[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]
