One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities

One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities. By JAMEs Z. LEE and WANG FENG. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. xii, 248 pp.

Attacking myths is a Sisyphean task. These deeply embedded simplifications defy refutation by new evidence. Yet knowledge only advances when we destroy simplistic, obsolete conceptions of the world. Stereotypes of West and East have engraved on our minds images of a sharp divide between the prosperous, individualist, democratic, liberal societies of Western Europe and North America and the poor, collectivist, autocratic, repressive governments of the rest of the world. Much of this spurious opposition originated with eighteenth-century thinkers like Parson Thomas Malthus, whose impressive model still dominates discussions of population dynamics today. Even though the Industrial Revolution invalidated his predictions of imminent famine for Europe, many still believe that population pressure threatens the global environment. But Malthus, like his contemporary theoreticians, relied heavily on myths about the East. For him, Western Europeans, especially Englishmen, could reduce their population growth rates by practicing individual "moral restraint": late marriage, limited sexual activity, and careful balancing of individual economic costs against immediate pleasure. The rest of the world, especially China, would suffer repeated catastrophic "positive checks" of famine and disease, because its people married early and bred like rabbits. For Malthus, East and West contrasted not only economically, but morally.

James Z. Lee and Wang Feng convincingly dismantle these Orientalist preconceptions. Their concise argument shows that Malthus was almost entirely wrong about China. Chinese families...