Fate and Fortune in Rural China is a major contribution to the study of both the social and population history of late traditional China, and that of historical demography in general. Lee and Campbell demonstrate the interaction between demographic and other social pressures, and illustrate graphically the nature of social mobility and social organization in rural China during the century from 1774SH1873. Their conclusion--that social norms, rooted in ideology, determined demographic performance--is supported by a mass of hitherto inaccessible primary data.

James Z. Lee (1952 -) is Chair Professor of History and Sociology and the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Faculty Associate at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan, and Jiangxi Chair Visiting Scholar at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He and his colleagues in the Lee-Campbell Research Group construct, analyze, and disseminate Big Social Science Data collections dealing with historical and contemporary China. Their research findings from these data fuel a new scholarship of discovery featured in A New History for A New China, a Coursera Massive Open On-line Course, www.coursera.org/course/newchinahistory1 designed to show how such facts complicate our current understandings in Part One of comparative societies, in Part Two of human behavior, and in Part Three of the construction of individual and group identities.