Villages, Descent Groups, Households, and Individual Outcomes in Rural Liaoning, 1789–1909

Abstract

We make use of a uniquely detailed and voluminous longitudinal, individual and household-level dataset from rural Liaoning in northeast China during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to compare the role of communities, kin networks, and households in determining individual social and demographic outcomes in late imperial China. We assess the importance of each level of social organization by examining how individual chances of attainment, fertility, marriage, and mortality were correlated with rates at the level of the household, the household group, the descent group, and the village. We then examine relations across outcomes by measuring how individual chances for each outcome were associated with rates for other outcomes at each of the four levels of social organization. Results indicate that each level of organization was important in the sense that clustering was apparent, though the precise pattern of associations varied by outcome. Finally, motivated by recent results for contemporary China that suggest that villages dominated by single kin groups or small numbers of kin groups have better provision of public goods (Tsai 2004), we carry out a preliminary assessment of the importance of “collective efficacy” in late imperial Liaoning villages by examining whether residents of villages that were more homogeneous in terms of their descent group composition had better provision of public goods, as reflected in more favorable demographic outcomes.