Abstract
This chapter examines ways that household-level decisions about reproduction are shaped by available land resources, political discourse on population and impoverishment, and changing perceptions of children’s utility to long-term economic strategies. The research centers on three villages in Shigatse Prefecture of China’s Tibet Autonomous Region and is based on a combination of longitudinal demographic data gathered through surveys and in-depth interviews with parents about social, economic, and political factors that influenced their decisions to limit family size. The first part of the chapter discusses policy changes in the 1980s that dismantled Tibet’s commune system and gave families control over set amounts of arable land, and ensuing processes that led to a sharp reduction in per capita land holdings. The second part of the chapter discusses China’s birth control policy in terms of how it is rooted in a vision to create a modern society and how this policy applies in Tibet. The third part of the chapter documents the timing and magnitude of the recent fertility decline in rural Tibet and links it with (1) the reduction in per capita land holdings, (2) China’s birth control policy, and (3) the changing roles that children play in households’ long-term economic strategies. The concluding section discusses how human-environment interactions are one among several variables involved in the complex reproductive decision-making process in rural Tibet.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, Tibet refers exclusively to China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.
- 2.
The total fertility rate is a synthetic cohort estimate of the average number of children who would be born to each woman in a population if current age-specific fertility rates remain constant. It is one of the most widely used barometers of childbearing used by demographers.
- 3.
The concept of natural fertility was initially defined by Louis Henry (1961: 81) as “fertility which exists or has existed in the absence of deliberate birth control.” Demographers generally understand natural fertility to imply that couples can influence the number of children born, for example, through periodic abstinence and other cultural measures that affect spacing between births, age at marriage, and norms of widow and divorcee remarriage, but that any such action is independent of the number of children already born and therefore not meant to control the ultimate number of children born.
- 4.
This NSF-sponsored research project (#0527500) was conducted in collaboration with the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences in Lhasa.
- 5.
Several initiatives have partially counteracted the diminishing landholding trend. For example, below Sogang the government established a “poverty alleviation village” by building a dam and irrigation system on marginal land. This temporarily increased per capita landholdings in Sogang by moving several poor families to the new village.
- 6.
Mu, the basic land measurement in China, is equal to 1/15 of a hectare.
- 7.
Document No. 5, Party Committee of Tibet, 1996, as cited in Goldstein et al. (2002).
- 8.
Individual counties and prefectures had considerable autonomy regarding how to enforce this limit, if at all, and in some areas the limit was changed to allow four children for rich families, three for middle income families, and two for poor families (Goldstein et al. 2002).
- 9.
In contemporary political discourse and in rural areas where we work, pre-1959 Tibet is commonly referred to as the “old society” (chitsok nyingba).
- 10.
Although China asserted control over Tibet in 1951, the traditional manorial estate system continued until 1959.
- 11.
The government propagates this message through radio, television, newspapers, and in village meetings via members of the Maternal Care Office.
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Childs, G., Goldstein, M.C., Wangdui, P. (2013). Balancing People, Policies, and Resources in Rural Tibet. In: Brondízio, E., Moran, E. (eds) Human-Environment Interactions. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4780-7_3
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