6.1: Conclusion: The Salient Legacy of China’s Past

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

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The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

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

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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

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Module 3: Who Cares and Course Conclusion

In this module, James and his post-graduate student Hao DONG will co-deliver the lectures.

5.1: Who Cares: State, Kinship and Family7:14

5.2: Effects of Living with Kin (by Hao DONG)4:47

5.3: Family System in Comparative Perspective (by Hao DONG)9:29

5.4: Kin Influence Across East Asian Family Systems (by Hao DONG)6:33

6.1: Conclusion: The Salient Legacy of China’s Past7:12

Познакомьтесь с преподавателями

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

[MUSIC]

Welcome to the final section of Understanding China, 1700 to 2000,

A Data Analytic Approach part 2, section 20, the Salient Legacy of China's Past.

Over the last 19 lectures, we have described a distinctive,

demographic Chinese system of behavior,

one which is characterized by multiple control.

Not just of the individual, over the demographic behavior, but of others over

demographic behavior producing very distinctive results in survivorship,

in reproduction, in marriage, in adoption, and so on.

And what is important to note is that all of these behaviors

carry over to the present.

So if you look at Chinese survivorship today, say of infants,

the sex ratio at birth shows the continued

differential survival by gender and by birth order, due of course outward now,

to sex selective abortion presumably rather than infanticide.

Nevertheless you can see that whereas the sex ratio at

first birth is generally relatively even it becomes increasingly uneven

as it goes to second birth third birth and fourth birth.

And by the fourth birth you have something like four times as many

boys being born and recorded and registered as being alive than girls.

As a result, while you do see continued universal marriage for

females You also have continued differential marriage for males,

because there continues to be a shortage of available females.

And this is, of course, in some extent,

exacerbated now by the imposition of monogamy.

On top of that, you have the continued reproductive control

of one's own reproduction by others, of which, of course,

the most stunning example is the Chinese current family planning program,

notoriously called the one-child policy,

though it actually works out to about two children per married couple.

You have continued high rates of adoption and you continued multifarious

influence of kin on a variety of demographic decisions.

At the same time you have the tremendous expansion of

Chinese social mobility which we described in part one.

You have the increasing occupational mobility as farmers become workers,

and workers become service workers and rise up in social status.

You have increasing geographic mobility as people move from poor regions to richer

regions.

You have increasing residential mobility as people move from the country side to

cities.

You have increasing educational opportunities, such as we discussed for

Peking University and Sozo University, and you have increasing poverty reduction.

China has, probably had the largest, most successful programs

in poverty reduction in world history in the last 30 years.

And you have the tremendous increase in personal wealth, which is literally

fueling not just the wave of Chinese tourists around the world, but

a wave of Chinese sort of migrants, especially educational migrants

to universities in the United States, in Europe, in Australia and elsewhere.

And you have with this increasing personal wealth, especially property wealth,

you have increasing intergenerational wealth transmission.

Before inheritance didn't matter that much because everybody was relatively equal but

there was not that much property.

Now you actually have really substantial estates where parents can

pass on to children resulting as we showed in a home ownership rate even for

young people in their mid-thirties of something around three quarters

of young people in their mid-thirties owning their own home.

In the west of course the home ownership rate overall is about 20% of households.

So you have the ironic continued control by the collective,

by parents, of individuals within the same

time of increasing mobility of people at the group level.

So you see the kind of persistence of the distinctive Chinese demographic system,

of a lot of Chinese values, while at the same time you have

really a totally different kind of socioeconomic frame in which people live.

And this result means that on the one hand we have a kind of transformative

increasingly heterogeneous society and economy, but

at the same time we have a persistently sort of salient homogeneous

set of Chinese behavior from the past because while society and

opportunity has changed, values, culture has not changed as much.

And central to these values is always the Chinese family.

Because the Chinese family has persisted and on some levels, gained in strength

with the rise of property and the rise of intergenerational wealth transmission.

So you find therefore this increasing therefore

juxtaposition of familial values, familial control at

the same time that we also find the increasing openness,

transformation of the economy and of Chinese society.

So in conclusion, a data analytic approach to understanding China not

only provides a different evidence based narrative of this Chinese transformation.

It also gives us tremendous insight into the persistence of Chinese

characteristics in the face of this transformative change and

allows us to see what remains and

is distinctively Chinese at the same time that China goes global.

[MUSIC]

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