CHINA STUDIESdistributing jobs, and the layoffs and unemploy-
ment being generated by reforms of China’s
inefficient state-owned enterprises (e.g. Bian 1994;
Guthrie 1997; Matthews 1998)Solinger 1995;
Sensenbrenner 1996.
Another primary research focus of China soci-
ologists, in addition to the causes and consequences
of the post-1978 economic reforms, involves Chi-
na’s dramatic fertility decline and its social conse-
quences. The transformation of China from a
society with moderately high fertility (total fertility
rates of 5+) to extraordinarily low rates (total
fertility rates under 2) has occurred in roughly the
same time period as China’s economic reforms
(from the 1970s through the 1990s), but these two
fundamental changes have been produced by con-
tradictory processes. Whereas in economic affairs
the state has increasingly withdrawn from bureau-
cratic management and has allowed markets to
govern distribution, in regard to population the
state has shifted away from indirect management
and persuasion in favor of direct bureaucratic
mandating of fertility quotas. The high national
priority of this fertility reduction program has
complex implications, in terms of sociological re-
search. High priority, combined with recurring
foreign criticism of China’s human rights record
in the realm of family planning (see Whyte 1998),
produce political sensitivities that often obstruct
and constrain research on this topic. However,
that same priority has made research on topics
related to fertility so important that foreign as well
as Chinese demographers and others have been
recruited to help plan and carry out a large num-
ber of high-quality surveys of China’s demograph-
ic dynamics. These data have also in most instanc-
es been made available for examination by foreign
as well as Chinese researchers. On balance the
result has been a boom in research on China’s
population and a much better understanding of
current trends in fertility, mortality, and other
demographic domains than existed prior to the
1980s (see, for example, Banister 1987; Coale
1984; Feeney and Yuan 1994; Riley and Riley 1997).
In sum, recurring political turbulence in Chi-
na has in some cases obstructed and delayed socio-
logical research, but both the field and its practi-
tioners have continued to forge ahead despite the
uncertainties involved. The rapid and complex
social changes that have occurred in China in the
1980s and 1990s have provided many new re-
search questions for sociologists to explore, and a
maturing network of Chinese sociologists and for-
eign China specialists (and nonspecialist sociolo-
gists interested in studying the world’s most popu-
lous and most rapidly developing society) have
taken advantage of new research opportunities. As
a result of these changes the sociological study of
China at the end of the 1990s was much better
established than it was two decades earlier, with a
wide variety of social processes and trends better
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