Marriage in Taipei City: Reasons for Rethinking Chinese Demography

Abstract

The only pre-1950 Chinese cities for which reliable demographic records exist are those in Taiwan. Analysis of two samples of the records from Taipei City produces surprising results. Urban women were far less likely to marry than rural women and consequently had markedly lower fertility. This was due to a greater demand for female labor in the city but not because employment outside of the home freed women to refuse marriages arranged by their parents. Parental authority was as strong in the city as in the country. The difference was that given the possibility of remunerative employment for their daughters many parents chose to keep them at home rather than giving them to another family in marriage.

Positive or Preventive? : Reproduction in Taiwan and the Netherlands, 1850-1940

“…When we look at the columns headed "infant deaths per 100 births" we learn that there is a much weaker and inconsistent relationship between the probability of an infant dying and parity. In the Taiwan case, infants born to women at the highest (11)(12)(13)(14) and also the lowest (1-3) parities were more likely to die than those born to women at middling parities. A similar pattern is found in the Dutch case, where infants born to women at parities 9-13 were more likely to die than those born to women at middling parities.…”

“…12 Notwithstanding these biases and problems, the population registers have been used extensively for family and migration history. 13 They are kept in the municipal archives and are freely accessible before 1940. In addition, for persons deceased between 1939 and 1994, the personal cards can be retrieved from the Central Bureau of Genealogy, albeit without information that might infringe on privacy.…”

“…Cities in Taiwan, and perhaps on the continent, drew disproportionate numbers of young women as servants, sex workers, and in handicraft. 13 Apparent unbalanced sex ratios cannot be proven real without factoring in gender-differentiated flows of labor and the cultural bias that made for under-recording of girl children.…”

“…The late imperial Chinese empire encompassed great ethnic diversity. The Han majority -called "ethnic Chinese" by most Westerners -with seven mutually unintelligible Chinese "dialects" 12 as well as documented regional variation in marriage practices 13 and political economy 14 displayed at least as much ethnic and linguistic diversity as western Europe. Non-Han ethnic groups, speaking languages distantly (if at all) related to Chinese and practicing their own customs, constituted the local majority in many parts of the Chinese empire, especially in border regions.…”

“…13 The samples employed in this paper are of Taiwan and Dutch completed marriages in which women remained in first marriages and were continuously under observation from age at marriage to age 46. 14 These are stringent conditions.…”