The Influence of the Pattern of Settlement on Immigrants’ Long-term Mortality: A Case from Northeast China, 1866-1914

This paper analyzes longitudinal demographic data from 120 villages in northeast China for 108,020 resettled immigrants and their descendants based on 1,346,829 individual annual observations from 1866 to 1914. The 120 villages were established through government-planned migration during the early nineteenth century. In this paper, we examine the long-term pattern of immigrants’ mortality in relation to the pattern of settlement. We especially focus on two aspects of the pattern of settlement: the geographical condition of immigrant villages and the level of heterogeneity of village communities measured by immigrants’ place of origin. Based on our previous studies of a subset of this population, we identify prominent mortality variations depending on geographic origins among urban immigrants from Beijing and rural immigrants from Liaoning and Jilin and their descendants. In this paper, we extend our analysis to the complete dataset and to the village level. We expect to find mortality variations among immigrant villages based on their population composition and geographical condition.