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The Indochinese Peninsula: A Demographic Anomaly

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Wilbur Zelinsky
Wilbur Zelinsky
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
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Extract

It is a commonplace that the great majority of the world's inhabitants are concentrated within a few demographic areas covering only a small portion of the surface of the earth. Of these, perhaps only three are of a first order of magnitude, while easily the greatest of these, the agglomeration in Monsoon Asia, may contain as much as 50 per cent and certainly more than 40 per cent of the world's population. Within this crescent of favored littorals and archipelagoes, certain areas – Japan, China, Java, India, and Tonkin in particular – demonstrate the most delicate and potentially disastrous balance between the physical endowment of an area and the ability of men to win a livelihood and to increase their numbers.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , February 1950 , pp. 115 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1950

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References

2 Throughout this study the area occupied by the countries of Burma, Siam, and French Indochina will be designated Indochina. The name is appropriate enough since, culturally, this area has been profoundly influenced by both its neighbors and has never within historical time acted as a culture hearth. British Malaya is not to be considered within Indochina, for its affinities seem to lie with Indonesia rather than with the north.

3 Robequain, Charles, The economic development of French Indo-China (New York, 1944), 50.Google Scholar

4 Just within the Indian realm, however, one encounters the odd and tantalizing demographic problem of an underpopulated Assam, perhaps the only considerable area in India that can receive large numbers of immigrants. Annam's proximity to Indochina might suggest a common explanation; this may very well be although the topic remains unstudied. The province did lie within the Indochinese orbit as late as the nineteenth century when it was conquered, in part, at least, by a Burmese army. In the thirteenth century, Assam was invaded from the east by the Ahome, a Shan tribe who have since lost their original culture (see Smith, Vincent A., The Oxford history of India... [Oxford, 1919], 179).Google Scholar Assam certainly has shared the political instability characteristic of Indochina and would seem also to have undergone frequent invasion by primitive or semicivilized peoples.

5 Gourou, Pierre, Les paysans du delta tonkinois (Paris, 1936), 138–70.Google Scholar

6 The census material is contained in the following series: Armuaire statistique de I'Indochine, 1937–1938; Census of India, 1931, vol. 11, Burma (in two parts); and Statistical year book – Siam, 1936–1937. The last was not available to the writer, and secondary sources based on the official publication were resorted to. An enumeration of Burma was carried on in 1941, but the results have never been published. For the Chinese section of Figure 1, I have used data from a new population map of China by John A. Alexander and T. Y. Chou published in the December 1947 issue of the Annals of the association of American geographers. The data for the Indian sections of Figure 1 are derived from the Census of India, 1931.

7 “French Indo-China: demographic imbalance and colonial policy,” Population Index, 11 (1945), 70;Google Scholar “The 'censuses' of French Indo-China have been little more than estimates and the only attempt at actual enumeration occurred in 1921.” Gourou, Pierre, “La population rurale de la Cochinchine,” Annales de géographie, 11(1942), 10;Google Scholar “Cette population est d'ailleurs fort mal connue, les donnees statistiques sur les contrees peu peuplees de la Cochinchine orientale etant de detestable qualité...”

8 The most serious attempt was made in 1937.

9 Les paysans du delta tonkinois, 142–43.

10 “French Indo-China: demographic imbalance and colonial policy,” 72.

11 For detailed descriptions of the races of Indochina and their distribution consult Wilhelm Credner, Siam, das land der Tai (Stuttgart, 1935);Google ScholarGraham, W. A., Siam (London, 1924), vol. 2;Google ScholarScott, J. C., Burma, a handbook, etc. (London, 1906);Google Scholar and the various ethnic maps and ethnological essays published by the Census of India.

12 See especially Unger, Leonard, “The Chinese in Southeast Asia,” Geographical review, 34 (1942), 196–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Robequain, 25.

14 Thompson, Virginia, Thailand, the new Siam (New York, 1941), 323.Google Scholar

15 The only major exception is the central area of the Mon-Khmer Empire which flourished in the thirteenth century a.d. From a population of possibly 4,000,000 then, there has been a decline to about 1,200,000; see “French Indo-China: demographic imbalance and colonial policy,” 69.

16 Les paysans du delta tonkinois, 128–29.

17 Ibid., 132.

18 “French Indo-China: demographic imbalance and colonial policy,” 75.

19 Annual report of the sanitary commissioner with the Government of India, 1900 (Calcutta, 1901), 75.Google Scholar

20 “French Indo-China: demographic imbalance and colonial policy,” 78.

21 Ibid., 78.

22 Robequain, 56.

23 “French Indo-China...,” 76–78.

24 Census of India, 1891, general tables for British provinces and feudatory states, 2:148.

25 Wickizer, V. O. and Bennett, M. K., The rice economy of Monsoon Asia (Stanford University, 1941), 190.Google Scholar

26 Gourou believes, however, that one of the reasons for the higher densities in Tonkin as compared with Cochinchina is the drier winter monsoon in the latter which precludes the double cropping practiced in Tonkin; “La population rurale de la Cochinchine,” 14.

27 Christian, John L., Modern Burma (Berkeley, 1942), 106.Google Scholar

28 Thompson, Warren S., Population and peace in the Pacific (Chicago, 1942), 296.Google Scholar

29 Zimmerman, Carle C., Siam rural economic survey, 1930–1931 (Bangkok, 1931), 275.Google Scholar Zimmerman made careful determinations of the amount of rice consumed by people in a number of typical rural villages during his field studies in Siam. In the glutinous rice areas the average annual consumption of rice by adults was equivalent to 243 kilograms and in the nonglutinous areas the average amounted to 202. Even allowing for a generous number of children, the average per capita consumption must be about double the figure that is derived from the official statistics. An underestimation of the amount of rice produced is the most likely answer. Zimmerman also ascertained that dietary deficiencies in Siam were a matter of lack of dietary knowledge rather than insufficiency of food. Variations in dietary adequacy among the various social classes are insignificantly small.

30 Wickizer and Bennett, 120, 219.

31 Christian, 106.

32 L. Dudley Stamp, personal communication.

33 Zimmerman, 159.

34 Zimmerman, Carle C., “Land utilization in Siam,” Geographical review, 27 (1937), 391;CrossRefGoogle Scholar “If dry agriculture were developed, it would mean new crops and abundant resources for many millions more people.”

35 The first use of this appropriate term of which I am aware occurs in the International Labor Office's Labour conditions in Indo-China (Etudes et documents, series B, no. 26, Geneva, 1937), 217.Google Scholar

36 Les paysans du delta tonkinois, 183.

37 Ibid., 186.

38 Ibid., 190.

39 Ibid., 193.

40 Zimmerman, Carle C. and Vaidhyakara, Phra Chedt, “A demographic study of eight oriental villages yet largely untouched by Western culture,” Metron (Rome), 11 (1934), 188.Google Scholar

41 Muraz, Gaston, “Aperçu sur la mortalite infantile… dans une cite sino-annamite,” Revue anthropologique, 46:30.Google Scholar

42 Zimmerman and Vaidhyakara, 191.

43 “French Indo-China...,” 76.

44 Office Permanent de l'lnstitut International de Statistique, Aperçu de la demographic des divers pays du monde, 1929–1936 (The Hague, 1939), 200–01.Google Scholar

45 Zimmerman and Vaidhyakara, p. 185.

46 Simmons, J. S., Whayne, T. F., Anderson, G. F., Horach, H. McL., and collaborators. Global epidemiology: a geography of disease and sanitation (New York, 1944), 1:88.Google Scholar

47 In general, the Europeans have only attempted to prevent or ameliorate mass epidemics and have done little to root out the endemic diseases of colonial areas.

48 “French Indo-China...,” 79.

49 Listed here are references to all the explanations of the problem which the writer has been able to discover. In all cases the treatment is incidental in tone, and no one appears ever to have made a concentrated attack on the subject. The most articulate discussions are to be found in Thompson's Thailand, 320–23, and in “French Indo-China: demographic imbalance and colonial policy.” Others occur in Census of India, 1931, vol. 11, Burma, part 1, 33–34;Google ScholarThompson, Virginia, French Indo-China (New York, 1937), 338;Google ScholarGourou, Les paysans du delta tonkinois, 8;Google Scholar and Sion, Jules, Asie des moussons (Geographic universelle, vol. 11, part 2, Paris, 1929), 409.Google Scholar

50 Les paysans du delta tonkinois, 131–32.

51 Consider Goodrich, L. C., A short history of the Chinese people (New York, 1943), 197–200, 215–18.Google Scholar

52 After the late advent of European culture there was an unusually abrupt rise in food production, especially in the production of export rice, since it was an intricate, highly developed international economy that affected Indochina rather than the relatively primitive mercantile economy of the days of the explorers.

53 Les paysans du delta tonkinois, 8.

54 Sion, 409.

55 Les paysans du delta tonkinois, 185, and Labour conditions in Indo-China, 217.

56 Gourou, Pierre, “Densité de la population et utilisation du sol en Indochine françhise,” Comptes rendus du Congres International de Geographie, Amsterdam, 1938, section IIIA (Leiden, 1938), 420.Google Scholar

57 Christian, 196.