Is Demography Just a Numerical Exercise? Numbers, Politics, and Legacies of China’s One-Child Policy
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Population Association of America 2018Demography, as once advertised on the cover of this journal, is "the statistical study of human populations."In the long history of the discipline, tracing back perhaps to John Graunt's primitive construction of the life table in 1662 (Smith and Keyfitz 2013/1977), the statistical study of human beings has expanded well beyond earlier interests, which were mostly concerned with relationships between vital rates and population size and composition.While many researchers still distinguish between demography and population studies, Demography, as the flagship journal of the Population Association of America (PAA), now encompasses scholars from anthropology, economics, geography, political science, public health, sociology, and many other fields.Demographic processes and outcomes are seen as among the best measures to understand human societies and changes.Practitioners in the field now study social phenomena ranging from health to wealth, from
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Rapid improvement in health during the early socialist years laid the foundation for fertility reduction, as did rising education levels.
“Rapid improvement in health during the early socialist years had laid the foundation for fertility reduction up to that time, and so had rising education levels (Banister 1987, Lavely & Freedman 1990, Wang et al. 2018).”
From The Social and Sociological Consequences of China's One-Child Policy (2021) · cites this paper as Wang et al. 2018
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Cites
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Sorted by citations
The Social and Sociological Consequences of China's One-Child Policy
Cai, Y., & Feng, W. (2021) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-090220-032839 · Cited by 120 · see citing works
Self-citation
- Authors
- Wang, F., Cai, Y., Shen, K., & Gietel-Basten, S.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Irvine (US)
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (US)
- Fudan University (CN)
- Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong
- Venue
- Demography
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Published
- 2018-04-01
- Volume
- 55
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 693-719
- ISSN
- 0070-3370 (ISSN-L)
- 1533-7790
- OpenAlex
- W2796111736
- Cited by
- 42
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 2
- FWCI
- 7.02
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Demography (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Rare & Special e-Zone (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Fudan University
- Università degli Studi di Padova
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (P2C HD050924)
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD050924, P2CHD050924)
- Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (P2C HD050924, HD050924)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance
- Social Sciences › Demography › Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management
- Keywords
- one-child policy, population policy, population statistics, policy legacies, China, population control
- MeSH terms
- China, Demography, Developing Countries, Economics, Asia, Eastern, Humans, Politics, Population Dynamics, Family Planning Policy
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