The occupational structure of the Yangtze Valley in the twentieth century
type: CreativeWork
description: Twentieth-century China witnessed devastating wars, radical political revolutions, and, recently, very rapid economic development that lifted hundreds of millions from dire poverty. The economic development profile of this century of revolutions has not been described with consistent and reliable data, leaving open debates on China’s transition to modern economic development. My Ph.D. project identifies jiapu (Chinese lineage genealogies) as a novel, reliable, and consistent source which allows me to reconstruct the changing occupational structure of twentieth-century China. Jiapu record individual-level information of descent groups with a common ancestor together with biographies detailing the life course of some members. The value of this source for studies of historical demography has been recognised, but the occupational information has not been identified and exploited systematically. My Ph.D. project created, from scratch, the novel Yangtze Jiapu Dataset (YJD) with 208,130 occupational observations from 828 counties in the Yangtze Valley, where more than 40% of the national population lived. Comparisons with censuses suggest that the YJD broadly represent the regional population. My project marks the first use of jiapu data to quantitatively estimate the occupational structure of the Yangtze Valley from ca. 1920 to the 1982 census, the first census with reliable occupational data. These new estimates and census data suggest that a substantial shift of the labour force out of agriculture only occurred in the three decades from 1990 onwards with the primary sector share decreasing from 74.6% in 1990 to 19.1% in 2020, which is much later than other changes characteristic of modern economic development, such as the increase in per capita income and the emergence of modern factories with high productivity. The occupational structure series also suggest continuities in the increase in industrial employment across the divides of 1949 when the People’s Republic of Ch…
abstract: Twentieth-century China witnessed devastating wars, radical political revolutions, and, recently, very rapid economic development that lifted hundreds of millions from dire poverty. The economic development profile of this century of revolutions has not been described with consistent and reliable data, leaving open debates on China’s transition to modern economic development. My Ph.D. project identifies jiapu (Chinese lineage genealogies) as a novel, reliable, and consistent source which allows me to reconstruct the changing occupational structure of twentieth-century China. Jiapu record individual-level information of descent groups with a common ancestor together with biographies detailing the life course of some members. The value of this source for studies of historical demography has been recognised, but the occupational information has not been identified and exploited systematically. My Ph.D. project created, from scratch, the novel Yangtze Jiapu Dataset (YJD) with 208,130 occupational observations from 828 counties in the Yangtze Valley, where more than 40% of the national population lived. Comparisons with censuses suggest that the YJD broadly represent the regional population. My project marks the first use of jiapu data to quantitatively estimate the occupational structure of the Yangtze Valley from ca. 1920 to the 1982 census, the first census with reliable occupational data. These new estimates and census data suggest that a substantial shift of the labour force out of agriculture only occurred in the three decades from 1990 onwards with the primary sector share decreasing from 74.6% in 1990 to 19.1% in 2020, which is much later than other changes characteristic of modern economic development, such as the increase in per capita income and the emergence of modern factories with high productivity. The occupational structure series also suggest continuities in the increase in industrial employment across the divides of 1949 when the People’s Republic of Ch…
author: Dai, Ying
language: eng
keywords: by-employment, China, female labour force participation, foot-binding, jiapu, lineage genealogies, occupational gender segregation, occupational structure, twentieth century, Yangtze Valley
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2022-09-24
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:28Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.95857