One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities (review)

One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities. By James Z. Lee and Wang Feng. (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999.) Xv+248 pp. $47.50

The organizing principle of this highly structured volume is the work of Malthus, written 200 years ago.¹ Lee and Feng attack Malthus' description about the operation of the principle of population in China, although they grant that he had correctly identified universal female marriage and the dominance of kinship interests in family formation as enduring Chinese traits. More important, they present a stylized Chinese demographic model, based on recent research, that is contrasted with a stylized European model.

Belief in the difference of the "Chinese system" is based on recent scholarship by the authors and other historical demographers and students of contemporary China. The authors do not present this work in any detail, opting for synthesis, and a high degree of generalization, instead. There is a short Appendix on Chinese population sources, 1700-2000 . The population history of 500,000 people primarily from six geographical areas--roughly 2 per 10,000 of China's population during that time--has been reconstituted. (151).

The material is biased toward elite groups (those preserving genealogies). In some European elites too, quasi-universal female marriage was achieved, and the kinship interests were dominant. The authors believe, however, that there are enough common traits in the material, and sufficient continuity with present-day populations, to talk about a Chinese demographic model with four distinctive aspects. First, Malthus and his contemporaries exaggerated the role of famines in checking population growth; the true positive check in China consisted of female infanticide. Second, distorted sex ratios led to a gender-unbalanced marriage market and a series of strategies (polygyny, "little-daughter-in-law marriage," levirate, son-in-law adoptions) to ensure perpetuation of family lines. Third, marital fertility was markedly lower than in Europe--the result of slow starting, early stopping and long spacing of childbearing. Fourth, the population resorted to fictive kinship to complement biological reproduction, using a variety of systems of adoption to shape families. These four features were the consequence of two enduring cultural characteristics, patrililinear ancestor worship and bureaucratic state autocracy. In the Chinese model, reproductive decisions are collective, not individual, and the success of family planning programs in producing accelerated fertility transitions is in line with tradition.

Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to Lee and Feng is that they are worthy successors of Malthus in organizing a logical model and a mythology of Chinese demography. This is a useful task, performed with elegance and subtlety (I wish it the same longevity as the Malthusian synthesis). Confirming its insights and discovering its flaws will provide work for future researchers, in the same way that refuting Malthus has been one of the bulwarks of Western demography.

It would be surprising if this enormous block of humanity did not exhibit some diversity; no model can account for the enormous variety of European behavior either. The authors might have provided a better explanation of why marital fertility was low before the transition. Each of their arguments could be used with Western populations (90-92). A suspicion of sex as a liability for health, disapproval of passion in marriage, extended breast feeding and a wide inventory of traditional reproductive technologies and pharmacology were all present in Europe. Assuming that the explanation does not lie in the relative incompleteness of the Chinese records, this remains one of the main puzzles to be resolved.

Etienne van de Walle
University of Pennsylvania

Note

1 The collected works of Malthus, including the 1805 edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, which contains the ªrst extensive discussion of China, is available in E.A. Wrigley and David Souden (eds.), The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus (London 1986), 8v.

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