1.3: Big Data, New Facts and Classic Social Theory

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En provenance du cours de The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Understanding China, 1700-2000: A Data Analytic Approach, Part 2

21 notes

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Understanding China, 1700-2000: A Data Analytic Approach, Part 2

21 notes

The purpose of this course is to summarize new directions in Chinese history and social science produced by the creation and analysis of big historical datasets based on newly opened Chinese archival holdings, and to organize this knowledge in a framework that encourages learning about China in comparative perspective. Our course demonstrates how a new scholarship of discovery is redefining what is singular about modern China and modern Chinese history. Current understandings of human history and social theory are based largely on Western experience or on non-Western experience seen through a Western lens. This course offers alternative perspectives derived from Chinese experience over the last three centuries. We present specific case studies of this new scholarship of discovery divided into two stand-alone parts, which means that students can take any part without prior or subsequent attendance of the other part. Part 1 (https://www.coursera.org/learn/understanding-china-history-part-1) focuses on comparative inequality and opportunity and addresses two related questions ‘Who rises to the top?’ and ‘Who gets what?’. Part 2 (this course) turns to an arguably even more important question ‘Who are we?’ as seen through the framework of comparative population behavior - mortality, marriage, and reproduction – and their interaction with economic conditions and human values. We do so because mortality and reproduction are fundamental and universal, because they differ historically just as radically between China and the West as patterns of inequality and opportunity, and because these differences demonstrate the mutability of human behavior and values. Course Overview video: https://youtu.be/dzUPRyJ4ETk

À partir de la leçon

Orientation and Module 1: Who Are We and Who Survives

Before you start with the content for Module 1, please review the Assignments and Grading page and introduce yourself to other learners who will be studying this course with you.

1.1 Who Are We? An Introduction4:29

1.2: Big Data and the Scholarship of Discovery10:00

1.3: Big Data, New Facts and Classic Social Theory7:16

1.4: New Data and Eurasian Comparisons6:47

2.1: Who Survives: Life Under Pressure8:17

2.2: Mortality: Geographic and Socioeconomic Comparisons5:49

2.3: Mortality and Who We Are4:33

Rencontrer les enseignants

James Z. Lee
Dean and Chair Professor of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences

[MUSIC]

Welcome to Understanding China, 1700-2000, A Data Analytic Approach.

Part Two, Section Three: Big Data, New Facts, and Classic Social Theory.

Virtually all population theory, can be traced back to Thomas Robert Malthus and

his contemporaries, Adam Smith,

David Ricardo, whose work together forms the formal basis for

our understanding of the modern world, and what we now call, modernization.

In his famous An Essay on the Principle of Population,

Malthus sought to explain why Western Europe, especially England,

had achieved higher living standards than the rest of the world, especially China.

And according to Malthus, demographic responses to hard times

played a key role in balancing population and resources.

A marriage-based preventive check in Northwest Europe

allowed it to sustain higher living standards than the rest of the world

where a mortality-based positive check predominated.

And this model of Malthusian processes

determining the overall process of development and

of modernization has been tremendously influential, even in the late 20th

century, where there has been a widespread neo-malthusian revival.

Both in the terms of the study of England and also for the study of China.

In England, again based on big data, the Cambridge Group for

the Study of Population and Social Structure, led by Tony Wrigley,

the president of the British Academy, and a number of other distinguished scholars,

especially from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics.

Relaunched the neo-malthusian revival, which then was adopted by,

especially scholars at Stanford, and the Netherlands,

who in a series of books called Life at the Extremes,

meaning the extreme ends of Eurasia, proceeded to claim

that the population processes that they can observe were

very much the same as those that had been propounded by

Thomas Robert Malthous at the end of the 18th century.

Now in contrast, over the last 20 some years,

there's been what's called the California school of Chinese and

comparative World History, of which perhaps the most influential book

overall has been Ken Pomeranz's The Great Divergence.

And for population studies, for population behavior, my book with Wang Feng,

One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities.

Followed by another series of studies contrasting Eurasian populations,

Eurasian population of family history project which has

three major books, published by the MIT press Eurasian population and

family history series, which we'll discuss in the weeks ahead.

Now in the Malthusian model the idea of modernity

is based on the binary opposition of past and

present, where the modern west, the present,

is contrasted with the historical west which was non-modern.

And the contrast of rest and

west, that is of western Europe and the rest of the world.

And the assumptions were that the past,

the rest, were largely collective whereas the present,

the west, were largely individualistic.

And the past and the rest were characterized by largely

passive human behavior, whereas, the present and

the west were characterized by human agency that is,

by proactive human decisions about human actions.

Ansley Coale has called the calculus of conscious choice, where human

beings make decisions about their population behavior and act accordingly.

The Malthusian understanding of Chinese population, high mortality, early and

universal marriage, high fertility

is contrasted with the data-driven discoveries about Chinese population.

Which are summarized in one corner of humanity by Wang Feng and myself,

which introduces a demographic system of collective intervention with not

high mortality, but moderate mortality, but high rates of female infanticide.

Not only in universal marriage for all, but early universal marriage for

females contrasting with low rates and late marriage for males.

Not high fertility, but low moderate marital fertility

supplemented by high rates of male and sometimes female adoption.

These discoveries have been further amplified by other data discoveries from

various European historical populations summarized in the third volume, second and

third volume of the MIT Eurasian and population of families through project.

Which shows that deliberate sexuality fertility control

occurred long before 19th century modernity, and that deliberate

spacing of births was practiced, not only in the East, but also in the West.

Contrary to the assumption that only modern populations exercised control over

their reproduction, recent demographic comparison of populations in

historical Europe and Asia demonstrate the importance of human agency throughout

the world in understanding pre-modern individual population behavior.

[MUSIC]

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