Marital fertility and birth control in rural Netherlands and Taiwan, 19 and early 20 centuries

A few years ago, Arthur Wolf compared the oral and literary evidence that the pretransitional Chinese had practiced deliberate birth control to an elephant in the living room: “There would be evidence of its presence everywhere”. He stated that all suggestions of wide spread birth control were utterly misguided: “Who, then, cleaned up after the elephant? No one. There was no elephant”. 1 With these sentences he concluded an article in which he dismissed the claim of “revisionist” demographers that historical levels of Chinese marital fertility were low because Chinese couples had consciously limited their family size. The “revisionists”, however, are not convinced by Wolf's arguments and the debate on pretransitional fertility continues unabated. 2 This controversy is not restricted to the arcane field of sexuality in the Chinese past. The subject is attracting interest from economic and “world” historians, who take a keen interest in the diverging developments of China and western Europe in the past three centuries. See, for instance, the latest issues of the Journal of Asian Studies. Indeed, these are exciting times to analyze and compare historical fertility patterns in China and western Europe. The “new” historical demography of China seeks to undermine the “Malthusian” paradigm on Chinese population history. In the wake of Malthus, it is a widely held view that Chinese population growth was checked by recurrent crises, such as wars and epidemics. Because the Chinese married early and universally, the birth rates are supposed to have been high. However, recent research shows that marital fertility was actually very low, at least compared to Europe. In addition, (female) infanticide was a commonly used method to adjust family size to current circumstances. Some authors have described this as the “functional equivalent of family planning”. 3 How did Chinese couples achieve a low marital fertility and was this deliberate or more or less accidental? The debate on this issue is based on rather disparate sources. The “revisionists” draw on John Lossing Buck's Farm Survey (1929-1931), on Qing imperial genealogies (17001830) and on the registers of the bannermen of Daoyi in Liaoning province (1774-1873). According to Lee, Wang, Campbell and others, Chinese marital fertility rates were low due to late starting, early stopping and the spacing of birth intervals. In their view,