Pretransitional fertility in China

摘要

Almost two decades ago, in this journal and elsewhere, Arthur Wolf and Ansley Coale engaged in a debate over the level of marital fertility in prerevolutionary China (Coale 1984, 1985; Wolf 1984, 1985). Coale and his colleagues, George Barclay, JamesTrussell, and Michael Stoto, after reanalyzing survey data collected from 40,000 farm families in 119 widely dispersed localities in China in 1929-31, not only concluded that marital fertility was lower in China than in historical Europe, but concurredthat such a low level "would be expected by demographers only in populations where some combination of contraception and abortion is practiced" (Barclay et al. 1976: 625). Wolf, relying largely on his own studies of earlytwentieth-century populations from Taiwan and his 1980-81 survey of 580 elderly women from seven other provinces, challenged their results and their explanation.