PUM8305 Population and Family in China

2020/10/9 10:16:36

2credits

This course is designed to explore the governance issues in the field of population and family in China. Population study covers all of the factors related to changes in the size and characteristics of a human population. Family is the basic unit of a society. The topics under study are as diverse as population governance as politics, as well as contents including fertility, migration, marriage, aging, as well as disparities in social, economic, and health outcomes in China.

An understanding of demography and population dynamics is crucial to professionals in a diversity of careers and industries. For example, city planners, environmental engineers, and health policy experts all utilize demographic expertise about population growth, migration patterns, and health and longevity in decisions on issues such as how many schools a city should build, how much water a region will need over twenty years, and what type of public health initiatives would best serve a community. Professionals in business also rely on demographic knowledge to make decisions about which markets to enter, what products are needed, and how to best market their products. 

In this course, we will explore the governance politics on China’s population dynamics and family transitions and the contextual backgrounds of the issues and its governance. Basic demographic “building blocks” include techniques for describing population characteristics will be introduced for understanding population dynamics. We will also discuss the centrality of Chinese population dynamics to social, political, and economic issues in the past and in the future. Four content sections will be included: Fertility and Policy, Marriage and Family, Migration and Urbanization, as well as Aging and Health.

This course aims to 1) use key concepts related to population structures (including population age structure, sex composition, population size, population growth rates, etc.) to describe the trajectory of Chinese population; 2） understand fertility and related policies and its contexts in china in the past few decades;3）Understand marriage trends and its constituting role in Chinese family；4） Identify the determinants and challenges of internal migration in china ；5） explain how population health is intertwined with social and economic inequalities; 6） identify how changes in population and family in China are relevant to contemporary public policy debates.