RUC Lecturer Wins Best Paper Award of Asia-Pacific Economic History Review 2023

RUC lecturer of School of Economics Hu Sijie winning the 2023 Sir Timothy Coghlan Prize

Hu Sijie won the 2023 Sir Timothy Coghlan Prize for her paper Descendants over 300 years: Marital fertility in five lineages in Qing China (Hu as the sole author, published in July 2023 in the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review), namely the Best Paper of the Year for 2023 by the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review.

Abstract

This paper studies the martial fertility—broadly defined as the ratio of live births to married women—of five Chinese lineages since the 17^th century, mainly in the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). The results demon-strate a unique pattern of Chinese marital fertility byexploiting new genealogical data and studying morethan 50,000 individuals from five lineages. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the marital fertility rates in the period were moderate. On the other hand, in line with the classic ideas, this paper finds no clear indication of two fertility controls within marriages, parity-dependent early stopping and longer spacing.

Findings and Contributions

Hu Sijie's paper utilized a brand-new dataset from the genealogy of five families including over 50,000 individuals from the Qing Dynasty, focusing on family reproductive behavior to showcase the unique reproductive patterns in China’s Qing Dynasty. This paper validates the revisionists' view of moderate fertility in pre-modern China by estimating the marital fertility rates in the five lineages from 1600 to 1920. The marital fertility rates in the five lineages after adjusting upwards for infant mortality were all around four to six in the three centuries. Meanwhile, as revealed by the age pattern of marital fertility and the two tests on parity-dependent early stopping and longer spacing in the five lineages, it supports the traditional view that fertility was not deliberately limited in pre-modern Chinese families. It also argues that the marital fertility pattern, as demonstrated by the five Chinese lineages, was a unique combination of low rates and no conscious controls.

About the Author

Hu Sijie, lecturer of the School of Economics, Renmin University of China, obtained a Ph.D. degree in Economic History from the London School of Economics. Her main research areas include Chinese economic history, historical demography, and population economics, focusing on the study of population changes, social mobility, and human capital formation in China during the Ming and Qing dynasties. She serves as an anonymous reviewer for international journals in the fields of economic history and population economics, such as the Journal of Economic History, Economic History Review, and Journal of Population Economics. She has led one ongoing project funded by the National Natural Science Foundation and has already translated one book. Her research results have been published in domestic and international journals including the Journal of Population Economics, Cliometrica, Asia-Pacific Economic History Review, and 'Quantitative Historical Studies (Volume Six)'.

About the Prize

This prize, which is decided by the editorial board's vote, is awarded once a year to the best paper published in the 'Asia-Pacific Economic History Review' in the previous year. The prize is named after the late Sir Timothy Coghlan (1856–1926), who served as the New South Wales Government Statistician for 19 years. His four-volume work Labour and Industry in Australia from the first Settlement in 1788 to the Establishment of the Commonwealth in 1901 is widely regarded as one of the most significant contributions to the economic history of Australia.

Link to Paper

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aehr.12269