Positive Check or Chinese Checks

As recently as twenty-five years ago, there were virtually no demographers of China and there was little available data on Chinese demographic behavior. Thus in spite of intense interest in China's population dating back at least to Malthus (1766-1834), his initial understanding, or rather misunderstanding, of Chinese population dynamics remains dominant. While recent research on European population history has confirmed Malthus's observations that European, or at least English, population size was controlled largely by the preventive check, nuptiality, the absence of similar studies of Chinese population history ironically facilitated the persistence of a Malthusian hypothesis that Chinese population size was controlled largely by the positive check, mortality. It is a tribute to the elegance and power of the Malthusian orthodoxy that in spite of the lack of information on Chinese historic demographic behavior and economic performance, many of the most distinguished Western scholars of late imperial China continue to interpret social and economic processes in China during the last three hundred years in Malthusian or neo-Malthusian terms (Elvin 1973; Chao 1986; Huang 1990

China · Developed country · Development economics · Economics · Genealogy · Historical demography · History of China · Orthodoxy · Population · Population growth · Sociology · Tribute · Chinese history and philosophy · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies · Demography · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History

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• The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus

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• Family and Population in East Asian History

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• Famines in Historical Perspective

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• Revising the Malthusian Narrative

  Open Access•William Lavely, R Bin Wong•The Journal of Asian Studies•1998

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• Introduction

  Open Access•Lillian M Li•The Journal of Asian Studies•1982

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• Chinese Demography

  Open Access•William Lavely, James Lee et al.•The Journal of Asian Studies•1990

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• The Pattern of the Chinese past

  Evelyn S Rawski, Mark Elvin•The Journal of Interdisciplinary…•1976

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• The Nutrition Fertility Link

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• Les crises de subsistances et la démographie de la France d'Ancien Régime

  Open Access•Jean Meuvret•Population•1946

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