A Study of Population Change Led by China’s Great Famine (1958-1961)* ——based on modified Lee-Carter model

Population study of hard times during 1958 and 1961 after Great Leap Forward is of great importance for China’s contemporary population study. As for the exact number of abnormal deaths,there is no official report by Chinese government. Moreover, because of social disruption at that time, there is something wrong with the registration and preservation of demographic data. As a result, by now, there is only estimation and prediction of abnormal deaths during China’s great famine, which can be done from an in-depth and micro perspective. Although Lee-Carter Model is a very widely applied method to predict death rate in the world, it is found from the study conducted in this essay that the original model can not be mechanically used under China’s situation. With modified Lee-Carter model, the study made an index curve which limits the death rate in the original model into ―logistic‖ curve and made an adjusted parameter. Simulation results show that there is a big improvement in fitting goodness of parameters and actual prediction of modified model which can be further applied in the reverse *This work is supported by the following funds:  Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LZ13G030001);  The Ministry of Science and Technology of China ―Simulation Model Platform of Labor and Social Security Policy and Decision Support Systems‖(2012BAK22B02);  The Major Project of the National Social Science Fund (12&ZD099);  The Major Social Science Project of Ministry of Education (12JZD035). 2 prediction of death rate. Based on modified Lee-Carter prediction model of morality, this study did reverse prediction with reference to China’s official age-specific mortality data to re-construct and calculate single-age morality and normal deaths if there were no great famine in the last century. In the end, with regard to total deaths estimation calculated by scholars home and abroad, we did estimation research of abnormal deaths led by famine. It is shown in our result that population dynamics, especially abnormal deaths, during great famine, mainly occurred between 1958 and 1961. If there were no famine, normal deaths would be 43.39 to 43. 85 million. With famine, abnormal deaths are between 16.24 and 23. 37million.