California Center for Population Research On-line Working Paper Series Deliberate Fertility Control in Late Imperial China: Spacing and Stopping in the Qing Imperial Lineage Deliberate Fertility Control in Late Imperial China: Spacing and Stopping in the Qing Imperial Lineage

Introduction Whether and how couples in China deliberately regulated their fertility before the late twentieth century remains the subject of heated debate. We and others have claimed that marital fertility in China was lower than in Europe, and subject to deliberate control detected evidence of deliberate limitation in China in the middle of the twentieth century through detailed analysis of retrospective fertility survey data. A comprehensive review of other published estimates, primarily from lineage genealogies but also from survey data, generally suggests that levels of marital fertility were low (Lee and Wang 1999). Critics of such claims argue that even if marital fertility rates in China were lower than in Europe, fertility was not subject to deliberate control, and whatever gap existed was the unintended consequence of other factors such as poverty, extended breastfeeding, or else an artifact of measurement issues related to differences in average age at first marriage to support the existence of uncontrolled fertility includes calculations based on Taiwanese household registers compiled by the Japanese during their occupation of the island in the first half of the twentieth century, retrospective surveys and published results from other studies To advance this debate, in this paper we reexamine the vital records of the Qing Imperial Lineage for evidence of deliberate fertility control. We take advantage of advances in statistical methodology and computing technology in the decade since our previous analysis of fertility in the Imperial Lineage (Wang, Lee, and Campbell 1995) to test directly for the existence of deliberate fertility behavior among women on monogamous marriages according to the number, sex composition, and mortality of previous births. We begin by investigating parity-specific behavior. We show that once this heterogeneity is accounted for with a fixed effect of mother, there is strong evidence of parity-specific behavior, in that for any given woman, additional births substantially reduce the pace of subsequent childbearing, even after duration since first birth is controlled for. We then move on to fertility behavior according to the sex composition and mortality of previous births among women in monogamous marriages. We demonstrate that both had powerful effects on the timing of subsequent births, and that patterns of effects were consistent only with deliberate control. We divide the remainder of the paper into four sections. We begin with background, identifying what we believe are the key issues that impede resolution of the debate over fertility control in China before …