China Multi-Generational Panel Datasets Series

 

Investigator(s): Lee, James Z.; Campbell, Cameron D.

The China Multi-Generational Panel Datasets project links historical and contemporary archival sources, social surveys, genealogies, inscriptions, and oral histories to create large individual level panel datasets extending from late imperial to contemporary China. The research emphasizes how despite recent profound political, social, and economic changes, many distinctive institutions and patterns of demographic behavior, stratification, and social mobility persist from China's imperial past.

China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset - Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC)

The China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset - Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC) includes 1,346,829 person-year observations of 108,100 individuals who lived in 125 communities in Shuangcheng county in Heilongjiang province in northeast China between 1866 and 1913 and land registers that specify landholding in the years 1870, 1876, 1882, 1887, 1889 and 1906. (more).

China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset - Liaoning (CMGPD-LN)

The China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset - Liaoning (CMGPD-LN) has 1.5 million triennial observations of more than 260,000 residents from approximately 698 communities in the northeast Chinese province of Liaoning between 1749 and 1909. The data provide socioeconomic, demographic, and other characteristics for individuals, households, and communities, and record demographic outcomes such as marriage, reproduction and death. (more)

Announcements

For news and updates about the CMGPD and other datasets created by the Lee-Campbell Group, please see the Lee-Campbell Group webpage.

About the Researchers

Cameron Campbell is Professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his BS from Caltech, his MA and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and was an NICHD postdoc at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center. His research focuses on the relationships between social organization, family decision-making, and demographic behavior. He has published extensively on family and population in eighteenth and nineteenth century northeast China, most notably the book Fate and Fortune in Rural China with James Lee. Recently he has published papers on ethnic identity and social mobility, and presented work on disability. He is also a participant in the Eurasia project, an international collaboration that compares relationships between economic conditions, household organization, and demographic behavior for a variety of historical European and Asian communities. He is co-author of a volume from this effort, Life Under Pressure, published by MIT Press, that examines how household responses to economic stress were reflected in mortality patterns. With James Lee, he is currently working on a study of changes in family and kinship in northeast China from the seventeenth century to the present.

Shuang Chen is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Iowa. She received her BA and MA in History from Peking University and her PhD in History from the University of Michigan. She joined the University of Iowa in August 2010, after spending a year as a post-doctoral research fellow at ICPSR on the CMGPD-LN project. Professor Chen specializes in the social, economic, and political history of late imperial and modern China. Her research interests include ethnicity, frontier settlement, population behavior, and social stratification. As a member of the Lee-Campbell research group, she has worked closely with James Lee and Cameron Campbell on the analysis of historical demographic and socioeconomic data drawn from population and land registers. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript on interactions between wealth stratification, demographic processes, and institutional context that is based on her PhD dissertation and examines the settlement history and the subsequent evolution of inequality in land ownership in Shuangcheng County, Heilongjiang, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

James Z. Lee is Chair Professor of History and Sociology and the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He and his colleagues in the Lee-Campbell Research Group construct, analyze, and disseminate Big Social Science Data collections dealing with historical and contemporary China. Their research findings from these data fuel a new scholarship of discovery featured in Understanding China, 1700-2000: A Data Analytic Approach , a Coursera Massive Open On-line Course, designed to show how such facts complicate current understandings in Part One of comparative societies, in Part Two of human behavior, and in Part Three of the construction of individual and group identities.

Professor Lee's current research focuses on wealth accumulation and inequality of opportunity in historic and contemporary China, and their underlying and associated socio-demographic processes. His published works include seven authored or co-authored books, seven co-edited books or textbooks, and sixty articles focused largely on the demographic, ethnic, fiscal and frontier history of late imperial China, as well as on the population behavior, social organization, and social mobility of contemporary China. A John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2004), he is the co-recipient of six best book or equivalent honors.

Susan Hautaniemi Leonard is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research as well as a Research Affiliate with the Population Studies Center, University of Michigan. Dr. Leonard's work focuses on the relationship between human populations and their environments. Her research interests include historical epidemiology and mortality in emergent industrial areas; and household dynamics, farming practices and population dynamics in grasslands settlement.

Acknowledgement of Support

Preparation of the CMGPD-LN and documentation for public release via ICPSR DSDR was supported by NICHD R01 HD057175-01A1 "Multi-Generation Family and Life History Panel Dataset" with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

We are also grateful to the Institute for the History and Society of Northeast China, the Department of History, and the School of the Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University for their support and cooperation, especially in education and outreach efforts. The School of Humanities and Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the California Center for Population Research at UCLA also provided support for the public release of these data.