关键词: 消失女性, 性别歧视, 传统文化, 明清时期, 族谱

Abstract: The high rate of “missing women” in todays China has a long history that goes back to imperial times，and one embodiment of such preference is the presence of female infanticide in the Ming （13681644） and the Qing （16441911） dynasties With a relatively abundant qualitative accounts on the presence of female infanticide，quantitative evidence is scant As female infanticide matters to Chinese demography because it shaped not only the mortality，but also the fertility pattern，it is also a key issue in the Great Divergence debate，initiated by the release of Pomeranzs seminal work，“The Great Divergence” While the California School scholars argue it was widely practiced in Qing China，the only quantitative evidence is provided by Lee，Campbell，and Wang on North China，but not the core region in the debate，the Yangzi Delta 
Therefore，this paper attempts at reinvestigating the survival of daughters from 1350 to 1900 using newly digitised genealogical records from six lineages in the Yangzi Delta Using two separate samples comprising 19 516 fathers and 6 000 daughters，this paper first estimates the proportion of “missing daughters”，daughters who should have been born but were not recorded in the genealogies We then distinguish between the two causes of “missing”，underregistration and excess female deaths because of female infanticide and parental neglect during infancy and childhood，and estimate the underregistration rate and the female infanticide rate 
The estimated child sex ratio was about 1341，with the ratios in the elite lineages，the Gu （1191），the Zhuang （1151），and the Liu （116:1），the most balanced By assuming that the number of daughters who survived were completely recorded for fathers who had daughters records，we estimate that the percentage of missing daughters was around 689 per cent，with 214 per cent of them dying of infanticide and neglect in infancy and childhood，and 475 per cent of them survived but not recorded We compare the results from the six lineages with the previous estimates provided in Lee et al（1994）and Lee & Campbell（1997），finding that the daughters survival pattern in the three elite lineages in the Yangzi Delta was comparable with that of the Qing royal family，and the pattern of the three common lineages was comparable with that of the Liaoning rural village 
We then test the factors that were related with daughters survival in the Ming and Qing dynasties The empirical investigation suggests that fathers social status and cultural background were significantly correlated with their daughters records in the genealogies，their sex composition in the households，and their daughters marriages Being higher social status was positively correlated with the number of daughters a father would have，and the proportion of daughters within his household Daughters of degree and officeholders were also more easily to marry degree and officeholders A strong positive assortative mating pattern was observed in the six lineages in the Yangzi Delta

Key words: missing women, gender discrimination, traditional culture, Ming-Qing China, genealogies