[MUSIC] Welcome to understanding China, 1700 to 2000, A Data Analytic Approach Part Two. This is our final chunk, we have four sections dealing with the issue of Who Cares, State, Kinship And Family. I'll giving you the first lecture in section 16, followed by Hao, who will give the next three sections explaining how who cares tells us a lot about who we are. So, as we have already seen, Chinese demographic behavior, both past and present is largely a product of the Chinese family system. A hierarchical, patriarchal social institution, the Chinese family specifies clear lines of duty, responsibility and entitlements according to general Confucian principles called the sangang. Generation, parents over children. Age, senior relatives over younger relatives. And gender, men over woman. And the five relationships, ruler-minister, father-son, elder brother-younger brother, husband-wife and friend-friend. Success of Chinese dynasties for over 2,000 years from the first dynasty, the Qin through the last dynasty the Qing relied on the family to enforce social order, summarized by Imperial legal codes, which reinforce family prerogatives over individual personal and property rights. According to the very first imperial law code, the Qin, parents had control over their children's property. Parent's had control over the children's bodies. And unfilial behavior or unresponsive behavior could even be a capital offense. According to Qing law, the law of the last imperial dynasty, all family relationships within the fifth degree, that is common great-great-great grandparents, were reported. And the nature of the crime itself depended as much on the familial relationships between the criminal and the victim as of the specific act. The Chinese communist state, more recently, has redefined who we are. But in the process of changing the relationship of people to the means of production through three important sets of socio-economic policies. Land Reform, 1946 to 1952. Rural Collectivization, 1953 to 1978. And the ongoing processes of Economic Reform, that began in 1979. The first unexpected consequence of Land Reform was the dissolution of the Chinese joint family and the proliferation of nuclear family households. Now that land was being handed out per person rather than per household. As a result of the number of registered households in China increased from 86 million in 1947 to almost 134 million in 1953. The second unintended consequence of rural collectivization was a population explosion that started in 1961, in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and continued unchecked for over a decade until the successive family planning campaigns of the 1970's and 1980's. By guaranteeing all presence a right to employment to livelihood, to free public education, to free healthcare. The Chinese state removed any economic incentive for families to control their demographic behavior. Producing the increase in fertility shown in the following graph which resulted in an unintended and unexpected rise in China's rural population by 1972 of an extra unnoticed but then discovered 150 million people. Which resulted directly in the increasingly proactive and coercive family planning campaigns culminating with the one child per family policy in 1979. Finally, an unintended consequence of Economic Reform was the ironic resurgence now, as opposed to dissolution, of familial influence over population behavior due both to the rapid rise in propertied household wealth as 90% of all Chinese households today own their own home and 15% own two or more homes, and to the practice of intergenerational wealth transmission to support children's education and their marriage. As a result, in spire of marital independence under the 1950 New Marriage Law, the proliferation of virilocal nuclear households, with land reform, the recent rise of Private Life and Romantic Love, marriage in China ironic it continues to be virtually universal, parental influence over partner selection continues to be strong, and parental co-residence continues to be common both for infant care of grandchildren as well as old age care of parents and grandparents. So, as you can see population behavior can easily change. It's not necessarily predetermined by either political ideology or social tradition. Rather it is a path-dependent phenomenon shaped by tradition but modulated by politics. And by political economic, social economic context. And in exceptional circumstances such as the Chinese social economic campaigns. Land reform, collectivization and economic reform can even fundamentally change. And in changing change our understanding of who we are. The ironic juxtaposition of the contemporary Chinese family planning program and the persistence of universal marriage are good examples of the mutability of human behavior. Reminding us that the binary contrast between a collectivist East and an individualist West, and the linkage between demography and ideology can be overdrawn. Nevertheless, such comparison of human experience over time and place remains important to all social scientific explanation. And such East and West comparisons not only identify distinct demographic differences, they link these differences to social organization, to cultural values, to state institutions, and economic behavior. And in so doing, they contribute not just to a fuller understanding of populations and social history, but also to social theory and also to a better understanding of self identity of who we are. [MUSIC]
