Identifying the Intergenerational Effects of Prenatal Exposure to Nutritional Deprivation on Infant Mortality: Using the 1959-1961 Chinese Great Leap Forward Famine as a Natural Experiment

Using data from the 2001 Chinese National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Survey, I studied the relationship between prenatal exposure to the 1959-1961 Great Leap Forward Famine and the risk of infant death of the next generation. The results show that, on one hand, prenatal exposure to mild malnutrition reduced children’s risk of infant death; on the other hand, prenatal exposure to severe malnutrition increased children’s risk of infant death. Such a findings provides the first human-based supportive evidence to the developmental origins of health and disease argument and demonstrates the crucial role played by famine severity in determining the relationship between the effect of developmental plasticity and the effect of developmental disruption, the two distinctive forms of the developmental origins effects.