The one child policy slowed it down...
That bumb there that is the one child policy.... since it was forbidden people decided it is time to have children.
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The one child policy slowed it down...
That bumb there that is the one child policy.... since it was forbidden people decided it is time to have children.
One child policy was announced at 1979. You can see from the graph that the fertility rate was stabilising to around 2.7 before it was introduced and it's very unlikely the rate would have gotten as low as it did under the policy. So yes, there was a short term bump but it was more than offset by the drop that followed.The one child policy slowed it down...
That bumb there that is the one child policy.... since it was forbidden people decided it is time to have children.
My main point was that China and India's high densities were rather older than most other such countries and so not directly comparable. My secondary point was who knows where China would be if not for Mao's famine, WW2 and the one child policy. But that's alt history.
Sure we know that rapid economical growth had no consequence at all for East Asian fertility rates.
Like South Korea is not going to challenge the the TFR world record of Taiwan (0.9 from 2010) this year. They were close last year (0.92) and the number of birthes fell quite a bit in January.
Birth rates start declining only after economic growth, not before. Japan's fertility rate dropped below 2 in the 70s, Taiwan and South Korea's in the 80s.
You seem to argue that China's fertility rate was about to drop under replacement rate at the same time with Taiwan and South Korea despite being decades behind in economic development.
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South Korea was pretty much in the beginning of its economic tranformation in the early 80s when TFR fell like stone... but for our luck China had carried out an interesting experiment by switching to two child policy in 2016. And the result is: either exactly nothing or that the fertility is still on decline, depending on the interpretation.
No, South Korean economy started developing during the Park Chung-hee era during the 60s. By the 80s they were already well ahead of China in economic development.
Besides all of the above, like France, China had centuries of experience and went through several cycles of Malthusian traps, hitting the ceiling then seeing a third if not half its people die in some civil war or foreign invasion and related famines. If you repeat the cycle long enough, people eventually began to adapt and have fewer children. Notice that birth rates went actually up under Mao in the above graph, a hint that it wasn't the natural trend of the country but an ideologically-motivated one.
I don't think that's true. The birth rates went up in the 1950s and 1960s because after a century of fighting there was finally peace and everyone had their own home, free of debt, even if it was still very small at first. Then as women get more education, the rate falls like it does everywhere else in the world. Plus the One Child Policy because they were afraid of running out of food.
I'm also sure that France had some other reason for its low birth rate after Napoleon's wars. Poor, uneducated farmers don't learn from "centuries of experience" not to have children. They have children because life was mostly boring except for one very very fun pasttime. If something bad happened during gramma's life, maybe she tells her granddaughter about some herbs to avoid pregnancy.
That's pretty much it. Other than that, in old China, you tried to have children until you have at least one son. You kept having children until your wife was too angry at you or too old. A lot of traditional Chinese medicine is about still being able to make love in old age and rich men would have young wives. They didn't worry about Malthusian traps. If you were so poor that you couldn't afford your children or daughters, you gave them away to families that couldn't have children or you sold them as apprentices (kind of like slaves but less bad). This is where many of the actors and Beijing opera singers came from.
Egypt is Another country with enormous population density if you consider that around 100 million people live near the Nile, an area about the size of Belgium and like China and India or Mesopotamia for that matters it look like the answer is rivers that are very good for agriculture.
Interesting. But I am a little confused about the characterization of the Yellow River valley as "hilly". Or do they mean the Yangtze? Yangtze is notoriously hilly - thus the river moves faster & deeper, and hills mean a lot of rainfall (ergo suitable for rice).
The Yellow River area, by contrast, is flat and has very little rainfall. Yellow River itself is slow and meandering. It is very shallow, with hardly any banks or bed, so it floods easily and has changed course a lot over time, thus its loess deposits stretch very wide. This makes it very easy agricultural land to cultivate for early settlers - you just need to scratch the surface with stick (suitable for millet & wheat, not rice). Although it was also simultaneously a curse for for human settlements - frequent north China floods often ended up with disastrous loss of life. Ergo early need for collective public works to control river, thus Yellow River cultures moved up the civilizational ladder rather quickly.
So the difference between Yellow & Yangtze is analogous to difference between Euphrates & Tigris.
The Yangtze, as you note, is harder for agriculturalists and requires more "advanced" technology to settle than simply a stick. But the traditional idea that the Yangtze was cultivated by northern migrants from the Yellow River is increasingly disputed. It was definitely cultivated later and definitely required more work. But the new thesis is that the Yangtze Neolithic cultures emerged on their own in the delta, and only began to converge culturally with the Yellow cultures later (by trade and interaction, from c.4000 onwards).
You still have differences within Chinese cuisine reflecting that (noodles, buns & dumplings in north, rice-based dishes in south).
On a general note, only 12% of land in modern China is considered arable. Rest is too arid and dry.
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Yeah, the passages about hilly terrain refer to the western part of Yellow River before it reaches the North China Plain in the east. It might not come across clearly since I tried to keep the length of the quote "readable" and left out parts of the text.
The steppe did see significant swings in rainfall patterns, back and forth, over the centuries. I suppose, given the geography, it means that lower Yellow River plains did see these changes too.
Northern Ordos is more curious case. Yes, it's very arid, but there is also the river...
Northern Ordos is more curious case. Yes, it's very arid, but there is also the river...
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I know we can't go into details here, but what on Earth are you talking about? Kindly provide a SFW link, because that's either not a thing in English or an odd use of a surgical setup that, if applied to sex, would very much get a woman pregnant. Alternatively, which language are you trying to translate from? You might either be misunderstanding what a French kiss is or confusing them with (at least as the English understand them) the Greeks.
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In the form of floods, sure. Things did get worse, as they did everywhere on Earth, as the Chinese cleared the native forests.
It's traditionally had a very large endorheic salt lake in the NW that's disappeared as its affluents were reapplied to farming projects in the 20th century. The NE and central countryside, though, has been pretty fertile pasture at times in the past.
It's not weird that some arid regions end up with a major river running through them. Off the top of my head, that's the situation in Upper Egypt, Nubia in northern Sudan, several of the Central Asian states, most of Xinjiang in China, and the Colorado in the US. I think it's even the default: major mountains produce rain-shadow deserts but also have meltwater, some of which ends up flowing leeward.
They are and, more importantly for @Abdul Goatherd, those are the parts of the Yellow River where Chinese culture originated: The Xia and Shang in the hills around Luoyang just after the river drops through the passes and the Zhou attacking them from the highlands around Xi'an's Wei valley to their west. Even today, the floodplains of the lower river have many villages but very few major cities by Chinese standards.
Driving around in the countryside between Kaifang and the passes is weird. It seems like it should just be mild rolling hills like central Kentucky or Tennessee and then you hit somewhere the river is or has been and the land is so soft it's been carved into steep canyons like a more fertile version of the Rockies. The land just drops off hundreds of meters.
Perry-Castañeda Collection's old US Army topographical maps of China c. WWII (warning: Postal and Wade-Giles romanizations) has, e.g., this map of the land west of of Luoyang and just south of the Yellow River.
A newer take on this is the deforestation and flood works themselves made the Yellow River more dangerous: trying to restrain it with dikes elevated it too much relative to the surrounding countryside, so that (a) hundred-year floods, (b) bad dikes as the worst floods faded from living memory and more officials pocketed the money instead of maintaining them, and (c) calculated acts of war each had the potential to make the floods horrific disasters instead of periodic nuisances.
Eh, yes and no. Chinese paleohistory is too political an issue to be really trustworthy, but they keep pushing back the date of the earliest cultivation of rice in the lower stretches further and further back. Towards the delta, the land is some of the best in China, even though a good chunk of it is underneath or polluted by megacities now.
I think this is bulletproof by this point, although the Yangtze is so long you have really have separate cultures developing in the Sichuan basin and Xiang valley, connected with the ancestors of the Wu and Yue people on either side of Hangzhou Bay only as remotely as they were connected to the Yellow River cultures.
In Chinese sources, their leaders all ended up claiming descent from the Yellow Emperor for prestige reasons of course, but even there they were mostly explorers, exiles, refugees coming in and taking control of local populations and resources.
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One thing I'm not sure I understand:
I've heard explanations of why Europe's population density was (way) behind the mid-east based on temperature; Europe is cold, so if you spend a winter without enough food, you freeze. If you do that on the Nile, you're just very hungry come spring. But the Yellow River basin has some pretty low winter temperatures. Binzhou on the lower stretches of the river has daily means below 0 for december, january, and february, while e.g. Amsterdam has its lowest mean in January at +3.3°C.
Does this mean the explanation for Europe from temperature is just bollocks, and it's down to things like clay-ish ground and short growing seasons? (Amsterdam is a whopping 15° further north than Binzhou, or in other words, Cairo is closer to it in latitude, at 30° to Binzhou's 37 and Amsterdam's 52)
I've heard explanations of why Europe's population density was (way) behind the mid-east based on temperature; Europe is cold, so if you spend a winter without enough food, you freeze. If you do that on the Nile, you're just very hungry come spring. But the Yellow River basin has some pretty low winter temperatures. Binzhou on the lower stretches of the river has daily means below 0 for december, january, and february, while e.g. Amsterdam has its lowest mean in January at +3.3°C.
Does this mean the explanation for Europe from temperature is just bollocks, and it's down to things like clay-ish ground and short growing seasons? (Amsterdam is a whopping 15° further north than Binzhou, or in other words, Cairo is closer to it in latitude, at 30° to Binzhou's 37 and Amsterdam's 52)
How "special" is China's population density anyway? I mean, it's huge (even ignoring the empty stuff, but then you should ignore the less dense regions in other countries too). The Yellow River alone is some 5500km compared to the Rhine at 1200km or something (also broader, connects to more other rivers, and so on (and the amount of silt it carries is craaaazy. I don't know how fertile that stuff is compared to what other rivers carry, but it's like 30-times as much as the Nile...). If we say that river are major factors, add to that something of a head start, some suitable crops, a bit better weather overall possibly, perhaps slightly better ground, for how much of a difference do we still need to account? ^^;
It's oral sex, obviously. Though i once heard French demographic peculiarity attributed to coitus interruptus.
I meant annual rainfall in form of raindrops, not floods
And when it comes to N. Ordos, i was more about lack of agriculture, not why the river flows there - that's normal.
It's very far from obvious, as already pointed out and linked. Is it a German idiom or something?
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Recommended reading: La Terre by Emile Zola.
In short, the reason for the low rural birthrates in France was inheritance, and they practiced many different ways of not having children earlier than the rest of Europe did. Thus, they had the rural boom fueling city growth to a lot less of an extent than the rest.