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Life and Death in a Chinese Famine: Infanticide as a Demographic Consequence of the 1935 Yellow River Flood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Lillian M. Li
Lillian M. Li
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College
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Extract

Famine mortality has a special interest for those interested in population history. After Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, famine was viewed as an event that “checks” population growth, perhaps the inevitable consequence of overpopulation. Although demographers have recently tried to show that a single famine or demographic crisis cannot retard population growth in the long run (Watkins and Menken 1985; Bongaarts and Cain 1982), yet famine, to the extent that it exists today, still constitutes a most dramatic demographic event.

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Type
Acts of Kinship
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , July 1991 , pp. 466 - 510
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1991

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