The Poverty of Communism by Nicholas Eberstadt

Author:Nicholas Eberstadt [Eberstadt, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Political Science, Political Ideologies
ISBN: 9781351476676
Google: Acs3DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 36811259
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1988-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The regional differences in life expectancy computed for China are contrasted with corresponding estimates of disparities in India and Brazil, two other populous and diverse nations, in Table 7.4. (Figures for India and Brazil make an effort to adjust for the underreporting of deaths, and thus can be expected to depict the gap between advanced and more impoverished regions with less understatement.) In the mid-1970s, the difference in life expectancy between China’s Manchurian provinces of Liaoning and Heilongjiang and its “southeastern” provinces of Sichuan and Guizhou was at least ten years. In India in the 1960s, the difference between the healthiest state (Kerala) and the state with the lowest estimated life expectancy (Uttar Pradesh) was put at over twenty years, and for Brazil in 1970 the estimated difference between the highest and lowest state was placed at almost thirty years. Even accounting for the likely differential in underregistration of deaths in China’s less developed areas, it would appear that regional disparities in life expectancy in China were unlikely to be greater than in India or Brazil and may well have been considerably smaller.

While interprovincial differences in life expectancy do not appear to be extreme when placed in this international perspective, disparities within provinces do seem to be pronounced. The cleavage between rural and urban areas is particularly striking. Recent analysis by Chinese scholars has estimated the gap in life expectancy between the cities and the countryside to be on the order of 3–4 years46; these computations, however ever, do not seem to take the disproportionate underregistration of deaths in rural areas into account. A World Bank mission on rural health and medical education for China, by contrast, has estimated that the difference in lifespans between urban and rural areas at the time of the cancer survey may have been on the order of twelve years.47 This would be a greater inequality between city and countryside than in India in 1971 (an estimated 8 years),48 or Indonesia in 1971 (an estimated 6 years),49 and would be much wider than the difference in Brazil (an estimated 2-3 years).50 No other nation which has reached China’s estimated level of overall national life expectancy has such a pronounced difference in life expectancy separating its urban and rural population.51

TABLE 7.3

Unadjusted Chinese Estimates of Life Expectation at Birth in the P.R.C. by Province, 1973–75 (both sexes)

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