[MUSIC] Welcome to Understanding China, 1700 to 2000. A data analytic approach. Part two, section five, Who Survives: Life Under Pressure. According to the earliest reliable population records for the last 2,000 years, China with only perhaps one-tenth of the world cultivated land had one-third of the world's population. And therefore, Chinese population behavior exemplifies one of the major examples of human response to population pressure. One salient result of this pressure was the early prevalence of what Malthus would have called vice. In this case, the practice of infanticide, female infanticide. And another consequence, presumably because of the prevalence of infanticide was the equally early rise of different concepts of life and humanhood. In the following chart, we have the two lines indicating world population, the black squares where our best estimates of the population of China, the empty triangles. Contrasting with the histograms from the year 0 to the year 2000 indicating the proportion of world population, which is or was Chinese. And as you can see, the Chinese population, historically has always been somewhere between one-third plus or minus say, a few percent of the world population. In some periods rising to as high as almost 40% of the world currently at at historical low, slightly over 20% of world population and predicted to be climbing even further to about 18% of world population, which would be almost half of China's historical proportions of world population. Now given the high proportions and high density of China's early populations as early as the second century BC, we already find major texts, such as the Rites of Zhou, a compendium of statements on early political institutions and policies. Stating explicitly and I quote that people should be registered only after they have grown their teeth, that is according to standard explanation of seven to eight months for the first set of teeth or 5 and a half to 6 and a half years for the second set of teeth. Or as summarized in an imperial edict of the early seventh century in the Collection of Important Documents from the Tang Dynasty and I quote, people begin at birth as young animals and become children, literally small mouths, shall call at two and a half years of age. As a result, perhaps because of this concept of humanhood being largely post natal, infanticide was prevalent in China as early as the first millennium BC. One of the earliest well-known references to female infanticide Is a passage from the Han Feizi, a third century BC political thinker who wrote and I quote, parents' attitude to children is such that when they bear a son, they congratulate each other. But when they bear a daughter, they kill her, because of their convenience and long-term interests. This long-standing preference for sons dates back to Chinese ancestor-worship produced an almost primordial prejudice against daughters that dates back literally, to the second and third millenia BC. Son preference was reinforced by a patrilineal and patrilocal familial system supported by the imperial state such that only sons could carry the family name, sacrifice to the family spirits. Only sons at least from the first millennium AD onwards could inherit the family patrimony and only sons, again, from the first millennium AD onwards could sit for the imperial civil service examinations with its important implications of equality of opportunity for families to rise in society. A plethora of statements similar to Han Feizi document the practice of infanticide, especially female infanticide throughout Chinese history. However, because girls were not completely recorded in most Chinese historical data, the magnitude of such behavior was unclear until the late 1980s when the population records of the Qing Imperial Lineage were discovered to have almost complete recording of daughters as of sons. And therefore, with the entry of these data to create one of the first examples of Big Historical Data, we could actually calculate for the first time explicitly to what extent female infants died in greater proportions than males. And these Jade Records document female death rates that indeed were ten times higher for females, 72 per thousand, than for males, 7.5 per thousand in the first day of life. And a total female infanticide rate in the late 18th and early 19th century for even say, the imperial nobility of around 10%. This chart contrasts female infant mortality, male infant mortality with female child mortality and male child mortality and what you can see is that child mortality for both female and males decline from about 400 to well-below 100 in the 18th century. But at the same time, while male infant mortality remained relatively stable, the sort of solid axis, which is essentially a flat line, you can see that female infant mortality, the empty squares increase from about 100 per thousand female infants to as high as 350 per thousand in the late 18th century. If we were to look at this more closely, you can see that this rising female infant mortality is largely driven by female perinatal mortality that is to say, the solid black line and female neonatal mortality that is to say, the dashed black line. So that by the late 18th century, as female infant mortality was increasing from over 100 to almost 350 over two-thirds of that mortality occurred during the first week of life, perinatally and almost 99% of it occurred during the first month of life, so female neonates. [MUSIC]
