3.4: Reproduction: Geographic and Socioeconomic Comparisons

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Из курса от партнера The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Understanding China, 1700-2000: A Data Analytic Approach, Part 2

21 оценки

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Understanding China, 1700-2000: A Data Analytic Approach, Part 2

21 оценки

The purpose of this course is to summarize new directions in Chinese history and social science produced by the creation and analysis of big historical datasets based on newly opened Chinese archival holdings, and to organize this knowledge in a framework that encourages learning about China in comparative perspective. Our course demonstrates how a new scholarship of discovery is redefining what is singular about modern China and modern Chinese history. Current understandings of human history and social theory are based largely on Western experience or on non-Western experience seen through a Western lens. This course offers alternative perspectives derived from Chinese experience over the last three centuries. We present specific case studies of this new scholarship of discovery divided into two stand-alone parts, which means that students can take any part without prior or subsequent attendance of the other part. Part 1 (https://www.coursera.org/learn/understanding-china-history-part-1) focuses on comparative inequality and opportunity and addresses two related questions ‘Who rises to the top?’ and ‘Who gets what?’. Part 2 (this course) turns to an arguably even more important question ‘Who are we?’ as seen through the framework of comparative population behavior - mortality, marriage, and reproduction – and their interaction with economic conditions and human values. We do so because mortality and reproduction are fundamental and universal, because they differ historically just as radically between China and the West as patterns of inequality and opportunity, and because these differences demonstrate the mutability of human behavior and values. Course Overview video: https://youtu.be/dzUPRyJ4ETk

Из урока

Module 2: Who Reproduces and Who Marries

3.1: Who Reproduces: Prudence and Pressure6:50

3.2: Reproduction and Conscious Choice4:43

3.3: Reproduction and Adoption6:28

3.4: Reproduction: Geographic and Socioeconomic Comparisons6:31

4.1: Who Marries: Similarity in Difference4:35

4.2: Universal Female and Restricted Male Marriage5:35

4.3: Alternative Marriage Forms9:09

4.4: Marriage and Socioeconomic Comparisons4:52

Познакомьтесь с преподавателями

James Z. Lee
Dean and Chair Professor of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences

[MUSIC]

Welcome, to understanding China, 1700 to 2000,

A Data Analytic Approach, Part Two, Section Eleven,

Reproduction: Geographic and Socioeconomic Comparisons.

Now as we've seen from our discussion of aggregate measures of Chinese reproductive

behavior within marriage, Chinese couples in the past exercised similar,

or if anything, greater prudence, partly by the control of coitus within marriage,

than European couples in the past.

In Prudence and Pressure, the second volume of the EAP MIT series,

we directly compare individual behavior from five sets of Big Historical Data,

consisting of more than 180,000 observations of married females and

about 24,000 recorded births.

Overall, our Eurasian comparisons on fertility

reconfirmed the behavioral differences revealed in the mortality comparisons

summarized in the 2004 volume, Life Under Pressure.

Between individual oriented Western societies and

collective oriented Eastern societies.

In Western individual oriented societies, decisions on production and

reproduction were primarily in the hands of the individual couple themselves.

In Eastern collective oriented societies, production and reproduction were

organized under household heads, and resources and welfare were distributed

unevenly within the household according to domestic power hierarchy and gender.

We also saw evidence of a new binary

based on the relative importance of power and property.

Property societies in the West

provided a major gradient for mortality decisions.

And power based societies in the East had a similar influence on mortality patterns.

And as we see in the study of reproduction, these two different

gradients can also be discovered in the study of reproduction.

Reproductive responses to inequality often depended on the interplay between economic

circumstances and social stratification.

Thus, in Liaodong in northeast China, we can see that

peasants were consistently less likely to register a birth in years following a bad

harvest than, say, functionaries and servants.

And this is true also for landless,

the property gradient in Scania compared with freeholders or Crown tenants.

Demographic circumstances such as the number and

sex composition of children were as important as economic circumstances in all

our study populations, notwithstanding the enormous differences in cultural context.

In Japanese villages of Shimomoriya and Niita, for

example, couples tightly controlled reproduction through infanticide

to achieve a sex-balanced offspring set.

And even in bad years, Japanese couples with only daughters or only sons were

more likely to have another birth than couples who had both a daughter and a son.

However, in Scania and Sart in northwestern Europe,

when times were bad, Couples with only daughters were in fact much less likely to

have another child than those of both sons and daughters.

Suggesting again that this conscious control is not just something typical

of East Asian populations, but that it also exists in northwestern Europe.

Couples responded to household circumstance.

Although the nature of such responses differed

according to the predominant family and household system.

The relative seniority between the couple could also impact reproduction.

And large spousal age differences measured as wives being at least six years younger

than their husbands, reduced the likelihood of second or

later births in all our study populations.

And furthermore, in our East Asian study populations, wives who were older than

their husbands were more likely to register another birth.

So we can see that wives' conjugal power manifested in these age differences.

Could also enhance reproduction and

responses were stronger in societies where gender systems were more patriarchal.

Within the household, however, we can see important differences so

that the presence or absence of specific kin

also strongly conditioned individual reproductive behavior.

In East Asia, where households were more complex and intergenerational co-residence

was more prevalent, the presence or absence of senior relatives,

especially a widowed mother or mother-in-law, affected reproduction.

Women who had a co-resident mother or mother-in-law were much more likely to

have a birth registered in both our East Asian studied populations

whether the north eastern China or north eastern Japan.

And the presence of married progeny in the household on the other hand,

curtailed reproduction in both our East Asian studied sites, but

not in our Western European populations.

So, we see both difference, and we see similarity in conscious choice.

We see little support for the mouth using binary.

We see no evidence for a difference between East and

West in the role of positive and preventive checks.

We see no evidence of major differences in terms of the standard of living.

In fact mortality increases in hard times were if anything more pronounced in

our western study populations than in our Asian study populations and

the total fertility rates were relatively similar although the total marital

fertility rates were quite different.

So overall strong evidence of universal demographic mechanisms

conditioned by a pre-transition culture of conscious choice.

[MUSIC]

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