The Shanghai Jiaotong University Center for the History and Society of Northeast China was established as a research unit by a collaboration of the Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU) School of the Humanities and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) School of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Center’s second summer school will be held from July 6 to July 20. The class will focus on the use of the China Multigenerational Panel Datasets – Liaoning (CMGPD-LN) in the study demography, stratification, and social and family history. It will also preview a new dataset, the China Multigenerational Panel Dataset – Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC) that we plan to release in 2013. HKUST Distinguished Professor and Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences advises on the organization and content course. UCLA Professor of Sociology Cameron Campbell will lecture. If any non-Chinese speakers enroll, the lectures will be in English, otherwise lectures may be in Chinese.
This class is intended to introduce students to advanced techniques required to manage and analyse the CMGPD datasets, thereby equipping them to make use of the CMGPD-LN and CMGPD-SC in their own research.
Datasets
China Multigenerational Panel Dataset – Liaoning (CMGPD-LN)
The CMGPD-LN is an important dataset for the study of China’s family, social and demographic history, and for the study of demography and stratification more generally. The dataset is suitable for application of a wide variety of statistical techniques that are commonly used in social demography for the analysis of longitudinal, individual-level data, and available in the most popular statistical software packages. The dataset is distinguished by its size, temporal depth, and richness of detail on family, household and kinship context.
The materials from which the dataset was constructed are Shengjing Imperial Household Agency household registers held in the Liaoning Provincial Archives. The registers are triennial. Altogether there are 3600 of them. We transcribed a subset of them to produce the CMGPD-LN, which spans 160 years from 1749 to 1909. At present, the dataset comprises 29 register series, and consists of 1,500,000 records that describe 260000 individuals over seven generations. The CMGPD-LN is accordingly an important resource for the study of historical demography, sociology, economics, and other fields.
The CMGPD-LN and associated English-language documentation are already available for download at ICPSR, following a free registration. Please visit the website: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cmgpd
China Multigenerational Panel Dataset – Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC)
The CMGPD-SC covers communities of recent settlers in Shuangcheng, Heilongjiang in the last half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. It contains 1.35 million records that describe 100,000 people. The registers cover descendants of urban migrants from Beijing and rural migrants from neighboring areas in northeast China who came to the area in the first half of the nineteenth century as part of a government organized effort to settle this largely vacant frontier region. One of the distinguishing features of this dataset is the availability of linked, individual-level landholding records for several points in time. The data also include a rich array of other indicators of household and family context and socioeconomic status. We anticipate formal public release of the dataset via ICPSR in 2013 or 2014. We will provide participants in the summer class with access to drafts of the release and documentation.
Topics to be Covered in Class
1. Review of relevant research in related topics in social demography