Données nouvelles sur l'évolution démographique chinoise. I. Les recensements de 1953, 1964 et 1982 et l'évolution des taux bruts depuis 1950

Calot Gérard. ? New Data on the Chinese Demographic Situation. I. 1953, 1964 and 1982 Censuses and Crude Rates since 1950. On the occasion of the publication of the first results of the 1982 Population Census, the People's Republic of China has recently released a great deal of information on its demographic trends over the past thirty years. This first article is devoted to the comparative study of the three censuses taken in 1953, 1964 and 1982, and to the study of crude birth rates, crude death rates and rates of natural increase since 1950. From this analysis, the coverage of the censuses appears to be quite satisfactory, as does their mutual consistency by sex and age. Conversely, crude birth rates and especially crude death rates, such as they result from registration statistics, appear to be clearly underestimated. Population growth, which reached 2.5 to 3 percent annually in the late sixties, decreased by more than half in the 1970's, due to a considerable decline of the birth rate that dropped from 40 to 20 per thousand. Chinese demographic history over the last thirty years is marked by the Black Years 1958-1961, and especially by the 1960 catastrophic famine : the Great Leap Forward period ends up with a loss of 60 million people, almost equally shared between an excess of deaths and a deficit of births.