Did China's life expectancy at birth rise 30.5 years from 1960 to 1980? If so, what were the particular changes made to their society's structure?

Upvote:2

Actually, growth in life expectancy in China looks even better if you start from the end of the Chinese revolution (say, 1950). A nice paper on this with charts of provincial-level morality (infant and under-5) is An exploration of China's mortality decline under Mao: A provincial analysis, 1950–80, (K. Babiarz, et. al., Popul Stud (Camb). 2015 Mar; 69(1): 39–56.)..

There is an increase in mortality during the famine of the 1960s, but this is lower than the mortality rate in the early 1950s.

One nice tidbit from that article: China managed to almost completely eradicate smallpox over a period of just three years (!), 1957-1960.

Upvote:2

Question:
Did China's life expectancy at birth rise 30.5 years from 1960 to 1980? If so, what were the particular changes made to their society's structure?

There were two disastrous Chinese programs which accounted for millions of premature deaths in the 1960's and 70's.

The Great Leap Forward 1958 - 1962. cost 45 million Chinese their lives. A famine occurred as farmers were encouraged to destroy their plows and important farming equipment in a flawed attempt to manufacture steel. The effort resulted in mass famine.

The Cultural Revolution 1966 until 1976 at least 3 million people died violent deaths and post-Mao leaders acknowledged that 100 million people, one-ninth of the entire population, suffered in one way or another”.

Mao Zedong died in Sept 1976, and this lead to more enlighten and stable leadership.

Deng Xiaoping, ruled 13 September 1982 – 2 November 1987 his economic reforms put China's economy on a growth path. But his rule is outside the period identified in your question.

Sources:

Upvote:9

"1960 through 1980" is a very interesting choice of time periods. I suspect the claimed increase in life expectancy at birth during that period is true, but it's also misleading.

1960 was the worst part of the Great Chinese Famine, where somewhere between 15 million and 45 million people died; famines tend to be hardest on the very young.

1980, on the other hand, was in the middle of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. Semi-privatization of agriculture resulted in greatly increased production, and increased economic activity meant there was plenty of money available for things like basic health care (and the communist ideology meant that health care was available to everyone).

If you plot the raw death rate per 1000 people since 1960, you'll see the rate plummet over the period 1960-1962. That's the recovery from the famine; if you were to use 1965 rather than 1960 as your starting point, the improvement would be far less dramatic.

(The World Bank gives an improvement of only +23 years at birth over the period 1960-1980, rather than +30.5, but that may just be a difference in calculation techniques.)

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