[...]... countries There has been a marked expansion in the scope of population research in the last 30 years In the late 1970s and early 1980s, studies mainly concentrated on the nature of China’s population problems, theoretical considerations for population control, strategies of regulating population growth and methods of improving family planning programs At the same time, demographic theories and analytical... increases in length of residence at the places of destination and an increase in family migration The chapter also offers a comprehensive analysis of the spatial patterns of the floating population and provides important references for recent population movement in China Fei Guo’s Chapter 13 concentrates mainly on the impact of migration on migrants’ communities at the places of destination, cities in... expected population total This attracted the attention of the central government, which subsequently issued an instruction on controlling population in 1955 (Peng 1997) The population debate in the late 1950s centered on the ‘New Population Theory’ proposed by Ma Yinchu, the president of Peking University and a well-known economist of the time (Zha 1999) However, academic discussion of the population. .. quality and reach of the program, which has been increasingly concentrating on the provision of better services and the protection of the right of parents and children, rather than simply on the control of the number of births and population growth These changes have been reflected in recent research activities, especially those supported by the UNFPA A large number of studies on ageing, sex ratio at birth,... stage of the campaign, there was a pressing need to provide theoretical justification for the necessity and feasibility of the birth control policy This led to the third wave, or revitalization, of the population studies Driven by the high demand, the number of researchers working on population issues increased rapidly during the 1980s and 1990s There was almost no demographer working on population. .. investigations in China But this changed significantly in the 1980s, when the third national population census and a number of sample surveys collected very high quality and detailed demographic data However, China failed to maintain its early success The quality of recent census data and certain demographic statistics, the household registration data gathered by the Ministry of Public Security and the. .. three decades of the twentieth century, which has been widely regarded as producing the first wave of population studies and the beginning of modern demography in China This development was seriously interrupted by a series of wars in the 1930s and 1940s The second wave of population studies occurred in the mid-1950s immediately following the 1953 population census (Zhai 2000; Tian 2002) The census surprisingly... presented The book is, however, not a simple collection of conference papers It concentrates on China’s recent demographic changes and provides a comprehensive examination of all major demographic issues that exist at the beginning of the twenty-first century Most of the contributors to the book are well-known experts on Chinese population and many of them have published extensively in international and Chinese... summarize fertility decline in Mainland China in the 1970s and 1980s They then analyze the 2000 census data by linking recorded children to their mothers, which reveals that China’s TFR was likely to have reached about 14 Transition and Challenge 1.6 at the end of the twentieth century The authors, through the examination of tempo adjusted TFR, also provide very useful information on changes in cohort fertility... changes in patterns of induced abortion among married women and their interrelationship with the implementation of the family planning policies, falling fertility and rising sex ratios at birth It also identifies a number of factors which have markedly influenced patterns of abortion and the major characteristics of abortion in China Cai and Lavely concentrate on another issue: rising sex ratio and its regional . alt="" TRANSITION AND CHALLENGE This page intentionally left blank Transition and Challenge China’s Population at the Beginning of the 21st Century Edited by ZHONGWEI ZHAO AND FEI GUO 1 1 Great. standards, Transition and Challenge 2 and consequently the levels of consumption and nutritional intake in the population, have risen considerably as a result of the dramatic economic growth and. at birth for the population rose from about 35 years in the mid-twentieth century to more than 70 years at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Accelerated by its strict and nationwide family