Malthus and The Demographic Systems of Modern Europe and Imperial China: A Critique of Lee and Feng

Abstract

How manytimes do we not hear in academia that a new paradigm has emerged and for-mer certainties no longer hold sway? One of the editorial reviews of James Lee and WangFeng’s (2001) One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities,1700–2000 promises us that this book “presents evidence about historical and contempo-raryChinese population behaviour that overturns much of the received wisdom about thedifferences between China and the West first voiced byMalthus.” But I wonder if this is an-other instance in which what is described as “new” and “original” is reallya result of nothaving learned to appraise or understand the old.The essential thesis of this clearlywritten and well-organized book is that the “binarycontrast” Malthus drew between a “Western” demographic model characterized bylow fer-tilityand lowmortalityratesand aChinesemodeldominated byhigh fertilityand high mor-talityrates is not supported bythe available evidence on Chinese population behavior. ThisMalthusian interpretation, the authors contend, held dearlybya long line of historical de-mographers since Malthus’s time, has no basis in “Chinese realities” but is merelyanotherexpression of “the ethnocentric and teleologic traps so common to earlier social science”(146). Despite the authors’ keen grasp of “Chinese realities,” I think this assessment ofThomas Robert Malthus’s legacyis incorrect. The “binarycontrast” Lee and Feng attributeto Malthus is based on a loss of memoryof the historical and intellectual context to whichMalthus’s first essay ([1798] 1960) on population owes its origin.Reading Lee and Feng, one would think that Parson Malthus, the man whose theoryMarx called a “libel on the human race,” was a cheerful optimist firmlyconvinced that inmodern Western societies, reason had finallytriumphed over the unconscious exercise of