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Famine in China, 1958–61

  • Chapter
The Population of Modern China

Abstract

For many years, very little reliable information was available about the population of the People’s Republic of China. Inferences and speculations about population trends were based on press reports, eyewitness accounts, and occasional snippets of official information apparently based on a population registration system. This unsatisfactory situation has changed completely in the last four years, reflecting both a general switch to much greater openness on the part of the Chinese authorities and the successful execution of the 1982 population census. A flood of demographic data has poured out of China, including single-year age distributions from the 1953 and 1964 censuses, results from a 10 percent sample of households from the 1982 census, fertility rates for the period 1940–82 from a one-in-a-thousand sample fertility survey carried out in late 1982, and registration figures for year-end population and for birth and death rates from 1950 to 1982. These data provide a basis not only for assessing current demographic trends in China, but also for constructing demographic estimates for the entire period back to the establishment of the People’s Republic.

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Authors
  1. Basil Ashton
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  2. Kenneth Hill
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  3. Alan Piazza
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  4. Robin Zeitz
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

    Dudley L. Poston Jr.

  2. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA

    David Yaukey

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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Ashton, B., Hill, K., Piazza, A., Zeitz, R. (1992). Famine in China, 1958–61. In: Poston, D.L., Yaukey, D. (eds) The Population of Modern China. The Plenum Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1231-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1231-2_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-306-44138-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-1231-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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