Abstract
Since its re-establishment in the late 1970s, the field of demography in China has developed rapidly, and ties to the international demographic community have multiplied. Nevertheless, outside China little is known about the nature of demographic research-let alone social scientific research in general—in the world’s most populous country [1].
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Notes
To date only a handful of reports on Chinese social science have appeared. Wang’s review (1988) treats the development of one branch of population studies, historical demography. More is known about the re-establishment of the other social sciences. On economics, see Cyril Chihren Lin (1981) and Fred Herschede (1985); on sociology, Alice S. Rossi (ed.) (1985) and L. Cheng and A. So (1983); on anthropology, Rossi (1985). Chinese scholars write frequently on the development of their field, discussing such matters as the proper object of demographic research (Qu 1987) or the development of sub-fields such as population geography (Zhong 1989) or population sociology (Gu 1989). See also Zhang (1984), Liu Z. (1986), and Qu (1987).
This information was gathered as part of the work of the Committee on China Study and Exchange of the Population Association of America. The quantitative information gathered via questionnaire, while robust, does not contain a full account of demographic research within China’s universities. Despite attempts to obtain information on all university-based institutes, a few of the smaller ones either were not identified or failed to respond to my query. The survey did, however, include the vast majority of university-based institutes, and certainly all the major institutes. The paper’s descriptive coverage of the major research centers is further strengthened by the inclusion of data compiled by the United Nations Population Fund on the 22 institutes it supports.
The state of sociological research on the mainland has been ably described in a report by a delegation that visited China in 1984 (Rossi 1985). Much of the discussion in this book on the functions, memberships, and budgetary sources of Chinese sociology applies also to demography.
For a Chinese perspective on the theoretical challenges facing the field during the early years after its re-establishment, see Qu (1987).
The 26 mainland institutes included in my questionnaire survey reported a total of 473 researchers, an average of roughly 18 per institute.
In other disciplines, too, Jiaotong University has been a leader nation-wide in obtaining research contracts with government bureaus, factories, and other units (Conroy 1989, 56).
As of September 1989 Beijing University had attracted at least four PhDs in demography from prestigious foreign universities. Two were employed in the Population Research Institute, one in the Institute of Sociological Research, and one in the Sociology Department. Others who had planned to join the university staff in the summer of 1989 have temporarily put off their return to China. The concentration of some of the brightest young population specialists at Beijing University is no accident; realizing that they would be intellectually isolated if they were scattered in universities across the country, the first cohort of returnees decided to locate there together, as a small core of Western-educated demographers.
Another crucial link in this chain of influence is the international donor sector (including UNFPA), whose representatives have had a major impact on what gets studied and how. Here, however, I ignore external influences and examine relations between domestic actors.
For example, the selection of the nine key policy-oriented projects by the State Education Commission in 1988 was made on the basis of discussions with senior demographers, who were invited to a special workshop designed to establish priorities in population policy and applied demographic research (Project Agreement 1989).
In the field of economics, academic exchanges between institutes appear to have been more limited, at least in the early 1980s (Lin 1981). Some of the impediments Lin describes, e.g., reluctance to share information and foreign publications, also exist in the population field.
I thank Aprodicio Laquian, former UNFPA Deputy Representative in Beijing, for bringing this project to my attention.
My experiences in giving lectures to classes of family planning workers is that these “applied” demography students are even more receptive to new ideas than regular college students. A lecture on the social, economic, and cultural consequences of a range of alternatives to the one-child policy stimulated lively discussion.
Particularly controversial are the ideas of Liang Zhongtang. His paper from the 1985 conference, entitled “A Preliminary Discussion of China’s Development Strategy and Chinese-style Birth Planning,” is published in Liang (1988, 103-153). See also Editorial Board (1987).
That model was first presented in Bongaarts and Greenhalgh (1985) and further elaborated in Greenhalgh and Bongaarts (1987). The other foreign scholar attending the seminar was Tuan Chihsien.
Some of these projects are described in the semi-annual newsletter China Population Research, issued by the Population Association of America’s Committee on China Study and Exchange.
A careful study of the political strategies adopted by workers in China’s state-sector industries is Walder (1986). Staff members of China’s population research institutes face many of the same institutional constraints that state-sector factory workers face.
Inequities such as these are hardly unique to demography. For a discussion of such problems in Chinese academia generally, see Conroy (1989, 56).
Developments in Marxian population theory are reviewed in Qu (1987). For some recent contributions to Chinese population theory see, for example, Liu Changxin (1988) and Wu (1986).
For example, Lin, C. 1981. The post-1949 histories of economics and individual economists makes this amply clear.
Even in the 1980s, scholars in other fields who were attracted to the ideas of Western thinkers such as Sartre and Freud were charged with creating ideological confusion and doubting the correctness of the Party and its socialist vision (Goldman 1985).
On the increase in access to non-state funding sources among Chinese researchers generally, see Conroy (1989, 53ff).
Estimates of the number of Chinese students in the US, along with an abundance of useful information on their sources of support, fields of study, and so forth can be found in Orleans (1988).
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Greenhalgh, S. (1992). Population Studies in China: Privileged Past, Anxious Future. In: Poston, D.L., Yaukey, D. (eds) The Population of Modern China. The Plenum Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1231-2_2
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