To study the mechanism of China’s fertility decline has drawn much and increasingly
attention by demographers in recent years because of the fact that fertility
decreased substantially in a short period of time. Some have asserted that China's fertility
decline was largely due to the intensive family planning program, whereas socioeconomic
development only played a minor role in this process which thus has been
viewed as an "induced fertility transition" (Bongaarts and Greenhalgh 1985; Mauldin
1982). Some cross-sectional studies on the relationship between fertility and socioeconomic
development and family planning factors, however, have shown that socioeconomic
development also played an important role in the decline, apart from the role
of family planning (Peng, 1992; Poston and Gu, 1987; Tien, 1984). The mechanism of
fertility decline in China hence remains unclear and need further studies.
The total fertility rate in China as a whole shows less variation in the 1980s than
in the previous decade. However, substantial spatial difference in fertility remained in
all years in the 1980s. More importantly, unlike the years before 1980, with the implementation
of the policy of "reform and opening to the outside world" at the beginning
of the 1980s, socio-economic and institutional settings in China as a whole have
changed and improved greatly, while their regional diversity may even have widened,
which inevitably affect the family planning efforts and other factors such as cultural
and therefore the patterns of fertility. This provides a more reasonable base on which
we can examine the extent to which the variations in socio-economic development,
women's status and family planning efforts are related to the variations in fertility, and
most importantly, its changes over time. Therefore, in this research, I propose to construct
a causal model and use path analysis as the analytical tool to study provincial
level fertility variations in 1981 and 1990 in order to unravel the causal effect of fertility
change.
After examining the contributions of socio-economic development, women's
status and family planning efforts effect on fertility, a new concept patterns of determinants
of fertility decline will be introduced in this research. Two patterns "fertility control"
and "fertility influence" can be distinguished. The former is defined as a state in
which the fertility decline or variation is largely due to some fertility control factors
such as family planning efforts. Fertility influence is another pattern in which the fertility
decline is largely due to the factors such as socio-economic development, whereas
control factors only play a minor role. Of course, a mixed pattern, rather than pure fer-
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tility control or pure fertility influence is possible. The reason for this is, I believe, that
each pattern reflects the different mechanism or structure of fertility decline and, therefore,
has significant different policy implications, at least in the case of China