote family security and upward social mobility (Espenshade and Ye 1994;Greenhalgh 1988;Greenman 2011;Tang 2004). There is a large and compelling literature that links these values to fertility and family formation in the diaspora of Chinese populations that also is relevant for the Japanese and Korean populations (see Jones 2007;Lee and Wang 1999;Skinner 1997;Waters 2005;Yap 2010). ...
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We focus on a small but growing segment of the U.S. population, those who identify as Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK), and compare CJK fertility to other race/ethnic groups in the United States. CJK women in the U.S. exhibit a distinct, pervasive, and persistent pattern of late and low fertility with nearly all births occurring within marriage; this pattern displays a strong parallel to their counterparts in their countries of origin. To accompany this description, we offer a perspective on fertility difference that has broad applicability and that does not consistently predict that differences will disappear/remain. This discussion unites the literature on assimilation, segmented assimilation and pluralistic outcomes and processes. We also discuss the possible implications of these findings for country level policies to increase fertility. Most generally, these discussions are a corrective to demographer’s penchant for predicting secular change and convergence.
... This trend was relatively short lived, as the average age at first marriage began to climb during the 1990s, largely as a result from the higher educational attainment by both females and males, but also due to a growing desire among young adults to attain financial stability and independence (Parrish and Farrer 2000). At the same time, the population of unmarried males began to increase during the 1990s, and particularly those with less education (Lee and Wang 1999). As of 2005, approximately 2% of women and 10% of men between the ages of 30 and 34 remained unmarried (Jones and Gubhaju 2009), suggesting that marriage is both highly desired and highly achieved within the population and that males are facing a considerable challenge. ...
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Abstract Using data from a recent survey of Chinese college students, this study examines the contextual factors associated with young adults’ preferences for marriage and parenthood. The analyses demonstrate that females and males prefer a later age at marriage, less than two children, and a relatively short timing between marriage and first birth. Pro-natalist attitudes and religiosity are shown to significantly influence childbearing preferences, while parental characteristics have a strong association with males’ preferences, but comparatively less with females’. The analyses suggest that young Chinese adults are still influenced by traditional cultural expectations, but that individual traits are also important. The potential influence of cultural globalization and changing Chinese gender roles are discussed.
... A partial list might include Coale (1985), Lavely and Wong (1998), Lavely (2007) and Wolf (2001). Also see discussions in Zhao (2002) and Lee and Wang (2001). 6 For example, after Newcomen and Watt pioneered the steam engine in eighteenth century Britain, by the 1830s the first railway lines were being constructed in Germany as well as the United States. ...
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This paper studies the effect of changes in the return to human capital on the fertility–education relationship. The setting is in Anhui Province, China in the thirteenth to twentieth centuries. Over this period, key changes occurred in the civil service examination system, providing a means to test whether incentives for acquiring education influenced fertility decisions. I form an intergenerationally linked dataset from over 43,000 individuals from all social strata to examine the evidence for a child quantity–quality tradeoff. First, as the civil service examination system became more predictable and less discretionary starting in the seventeenth century, raising the return to human capital, I find evidence that households with a lower number of children had a higher chance that one of their sons would participate in the state examinations. This finding is robust to accounting for differences in resources, health, parental human capital, and demographic characteristics. Importantly, the finding is not limited to a small subset of rich households but present in the sample as a whole. Second, the negative relationship between fertility and education disappeared as the lower chance to become an official during the nineteenth century implied a decline in the return to human capital. Taken together, my findings support the hypothesis that fertility choices respond to changes in the return to human capital.
... The one-sex approach is still useful when the transmission of education and other social characteristics are sex linked. For example, social positions in the patriarchal societies during China's historical dynasties (Lee and Campbell 1997;Lee and Wang 1999;Mare and Song 2014) and the priest status in the ancient Jewish population (Goldstein 2008) were inherited only through male lines. This is analogous to the inheritance of the human Y chromosome, which can be passed down only from paternal grandfathers to fathers and then to sons. ...
Article
We use a multigenerational perspective to investigate how families reproduce and pass their educational advantages to succeeding generations. Unlike traditional mobility studies that have typically focused on one-sex influences from fathers to sons, we rely on a two-sex approach that accounts for interactions between males and females—the process in which males and females mate and have children with those of similar educational statuses and jointly determine the educational status attainment of their offspring. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we approach this issue from both a short-term and a long-term perspective. For the short term, grandparents’ educational attainments have a direct association with grandchildren’s education as well as an indirect association that is mediated by parents’ education and demographic behaviors. For the long term, initial educational advantages of families may benefit as many as three subsequent generations, but such advantages are later offset by the lower fertility of highly educated persons. Yet, all families eventually achieve the same educational distribution of descendants because of intermarriages between families of high- and low-education origin.
... Although migration has different effects on children of different age, here we stress that health is a gendered process and outcome with large variabilities between sexes. China has a strong tradition of son preference that was supported by the imperial state and Confucian ideology (Lee & Wang, 2001). Despite profound social and economic changes over time, son preference persists in China especially in rural areas. ...
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With unprecedented migration taking place in China, millions of children are profoundly affected. Using a sample of 916 children (aged 5-18) of migrants and the life course perspective, this article examines the impact of parental migration on children's health. Results show that migration has a complex impact on children's health. Although migrating to cities itself does not benefit children, poor housing conditions in cities have a negative impact on their health. The timing of parental migration is important, as preschoolers migrating with parents and teenagers left behind by parents have significantly worse health than others. Migration also has a gendered effect, as teenage boys benefit from migrating to cities but suffer from being left behind when compared to teenage girls.
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Abstract The main purpose of the study is to identify the child rearing practices from human evolution to the digital era. Additionally it has explored how parenting styles was evolved overtime, particularly as mother entered the workforce. Primal parenting involves the natural parenting style. In Stone Period a prehistoric period around 2.6 million years ago and lasted around 3300 B.C. The parents of that period did not have knowledge of proper way rearing a child and developmental process (Trayon & Faith, 2013). Similarly in Bronze Period children were not facilitate with proper environment, but breast feeding and bottle feeding practices were found during that period, mothers were busy on agriculture (Vaughin, 2019). In this regard, ancient time was characterized by strict discipline, where children were expected to respect and obey their parents. During Vedic period of Bharat Dynasty, it was common for boys to be separated from their parents and raised by the tutor (Gurukul) and Military Training (Sahota, 2022). Iron period was the era of civilization. Parents were busy in trade and agriculture. Children were either carried back of mother or left to play in their own environment. Children had to involve in different activities with their parents, so that they can learn to live (Lally, 2002). Buddha was born in 6th century BCE, he was reared by his Aunt. His mother was died seven days after his birth. Buddha’s father protect him from hardship of life outside the palace and kept him isolated inside the palace (Lopez, 2023). Similarly Ancient Greece has another history of rearing practices. During this period children were very important for married people. The economy was mostly based on agriculture, therefore having more kids means having more hands to help task (mmetodieva, 2020). In the Middle Ages Period, children were largely influenced by religious beliefs. Children were seen as innocent and in need of proper guidance. Religious teaching and moral values were major part of education. However corporal punishment was commonly used for discipline the children (Marrilee, 2022). Mothers of eighteenth century were focused on culture and literacy development rather than child holistic development and nurturing care (Francus, 2013). The digital era has brought both opportunities and challenges for working parents. On one hand the digital technology provide flexibility to perform activities but on the other hand balancing the demands of a career with the responsibilities of child rearing can be challenging for working parents (Meyers, 2018).
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Malthus predicted that fertility rises with income and that people regulate fertility via regulating marriage. However, evidence on the Malthusian equilibrium has been mostly confined to Europe and East Asia. We employ Egypt's population censuses of 1848 and 1868 to provide the first evidence on the preindustrial Malthusian dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa. At the aggregate level, we document rural Egyptian women having a high fertility rate that is close to the Western European level, combined with low age at marriage and low celibacy rate, that are closer to the East Asian levels. This resulted in a uniquely high fertility regime that was probably offset by the high child mortality. Next, we provide individual‐level evidence on the positive correlation between fertility and income (occupation). We find that the higher fertility of rural white‐collar men is attributed to their marriage behaviour, and not to marital fertility. Specifically, white‐collar men's higher polygyny explains 45 per cent of their fertility advantage, whereas their higher marriage rate and lower wife's age at marriage explains 55 per cent. Therefore, polygyny was an additional factor that led to a steeper income–fertility curve than in Western Europe by enabling the rural middle class to out‐breed the poor.
Chapter
Fertility has become an increasingly important driver of population growth. This is particularly true at advanced stages of the demographic transition, when mortality declines more gradually and primarily for people in post-reproductive ages. Over time, differences in fertility across (sub)populations will also shift the characteristics of the global population. In this chapter, I discuss population growth and population shifts as two consequences of fertility. I review how population growth has developed across human history and some of its effects on the environment and human welfare. I consider Malthusianism (the idea that the view that, if left unchecked, population growth will ultimately result in human misery) as well as more optimistic views. I discuss how low fertility leads to population aging and changes the global religious landscape.
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This study analyzes, from a comparative and historical perspective, the clash between state statutory law and native customary law and the consequential effects of that rivalry on ethno-legal categories. It adopts a long-term perspective on Chinese society, with a particular focus on its history over the last three centuries. Although the imperial Chinese state had a centralized legal code, many non-Han subjects followed different legal standards and systems. Such conditions became the basis of legal pluralism and the structural constraint for full-fledged legal uniformity. It is argued that state-imposed ethnic categories in China have been institutionalized to determine those who should be protected, or even privileged, by their own native law. This is especially true during the alien dynasties of conquest, which purposely emphasized the principle of personal law to preserve legal prerogatives of ruling ethnicity. Similarly, indigenes on the frontier carried a variety of legal exemptions on grounds of the principle of territorial law. Such conditions could leave room for individual agency and provide incentives for both acculturated Han settlers and sinicized indigenes to claim native status. Several examples, including an 18th-century homicide case in China’s southwestern frontier, substantiate how individuals manipulated their ethnicity for their self-advantage and how these behaviors complicated the personality and territoriality principles of imperial law. In this sense, ethnic law served as an institutionalized distillation of ethnic group boundaries, which were realigned by shifts in self-identity. The legacy of China’s imperial practices of particularistic jural relations continues today.
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Adoption was an important strategy for early-modern Japanese families to function and continue. This study is the first to systematically examine whether survival chances differ between adopted and non-adopted children and how gender moderates the survival differentials in historical Japan. We take advantage of individual-level panel data drawn from local household registers in northeast villages and towns between 1716 and 1870 consisting of 71,677 annual observations of 10,587 children aged 1–14, of whom 384 were adopted. Our event-history analysis takes a rich set of household characteristics and local economic context into account. We also apply matching and within-family comparison approaches to account for the unequal sex and age distribution of records between adopted and non-adopted children and unobserved systematic differences between households. We find substantial survival differentials between adopted and non-adopted children, which further vary by sex. Compared with non-adopted children of the same gender, adopted boys enjoyed survival advantages, while adopted girls suffered from elevated mortality risks. Moreover, the gendered survival differentials of adopted children were particularly apparent among those aged 5–9 rather than at older ages. In line with the patriarchal norms, these findings imply potentially different familial expectations for boy and girl adoptions in shaping child survival differentials.
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Age at marriage varies greatly over time and between places. This study examines changes in age differences between spouses, as well as age at marriage, over 200 years in Taiwan and Sweden. Changes across vastly different socioeconomic and demographic contexts are explored in these two different kinship and marriage systems. Five different data sources are used to create micro-level data on spousal age differences for Swedish marriages formed between 1830 and 2006 and for Taiwanese ones that occurred between 1870 and 2015. The findings reveal two clearly distinct marriage systems that converge in some ways over time but remain divergent in other aspects. Since the 19th century Sweden has had a population that marries much later in life, when compared to Taiwan, though the pace of marriage postponement in Taiwan has made the age profiles of contemporary married couples appear more similar to those of their Swedish counterparts. In addition, the distribution of ages at marriage has also become more dispersed in the contemporary than in the historical period for both countries. While age at marriage varied greatly over the two centuries, this study puts particular emphasis on how age at marriage for both men and women interacts with age differences between spouses. Findings revealed a gendered age preference in both Taiwan and Sweden, and how this has changed over time with rising female status and development. In contrast to shrinking age differences in Taiwan over one and a half centuries, average age differences in Sweden remained relatively constant, with the dispersion of age differences following a U-shaped pattern and reaching a minimum in around 1970.
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Published in History of the Family - https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2021.1931404 - Age at marriage varies greatly over time and between places. This study examines changes in age differences between spouses, as well as age at marriage, over 200 years in Taiwan and Sweden. Changes across vastly different socioeconomic and demographic contexts are explored in these two different kinship and marriage systems. Five different data sources are used to create micro-level data on spousal age differences for Swedish marriages formed between 1830 and 2006 and for Taiwanese ones that occurred between 1870 and 2015. The findings reveal two clearly distinct marriage systems that converge in some ways over time but remain divergent in other aspects. While age at marriage varied greatly over the two centuries, this study puts particular emphasis on how age at marriage for both men and women interacts with age differences between spouses and how this has changed over time. In contrast to shrinking age differences in Taiwan over one and a half centuries, average age differences in Sweden remained relatively constant, with the dispersion of age differences following a U-shaped pattern and reaching a minimum in around 1970.
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Disparities in reproductive behavior visible in the developed world are a long‐term implication of the demographic transition. While present at the very outset of the transition, their effects are most visible once childhood mortality loses its relevance as a key constraint on reproduction. These disparities are rooted in the type of society that emerged as the result of the way the historical role of the family and individual in society interacted with social and economic modernization processes characterizing the entire century, but especially visible during the rapid acceleration of social and cultural changes after mid‐century. The way these new societies function provides a necessary backdrop for understanding fertility in a world of individual reproductive choice and competing goals. The result is that traditionally individualistic societies tend to fare better than societies where family loyalties are and have always been a cornerstone of society. Disparities in fertility are rooted in the incentives and disincentives for reproduction present in society, are unlikely to disappear anytime soon and are leading to very different rates of aging in the developed world.
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My contribution will focus on the project 'Population and society in Taiwan and the Netherlands' and offer a reflection on how and why life courses in these societies were compared. Moreover, I will reflect on what are, in my opinion, the most important findings resulting from this project, and discuss what kind of research can and should still be done in the future when comparing the Netherlands and Taiwan. As a starting point, the proposal which led to the whole project will be discussed first, followed by a description of the international scholarship that engaged with similar topics after the first ideas of the project were put to paper. To offer a structured reflection, the goals, setup and a selection of the results of the four published volumes from the project will be discussed next. Finally, based on the developments since the last volume was published in 2011, I will suggest three directions for future research, in which I will incorporate the major strengths from the project and the advice given by Engelen in recent publications.
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Prevailing approaches in historical studies have been dominated by a macro view and placed an overwhelming emphasis on the Industrial Revolution as a major discontinuity in Western development. On the contrary, recent research in accounting, management, and business history has suggested a different direction. When opting for a micro-level focus, crucial discontinuities in management and accounting in the West can be traced further back to the Renaissance period. This article thus searches for “micro foundations” in managing and accounting practices to address the ongoing debate on the East–West divergence. Despite the obvious problems with source availability, we outline a new research agenda for the debate.
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We examine how parents have made decisions about the number of children they have, given their social status in accordance with residential location (either urban or rural areas) and time (either the pre-modern or modern periods). We use two sets of microdata – Jokbo and Jejeokbu – spanning the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries in Korea. Combining the two data-sets, we use multiple imputation to fill the missing entries of some observations and apply a Poisson regression model on the augmented data. Our empirical results reveal statistically significant evidence that higher socioeconomic status is related to having more children. Additionally, our findings indicate that: (1) all else being constant, among high-status people, rural residents had more children than urban families; (2) for people born between 1800 and 1945, those born closer to the 1940s tended to have fewer children; and (3) during modernization, there was still a significant trend for high-status families to have more children.
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Rare and private variants of uncertain significance (VUS) are routinely identified in clinical panel, exome, and genome sequencing. We investigated the power of single family co-segregation analysis to aid classification of VUS. We simulated thousands of pedigrees using demographics in China and the United States, segregating benign and pathogenic variants. Genotypes and phenotypes were simulated using penetrance models for Lynch syndrome and breast/ovarian cancer. We calculated LOD scores adjusted for proband ascertainment (LODadj), to determine power to yield quantitative evidence for, or against, pathogenicity of the VUS. Power to classify VUS was higher for Chinese than United States pedigrees. The number of affected individuals explained the most variation in LODadj (21-38%). The distance to the furthest affected relative (FAR) from the proband explained 1-7% of the variation for the benign VUS and Lynch associated cancers. Minimum age of onset (MAO) explained 5-13% of the variation in families with pathogenic breast/ovarian cancer variants. Random removal of 50% of the phenotype/genotype data reduced power and the variation in LODadj was best explained by FAR followed by the number of affected individuals and MAO when the founder was only two generations from the proband. Power to classify benign variants was ~2x power to classify pathogenic variants. Affecteds-only analysis resulted in virtually no power to correctly classify benign variants and reduced power to classify pathogenic variants. These results can be used to guide recruitment efforts to classify rare and private VUS.
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This article examines birth control as practice and discourse in 1920s and 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule and explores links with family planning and reproductive practices in post-1945 South Korea. The control of women's reproduction held critical implications for meanings of domesticity, marriage, sexual relations, and new womanhood. While a woman-centered position did emerge regarding birth control, the parameters of the discourse, concerns of gynecology, and the material culture of birth control ultimately tied the bodies and health of women to their biological and social roles as mothers.
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Chapter
The historical demographic study of family structure and kinship has experienced tremendous change over the last 20 years. While the focus in the past has been on the family and the household, including coresident kin, considerable resources have recently been devoted to delineating nonresident kin. This has been done not only in societies where kinship was a major organizing principle by which social groups maintained the security and well-being of their members, but also in Western societies, where the state played part of this role. The reason for the interest in family and kin networks also in Western societies is due to the fact that, while the state had the ultimate responsibility for the security and well-being of its citizens, this task was often devolved to families and employers, the state stepping in only if these agents failed. Thus, for most of the time, and for the majority of the population, the family and the household, and sometimes also the nonresident kin, were instrumental in securing living standards for their members in both the West and the East.
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Historians have assumed that early modern Europeans did not practice neo-naticide similar to the great Asian civilizations, but sex-ratio studies are only now entering the demographic literature. This article passes in review both published and unpublished research on sex ratios at baptism in Italy, France, England and colonial Acadia, together with juvenile sex ratios drawn from censuses in Germany, France and Italy. Both endemic and conjunctural imbalances appear everywhere, but they could target females or males depending upon the context.
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