Resources, Fertility, and Parental Investment in Mao's China

Abstract

During the first three decades of the People's Republic of China, income differences across social classes were compressed. Formal education was not an important determinant of personal income. In this study, there was no difference in income between white-collar and blue-collar families, although white-collar parents had more education than blue-collar parents. In urban China, where population density was high, couples of different occupational status appeared to make different trade-offs between quantity and quality of children. Urban white-collar couples had fewer, but better-educated, children than their blue-collar counterparts. In rural areas, white-collar couples still had better educated children than blue-collar couples, but no difference was found in lifetime reproductive success. High population density and an occupational structure that incidentally helped reinforce unequal distribution of cultural capital in the population encouraged urban couples with different levels of resources (i.e., cultural capital rather than income in this case) to adopt different reproductive strategies.