Author Description

China in the 1980s, which is the subject of this descriptive monograph, was in many respects very different from China in previous decades (and even more so, perhaps, from China in future decades), and it is important to understand the lessons that this large part of human experience can offer. China not only had an enormous population living under conditions very different from those that had been intensively investigated in the West, but the diet, habits, lifestyle, antropometry and blood biochemistry were highly variable between one part of rural China and another, as were the mortality rates from many of the world's most common diseases of middle and old age.The many different patterns that emerge from this study may well take years to assimilate properly into epidemiological and sociological understanding. The changes in the rural mortality rates (between the early 1970s and late 1980s) provide evidence of notable progress in the conquest of infectious diseases, most markedly in childhood, but not in the control of the chronic diseases of middle age. Both for infectious diseases and for chronic diseases, however, the mortality rates continue to show striking contrasts between different parts of rural China, and between rural China and other populations, that should provide important leads to causation, many aspects of which are still unclear.This bilingual volume will provide for the discerning reader some of the most stimulating and potentially productive observations on patterns of geographic variation ever to have been brought together in a single medical text.