ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors continue a line of research earlier directed at household composition in historical England; kinship networks for the aged in the United States; the effect of incest taboos on population viability; the effect of interspousal differences in age or other characteristics on rates of consanguineal marriage; and the effect of propinquity on types of consanguineal marriage. The social simulation programmes are employed here in an exploration of the consequences of irregular population change for the structure of Chinese kinship networks, circa 1750–2150. Kinship networks, in the sense of genealogical sets, have as their proximate cause the age structure of a population, since it is the distribution of persons by age and sex, linked by relations of consanguinity and affinity, that constitutes the kinship network structure. Some general expectations of the effects of changes in demographic rates on kinship structures may be easily imagined. China experienced unprecedented social, political, economic, and demographic changes between 1950 and 1982.
