Fertility Control in China’s Past

IN AN ARTICLE published in this journal in 1997, drawing on data from China’s 1982 One-per-Thousand-Population Fertility Survey, I argued that the highfertility regime existing before China’s nationwide family planning campaign was introduced could have involved deliberate fertility control. James Lee, Feng Wang, and Cameron Campbell reached a similar conclusion (Wang, Lee, and Campbell 1995; Lee and Campbell 1997; Lee and Wang 1999). Such claims challenge the widespread belief that historically the Chinese did not control their reproduction and wanted as many children, sons in particular, as possible. Arthur Wolf (2001) in this journal challenged the studies undertaken by Lee and his colleagues and by myself. Unfortunately, Wolf’s commentary misrepresents our work, uses our data in misleading ways, and produces contradictory arguments. This brief note aims to correct these mistakes, thereby refuting his major claims and conclusions. Wolf started by questioning the quality of our data. China’s 1982 Oneper-Thousand-Population Fertility Survey was designed according to strict statistical procedures, and the data were collected by well-trained enumerators. The sample size is very large and the results have been systematically analyzed by leading demographers from around the world during the last two decades (starting with Coale 1984). It is widely accepted that the 1982 survey is of very high quality. Wolf is skeptical about the survey data, arguing that recall problems make reports of numbers of children born up to 50 years earlier unreliable. His objection is based largely on his study of a small nonrandom sample (580 women) and on the observation that he himself under-recorded the number of births in his interviews (Wolf 2001: 135– 136; 150). While acknowledging the possibility of under-registration in the 1982 survey data, I argued in 1997 that it is very unlikely that under-registration could have changed or explained the systematic patterns in fertility behavior identified in my article. Wolf cited under-registration as a major reason for the relatively low fertility levels and the complicated fertility patterns, but as will be demonstrated his interpretations are self-contradictory.