Theories and Processes of Demographic Transition on Three Chinese Generations

POPULATION AND SOCIETY
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Population and Society
Demographic transition entails the long-term trends comprising changes in death and birth rates, which cause substantive changes in the age distribution of a society. The transitions tend to cause massive social and cultural differences across different generations or cohorts. One example of how these transitions transform society is the case of China with the developments that have taken place in the country over the last six decades. In this case, it can be observed that individuals born in the 1960s witnessed a cultural revolution in their childhood, while those born in the 1970s mostly faced social changes. Those in the 1980s in China are characterized by individuals pursuing materialism and self-realization. The focus of this paper is to utilize the theories and processes of demographic transition to account for the social and cultural differences across the past three Chinese generations. It is argued that the political and leadership revolutions have caused social and cultural changes based on the various policies and ideologies pursued by the various generational leaders.
Theories and Processes
Demographic transitions often involve the changes taking place in society due to a variety of reasons. The demographic transition theory characterizes populations in terms of mortality and fertility, more observable trends across the second half of the 20th century. The Office of Population Research formulated the demographic transition theory, which was then used to predict that populations across Western and Central Europe could peak in about 1950, after which it would decline. However, some scholars have established that the second half of the 20th century witnessed rapid growth in population from 2.5 billion in 1950 to around 6.5 billion in 2005 (Bongaarts 2009). However, the theory of demographic transition is founded on the notion that transitions accompany the development processes that transform society from an agricultural to an industrial society.
Other theories offer similar insights regarding demographic transition. For example, the Malthusian theory of population outlines the correlation between food production and population. In this case, Malthus uses the law of reducing yields to argue that food production reduces as the population grows (Unat 2020). In this case, the changes in industrialization influence production and hence the demographic transitions. During industrialization, population growth can be expected to be high, which reverses after full industrialization when population controls and the pursuit of materialism force birth rates to decline. However, the changes caused by demographic transitions could take place in cycles, as explained by the generational cohort theory (GCT). Popularized by Strauss and Howe in 1991, the GCT proposes a general hypothesis that social cycles tend to repeat themselves every four generations. In this case, a generation is referred to as a cohort, defined as the aggregate of individuals experiencing the same event within the same interval (Fisher and Crabtree 2009). This theory argues that changes across the cohorts are majorly the result of social events.
The demographic transition theory proposes a process that comprises five stages. The first one is the pre-industrial society that was characterized by high death and birth rates, often occurring in a balance. The second stage is that of a developing country, which sees a significant decline in death rates and prolonged lifespan due to improvements in sanitation and food supply. The third stage is characterized by low birth rates caused by such aspects as high wages, urbanization, reduced subsistence agriculture, and higher education status among women. Stage four sees low death and birth rates, which causes an increasingly large aging population. Lastly, stage five is debatable since some experts believe that the generation experiences below-replacement levels of fertility while others believe in increases in fertility. Overall, it can be argued that this is where the cycle starts to repeat itself.
Chinese Generations
The past three generations in China can be classified in one of two ways. First, there is the conventional classification of generations under the demographic transition theory: Boomers (1946-1960/1964), generation X (1961/1965-1978), and generation Y (1980-1995). Second, there is the approach used by (Tang, Wang, and Zhang 2017), which classifies the Chinese generations as Pre-reform (born before 1978), Reform (born between 1978 and 1989), and Post-reform (born after 1989). Regardless of the classification, it is important to acknowledge that these generations lived under different leaderships, which has seen a shift from Mao’s socialist orthodoxy to a reformist period after Mao and then to an economic transformation under the current regime. Leadership regimes and ideologies have heavily influenced the cultural and social values and attitudes across these generations.
Social and Cultural Differences
The social and cultural differences across the three Chinese generational cohorts have illustrated how the demographic transition theories and processes apply to population differences across time. As mentioned earlier, the demographic transition is a theoretical framework built on the idea that transitions accompany development processes transforming a country from an agricultural age to an industrial one. According to Tang, Wang, and Zhang (2017), the current (Post-reform) generation possesses self-focus values, including openness to change and self-transcendence. This means that the Chinese Generation Y adopts characteristics similar to most developed countries where people are more individualistic and, at the same time, pursuing goals greater than the self. As per the demographic transition theory, this generation and its society and culture adopted these characteristics because China has become an industrial state, as manifested through the massive economic growth across all sectors and industries. At this point, China rivals most countries in terms of economic growth, a transformation that has taken place due to the economic policies adopted by the current regime.
The reform generation is considered to have had the lowest conservation values. This generational cohort has also been described as one who grew up in an era of ...