Chapter 6: Misfortune of Children of the Cultural Revolution: Cohort Size, Historical Times, and Life Chances in China
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Montreal, August 2017 and the Asian Population Association’s annual meeting in Shanghai, July 2018. The research was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the Academic Senate of UC Davis.
This chapter unravels the impact of the Chinese population boom (1949– 1971) on individual life chances, analyzing the influences of large fertility numbers on personal welfare. Using seven waves of national data from the 2003–2013 Chinese General Social Surveys (N = 43,308), we estimate the effects of cohort size on socio-economic status and subjective evaluation of life. Members of large birth cohort suffer from their birth times; cohort size is negatively associated with family income and happiness. We further identify the impact of a confounding historical event, the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), on the cohorts coming of age in those times. Three cohorts (born in 1947–1966) who came of age during the Cultural Revolution fare the worst in objective and subjective well-being. This negative cohort effect is partly due to their large cohort size. Although born during the temporary low-birth period of the Great Famine (1958–1961), children of early Cultural Revolution fare the worst in human and political capital attainment, family income, and sense of subjective well-being. We speculated that they were also subject to the intense population-based competition in schooling and employment.
