Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning, 1774-1873 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning 1774–1873 Norma Diamond (bio) James Z. Lee and Cameron D. Campbell, with contributions by Chris J. Myers and Yizhuang Ding. Fate and Fortune in Rural China: Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning 1774–1873. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxi, 280 pp. Hardcover $49.95, ISBN 0–521–58119–2. This monograph is the culmination of almost two decades of data collection from and analysis of the household registers of a village called Daoyi and its neighboring hamlets. Located near Shenyang, these communities were a part of the Eight Banner Han Chinese Army. They were situated on state-owned lands that were allocated to the member households. Able-bodied men were liable for military service or corvée labor. Depending on their ability, some men in this Han Chinese martial population held offices and rank within the Banner system. Current residents who trace their ancestry to this earlier population hold that the original settlers came from Shandong. In many ways, this was very much a Chinese village, though not a "typical" one. Nor was it unique: the authors point out that during the Qing, 10 percent of all farmland was state-owned and managed by the Banners or tuntian garrisons, with a similar social organization. The household registers, compiled every three years, cover the period 1774- 1873. Over this century the population grew from 2,192 to 3,271 with only a small percentage of growth attributable to new immigration. At the same time, the number of registered households fell from 530 to 412 as a result of a trend toward complex household forms. The registers provide a careful accounting of births, marriages, deaths, occupations, and offices, and indicate the gender of each household member and his/ her relationship to the recognized head of the unit. Lee and his coauthors have done a remarkable and painstaking job of organizing the raw data into a variety of tables that show the shifts and continuities over time in birth and death rates, fertility rates and birth intervals, life expectancies, and nuptiality. Further tables demonstrate the relation between the demographic variables and such features as household structure, position within the family hierarchy, and social mobility. Household registers have an advantage over genealogies for writing a broad demographic history such as this: genealogies pay little attention to women and tend to omit kinsmen who were economic failures and/or left no surviving heirs. But even the Banner registers have omissions. They do not list servants and hired hands, and sometimes fail to explain the disappearance of family members from one compilation to the next. This study lays the groundwork for answering other questions that might be dealt with in the future by recourse to other materials in the archives. What seems [End Page 117] to be lacking here is a detailed economic context. The reader is told little about family landholdings or how lands were assigned or redistributed after the death of the original assignee. We are told that land could not be bought or sold, and a footnote on page 7 says that "in theory, the state initially provided each adult bannerman with the equivalent of 36 mu." Did this policy continue over the century, and how does it relate to household formation or division? It would also be useful to have information about the size of stipends paid to those at various ranks in the military, in artisan and specialized worker positions, or Banner official posts, along with estimates of income from corvée labor. This would shed light on income differences between households or between household segments in the more complex structures, and additionally provide clues to decisions about household division. Along the same line of inquiry, I wonder if there is a relation between the work-related absences from home of males (as soldiers, military support artisans, and transport workers) and the maintenance of joint households with home-bound brothers or other close kin in order to assure the security and support of spouses and children. Similar practical reasoning may be involved when the man falls into the category...