Research
ON-GOING PROJECTS 中文
1. KINSHIP AND DEMOGRAPHIC BEHAVIOR
This project analyzes a longitudinal population of 275,000 individuals from Liaoning Province in north China to examine the influence of kinship on social and demographic behavior. Working together with virtually all students, researchers, and consultants in the Lee Group, we examine 1.2 million individual records of some 600 rural communities to understand how kinship networks and household context influence such social demographic outcomes as employment, marriage, reproduction, and survivorship. Moreover we do so over a 250 year period from 1749 to 1999 to test the common assertion and important assumption that kinship becomes less influential with the rise of ‘modernization,’ especially commercialization and state penetration. We have already published thirty scholarly articles from this project as well as two books, James Lee and Cameron Campbell, Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning, 1774-1873 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Ding Yizhuang, Guo Songyi, Li Zhongqing, and Kang Wenlin Liaodong yimin de qiren shehui (Banner Society and the Settlement of Liaodong) (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexue chubanshe, 2004). In addition, we are writing a two volume study on kinship and power in rural northeast China. We plan to complete the first volume, tentatively entitled Royal Peasants and Serfs, 1652-1911, in 2005 and are actively gathering materials for the second volume, tentatively entitled Colonization and Collectivization: 1904-2004.
2. THE MALTHUSIAN PARADIGM REDUX: POPULATION AND FAMIY HISTORY IN EURASIA
In James Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Myth and Chinese Realities, 1700- 2000 (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1999/2000) we challenge the Malthusian Paradigm, particularly its relevance to Chinese population dynamics and its justification for the contemporary Chinese family planning program. The Eurasian Population and Family History Project extends this challenge to East Asia and West Europe. Working together with some 20 other scholars from a variety of countries and disciplines, we analyze some 2 million longitudinal individual level records largely from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make explicit comparisons of rural nineteenth and pre-nineteenth century populations at the extreme Eastern and Western ends of the Eurasian land mass. Carrying out nearly identical analyses of similarly configured rural populations from Eastern Belgium, Northeast China, Northern Italy, Northeastern Japan, and Southern Sweden, we compare patterns of demographic responses to economic conditions in a variety of contexts represented by the specific communities in the study, identifying both unity and diversity. By combining the increased resolution of individual level event history analysis with formal Malthusian models of demographic behavior under economic stress we can achieve greater luminosities and deeper understanding of human behavior. The MIT Press is publishing the results of our analysis of mortality, fertility, nuptiality, and migration in successive volumes of the MIT Press Eurasian Population and Family History Series. The inaugural volume, Tommy Bengtsson, Cameron Campbell, James Lee, Life Under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, appeared in Spring, 2004 and will be the subject of specific panel discussions at the 2004 annual meeting of the Social Science History Association and the 2005 meeting of the Population Association of America. We have three other books under contract. George Alter, Noriko, Tsuya, and Wang Feng are finishing the second volume in the series, Prudence and Pressure in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900 while Renzo Derosas, Satomi Kurosu, Christer Lund and James Lee are preparing the third volume on marriage and first birth tentatively entitled Romance and Constraint in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900.
NEW PROJECTS
3. THE DEMOGRAPHY OF RESETTLEMENT
This examination of the demography of resettlement, which is the subject of Chen Shuang’s on-going Ph.D. research, extends the preliminary analysis in Sam Clark, Elizabeth Colson, James Lee, and Thayer Scudder. 1995. ‘Ten thousand Tonga: a longitudinal anthropological study of southern Zambia, 1956-1991.’ Population Studies 49.1 (March): 91-109 to China over a much longer time period and with a much larger and more detailed data set. Using annual household and population registers from 1862 to 1912, Shuang analyzes a longitudinal population of some 50,000 welfare recipients who were forcibly relocated from Beijing to the Heilongjiang countryside in 1862. She traces the impact of resettlement on the social demography of this population. Moreover, she hopes beginning the summer 2005, to survey their historical and contemporary descendants and study the long-term consequences of specific resettlement and welfare policies.
4. THE POPULATION HISTORY OF URBAN CHINESE ELITES
James Lee and Guo Songyi. Eds. 1994. Qingdai huangzu renkou xingwei yu shehui huanjing (The Qing Imperial Lineage: Social Structure and Population Behavior). Peking: Peking University Press provides an initial analysis of the 75,000 members of the main line of the Qing Imperial Lineage who lived in Beijing between 1640 and 1910. This project which will hopefully become the focus for Zheng Lei’s Ph. D. research extends this analysis of what may be the most complete and reliable longitudinal Chinese historical population to the 15,000 members of the main line of the Qing Imperial Lineage who lived in Shenyang during the same time as well as to the collateral lines of the imperial lineage in both cities.
5. SOCIAL ORIGINS OF CHINESE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS, 1899-1998
This project with Ruan Danching (sociology, Hong Kong Baptist) and Yang Shanhua (sociology, Peking University) examines the social origins of some 30,000 Peking University student registered between 1976 and 1996. It makes use of student registration cards for some 80,000 students registered between 1899 and 1998 preserved by the Archives of Peking University. We anticipate completing the coding of these students by September, 2004 and the coding of the other 50,000 students who attended Peking University between 1900 and 1976 and 1996 and 1998 by September 2005.
6. RELIGION AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN MODERN CHINA
Religion is one of the most powerful and one of the least studied social phenomenon in Chinese history. This project deals with the last two hundred years of Chinese history focusing on Chinese Christian communities. There are two sub-projects: one by Li Ji on the history of French Catholics in North and Northeast China, the other by Xiao Yanlin on Anglo American Protestants and the rise of a national Church community.
7. SOCIAL SURVEY OF HUMAN AND SOCIAL CAPITAL IN RURAL CHINA
Most Chinese live in the countryside. Nevertheless, most social and economic surveys of China are biased towards urban populations. We are contemplating the design and implementation of a statistically representative survey combined with a panel study for rural Liaoning Province focusing in particular on human and social capital formation especially kin interactions. While the project is very much in the planning stages, we anticipate completing the initial survey design in 2004, and implementing proportionally representative surveys at the provincial level throughout Liaoning and national level throughout China in 2006.
8. A SOCIAL HISTORY OF CHINA, 1700-2000
This is a major project to summarize our understanding of social change in China during the last three hundred years based on the insights of others as well as the Lee Group findings from the above projects. The book will cover such topics as education, ethnicity, gender, geography, kinship, life course, occupation, religion, social and spatial mobility, and social organization. While we do not intend to begin writing systematically until some time in 2007, the main foci of our current thinking are the comparison and history of power and property in late imperial, republican, and contemporary China. James has accordingly made these the themes of his graduate and undergraduate classes at Tsinghua University, Beijing University, and the University of Michigan.