This is a proposal to analyze the determinants of year-to-year change in fertility in three villages in China's Shaanxi Province during 1962-87. Based on access to village society provided by collaboration with Chinese scholars, this is the richest-indeed, the only-data set available for the analysis of a broad range of sources of reproductive change in contemporary China. The data set, gathered by the PI, who is an anthropologist by training, includes quantitative survey data from 1,011 women and 150 families, statistical materials from the villages and the larger administrative units in which they are located, and a wide range of documentary, ethnographic, and other qualitative data. The research will examine key issues in fertility theory highlighted by recent work in historical and anthropological demography. The project examines a political economy model of fertility transition that builds on the insights of decades of demographic research and recent literature on the political economic forces underlying fertility change. Assuming that the Chinese state was the key instigator of fertility decline, the research focuses on the mechanisms by which it altered marital, contraceptive, and reproductive behavior in village society. The central hypotheses are that two kinds of state policies-socialist development policies (social, economic, and political policies) and fertility policies-were the main sources of demographic change, and that each operated through different kinds of mechanisms. Data analysis will involve comparisons across villages and neighborhoods, across subgroups of the population defined by social and economic criteria, and across phases of policy development. The analyses will examine the impact of a number of specific social and economic policies on community and family organization; the effects of changes in family organization on fertility preferences, the proximate determinants of fertility, and the level and timing of childbearing; and the influence of fertility policies, in particular the Later-Longer-Fewer Policy of the 1970s and the One-Child Policy of the 1980s, on marriage age, contraception, abortion, and the level and timing of childbearing. The project's theoretical goals call for a complex, quantitative-cum-qualitative analytic strategy that pays particular attention to micropolitical processes and places the village findings in the context of political economic developments at municipal, provincial, and national levels. Based on a uniquely rich data set, this project can be expected to produce the most broadly conceptualized and finely detailed account to date of the forces underlying fertility change in peasant China.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter