Living Standards in China during the 20th Century: Secular Change in the Age at Menarche

This paper uses the mean age at menarche as an indicator of long term changes in the standard of living in China. It discusses the difficulties of doing this in terms of the quality of the available data, the processing the basic data, and the interpretation of the results. The paper finds that the mean age at menarche stagnated at 16 to 17 years for women born during the 1880s-1930s, although it also finds evidence of decreases in some urban areas, such as Beijing and Shanghai. The mean age at menarche increased for birth cohorts in the 1940s, in part due the negative effects of the China-Japan war and the civil war until 1949, but particularly the famine of 1959-1962 that affected these cohorts during puberty. The age at menarche decreased in a sustained way for women born during the 1950s to early 2000s to a level of 12.1 in 2000-03. This decrease preceded the acceleration of economic growth in the 1980s. Analysis finds that improvements in education since the 1940s explains much of the decrease in menarche, ahead of improvements in nutrition, hygiene and healthcare.