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All these sources are part of a current controversy in Chinese historical demography: did Chinese people in pre-modern times consciously control their fertility. In reading and evaluating the arguments, pay particular attention to
Monday, January 26: Policy and Institutions
Pre-read "Demographer Ma Yinzhu," pp. 28-48 in Shapiro, Mao's War Against
Nature
Tu Ping, "Trends and Regional Differentials in Fertility Transition," in
Peng and Guo, eds., The Changing Population of China
Susan Greenhalgh, "Fertility As Mobility: Sinic Transitions, Population and Development Review, 1988.
These sources all deal, in different ways, with explaining the decline in fertility from the 1950s to the 1980s. When reading them, think about the following organizing points:
Wednesday, January 28: Planned birth: horror and necessity?
Wang Feng, "A Decade of the One-Child Policy," from Wang and Goldstein,
eds., China: The Many Facets of Demographic Change
This will give you some idea of what the one-child campaign was about and what its results were, in a statistical sense.
The following two stories will give you a more human idea of how it happened:
Erik Mueggler, chapter 9, "A Shattered Gourd," from The Age of Wild Ghosts, 2001. This is the story of the implementation of the birth-control campaign in a Lolopo (Yi minority) village in Yunnan.
Huang Shu-min, "Family Planning Campaign," from chapter 10 of The Spiral Road, an account of the campaign in a coastal Han village in Fujian.
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