Economic Reforms and Fertility Behaviour: A Study of a Northern Chinese Village (China Library)

Based on an intensive fieldwork in a southern Hebei village in northern China (1992/3), the author takes an institutional approach and focuses on the way deliberate Chinese state policies driven by new economic and social agendas since the late 1970s have impacted on marriage, family relations and consequently on the way fertility trends have been adversely affected; the study is also very much concerned with the human dimension and the way in which such social and economic changes are perceived and applied in a rural community. The research presented in this study goes a long way to unravelling the puzzle concerning the reasons for a very rapid decline in Chinese fertility rates, contrasting sharply with a very different fertility transition within western cultures. "This is the first study of its kind to apply an institutional framework to advance our understanding of the interplay between macro-economic and population policies on the one hand and micro-fertility behaviour on the other in post-reform rural China." "The research is based on primary fieldwork data accumulated over a period of seventeen months in a Hebei village (north China) from July 1992 to November 1993. It depicts the ways in which individual fertility motivations have been influenced by two decades of state-instigated economic reforms." "The changing institution of marriage, family structure and systems and the community authority structure are amongst the themes examined in depth." "In contrast to the expectations of scholars and government, however, contemporary couples not only prefer to have fewer children, their motivation for having girls has also become stronger, although the preference for sons persists. Clearly, individual fertility does not follow strictly the state norms, and the state-planned birth policy is increasingly mediated by individual desires and the discretionary decisions taken by local government."--Jacket. China's rapid fertility decline in the last few decades is not following the pattern of conventional fertility transition in Western European countries observed by the fertility transition theorists.