Fertility transition in China deviates from the classical model in two ways. First, fertility
decline in China was extraordinarily rapid with low level of socio-economic development;
second, the change has been from a high fertility regime to a low and sex-selective pattern of
childbearing. The two processes are directly the result from China’s family planning program,
which is the most stringent in the world, largely coercive, and has reached all sectors of the
population. However, the similar two demographic processes also occurred in South Korea
and Taiwan, despite the fact that neither has a heavy-handed family planning program
resembling that carried out in Mainland China.
Within one generation (about 20 years), the total fertility rate (TFR) in China dropped from
about six children per woman to less than two children per woman. At the same time, the sex
ratio at birth (SRB) in China has become abnormally high. The three recent population
censuses documented that China’s SRB increased from 108 in 1982 to 111 in 1990 and to
117 in 2000. Considerable international attention was devoted to examination and exploration
of the trends and determinants of this process (Banister 1987; Hull 1990; Hull and Wen 1992;
Johansson and Nygren 1991; Zeng et al. 1993; Gao 1995; Gu and Roy 1995). Scholars within
and outside China provide totally different explanations as to the major cause of the
abnormally high SRB in China. While foreign scholars point to the predominant importance
of the coercive family planning program resulting in excess female mortality from infanticide
or abandonment, Chinese researchers emphasize female birth underreporting as the dominant
cause of the high SRB, which would imply that the true SRB is still normal. However, the
State Family Planning Commission of China in 1999 conducted a nationwide cleaning-up
(qing li) of the birth underreporting between 1990-1999, which surprisingly found that more
male than female births were underreported in virtually all the provinces, and SRB of
underreported births was even higher than the SRB of reported births (SFPC 2000). This
unfortunately implies that the reported very high SRB may even be an underestimate of the
true SRB, thus the situation is worse than it had seemed.
Despite the extensive body of studies on trends and determinants of the abnormal SRB in
China, detailed analysis is lacking on the dynamics and patterns of the SRB in China. In
addition, new results from the 2000 census show some intriguing characteristics that are not
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found in the previous censuses. The objectives of the paper are to examine the changing
patterns of SRB and to analyse the factors affecting women’s sex-selective childbearing in
China. Data used in this paper are from China’s 1988 Two-Per-Thousand Fertility Survey
(sample size of two million women aged 15-57), 2000 National Population Census (one-perthousand
subsample) and 2001 National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Survey
(40 thousand women of reproductive age). In the next section, international and historical
experience of SRBs is briefly reviewed. Section three examines levels and trends of the SRB
in China. SRB patterns and their influencing factors are analysed in section four. Finally
section five discusses the implications.