Rural Population Of Central Hunan

As a populous country, population studies about peasants are very important in China.This article aims to explore the relationship between socioeconomic status and fertility in contemporary Chinese peasants.There are many Chinese proverbs about peasants' fertility behaviors, one of them is so-called "the poorer, the more children and the more children, the poorer", and "patriarchal" is another. These two proverbs could be transformed into four propositions: (a) the lower the family socioeconomic status, the more children; (b) the more children, the lower the family socioeconomic status would be; (c) families with all socioeconomic statuses prefer sons than daughters;(d) families with all socioeconomic statuses invest more in sons than daughters. This article aims to test these propositions and the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis by quantitative analysis.The data about around 1,400 peasant families came from fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2015 in central Human Province. The data show that (a) the higher the current family socioeconomic status or the previous class identity, the more children, (b) if the number of offspring is assumed to really influence subsequent family socioeconomic status, a regression analysis shows that the number of offspring positively influences current family socioeconomic status, (c) families with a higher current socioeconomic status or with a higher former class identity are more likely to have sons, and (d) families with a higher current socioeconomic status or with a higher former class identity invest relatively more in sons' education, manifest in the greater ratios of sons'average education to daughters'.Therefore, the data also show that the so-called "the poorer, the more children and the more children, the poorer" and "patriarchal"are both wrong, and that the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis is applicable to Chinese peasants.