Family Organization, Disability, and Mortality in Rural China, 1749-1909

Cameron D. Campbell, University of California, Los Angeles
James Z. Lee, California Institute of Technology

We investigate interrelationships among household organization, disability, and mortality in rural northeast China from the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. We begin by examining how family organization, in particular household and kin group structure, affected the chances of being identified as disabled for adult males. To test the claim that the extended family in China acted as a safety net for vulnerable members, we then examine how family organization conditioned the mortality impact of being registered as disabled. We focus on the effects on the mortality disadvantage of disability of the presence or absence of kin who could provide assistance, including spouses, siblings, or adult children. To investigate these questions, we apply discrete-time event-history techniques to longitudinal, individual-level household registration data from rural Liaoning province in China between 1749 and 1909.