Ch'en Ta 陳達 Ch'en Ta (1892-), sociologist and demographer, taught at Tsinghua University (1923-51) and published studies of Chinese labor, migration, and population. From 1938 to 1948 he directed the Institute of Census Research, developed a census program, and made demographic investigations of the Kunming area. After 1958, Ch'en came under Communist censure temporarily because of his proposals for population control. The rural country seat of Yühang hsien, a few miles west of Hangchow in Chekiang province was the birthplace of Ch'en Ta. He had a younger brother and a sister. He received a traditional education until 1905. Then he studied at the Yühang district primary school for two years, and from 1908 to 1910 he attended the Hangchow Middle School. These institutions had been established a few years earlier under the educational reform program. At both Yühang and Hangchow, Ch'en distinguished himself as a student of exceptional promise. Ch'en gained admittance to Tsinghua College, which was opened in 1911 to prepare Chinese students for study in the United States colleges on Boxer Indemnity Scholarships. However, Tsinghua was closed in November 1911 following the republican revolution, and Ch'en probably did not begin studying there until the institution was reopened in May 1912. He was graduated from Tsinghua in 1916 and shortly thereafter left China to begin his studies in the United States.

Ch'en attended the University of Washington for a short time and then transferred to Reed College, where he received a B.A. in 1919. In 1918 a young professor named William F. Ogburn left the University of Washington for Reed. The two met soon after Ogburn's arrival at Reed and began a lifelong friendship and professional association. Both men later moved to Columbia University, where Ch'en received his M.A. in 1920 and Ph.D. in 1923 in sociology. At Columbia he also studied under F. H. Giddings and R. E. Chaddock. His reputation as an outstanding young scholar gained him the acquaintance of such noted sociologists as Frank Lorimer, Stuart Rice, and Warren Thompson. Ch'en Ta was absent from China during the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and other Chinese student demonstrations of that period. Perhaps that is why he never developed the nationalistic zeal characteristic of so many of his contemporaries. As an observer and analyst, however, Ch'en did keep abreast of events in China. He served as editor in 1919-20 of The Chinese Students Quarterly, published in the United States by the Chinese Students Alliance, and he was associated with the Chinese delegation to the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1921-22. The professional detachment which marked his later work in sociology and demography already was apparent in his writings of this period. While in New York, Ch'en met the most articulate American advocate of birth control, Margaret Sanger, whom he briefed on China before her visit to Japan and China in 1922.

Ch'en Ta's primary interest during his graduate student days was overseas Chinese labor, a problem which had become of increasing concern in the United States during the early years of the century. Shortly after the first outbursts of racial feeling against Orientals on the West Coast, the Congress of the United States had passed the immigration laws of 1904, permanently excluding Chinese labor from the United States. The Chinese had retaliated in 1905 by boycotting American trade for five months. Overt expression of discrimination against Orientals in the United States culminated in 1923 in the passage of the Johnson Act, which prohibited admission of all aliens ineligible for American citizenship. Against this background, the United States Department of Labor became increasingly sensitive after the First World War to labor problems of overseas Chinese as they affected Sino-American relations. In 1920 United States Commissioner of Labor Statistics Ethelbert Stewart accepted an article by Ch'en Ta on the labor situation in China for publication in the Monthly Labor Review, issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That article was the first of a ten-year series of articles by Ch'en on labor conditions in China and other parts of the Far East. Stewart was also instrumental in having Ch'en's Ph.D. thesis published by the United States government. Chinese Migrations with Special Reference to Labor Conditions appeared in 1923 as Bulletin No. 340 of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

After he returned to China in 1923, Ch'en Ta became a professor of sociology, probably the first, at Tsinghua College in Peking. The conversion in 1925 of Tsinghua into a university designed to train Chinese students in China rather than to prepare them for study in United States colleges raised Ch'en's standing in the Chinese academic world. He continued to work on current Chinese labor problems. His surveys of Chinese labor in the 1920's were of considerable value, since the impotent, short-lived Peking governments of the pre- 1928 period lacked facilities for even rudimentary statistical coverage of employment and wages. Ch'en summarized the results of his investigations of Chinese labor in Chung-kuo lao-tung wen-Ci [Chinese labor problems], published in 1929. He accepted the post of chief of the department of statistics in the ministry of interior in the new National Government at Nanking, but he soon resigned because he was unable to reconcile himself to the working habits of the Nanking bureaucracy. Taking advantage of a sabbatical leave, he left China to teach at the University of Hawaü during 1929-30.

In the remaining years before the outbreak of war with Japan, Ch'en produced two significant Ch'en Ta works. The first, published in 1934, was Jen-k'ou wen-Ci [population problems], a textbook based on Ch'en's lectures at Tsinghua. A second book resulted from research undertaken at the suggestion of William L. Holland of the Institute of Pacific Relations and conducted on a trip from south China through the Netherlands East Indies, the Malay peninsula, Siam, and French Indo-China in late 1934 and 1935. This book, in part an expansion and updating of Ch'en's doctoral dissertation on Chinese migrations, was published in 1938 as Nan-yang hua-cKiao yü Min Yueh she-hui [overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and Fukienese and Kwangtung society]. An English version of that book was edited by Bruno Lasker and was published in 1940 by the Institute of Pacific Relations as Emigrant Communities in South China: a Study of Overseas Migration and Its Influence on Standards of Social Change.

Ch'en traveled frequently in the period before the war: after his seven-year residence in the United States from 1916 to 1923, he visited Hawaü in 1925 to attend the first Institute of Pacific Relations conference at Honolulu. He visited Japan in 1925 and again in 1930, when he returned to China from Hawaü by way of Korea. Following his research on overseas Chinese in 1934-35, he studied labor conditions in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy in 1935-36.

The outbreak of war with Japan in 1937 disrupted academic life at Peiping. The decision was made to evacuate Peking, Nankai, and Tsinghua universities to areas in west China held by Nationalist armies. Ch'en fled Peiping in mid-November, at times moving just ahead of advancing Japanese units, and finally arrived in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. There the consolidated university of 1,200 students began classes in early December of 1937. These were disbanded, however, when Japanese army units advanced up the Yangtze. Teachers and students moved westward again, this time to Kunming in Yunnan province, where they reunited to form Southwest Associated University. Ch'en left Changsha in the latter part of 1937 and reached Kunming in mid-February.

Later in 1938, after the refugee university had started classes, the Tsinghua authorities decided to establish several research organizations, among them the Institute of Census Research, in order to mobilize faculty ability for the war effort and for postwar planning. Ch'en accepted the post of director of the Institute. In the remaining seven years of the war Ch'en Ta, supported by the resources of the Institute, was able to initiate and carry out several censuses and registrations of births and deaths. In 1939 the Institute planned and directed a population census of Ch'eng-kung hsien. In 1942 the ministry of interior, the Yunnan provincial government, the economic council of Yunnan, and the Institute, in response to a proposal by Ch'en, jointly undertook a population census of the remaining hsien around Kunming Lake, including the city of Kunming.

At the first decennial conference of the National Government's directorate of budgets, accounts, and statistics in February 1941, Ch'en presented a census program for postwar reconstruction. The conference passed a resolution that population census work should begin at local government levels in 1941-43 to prepare for a national census in 1947. In support of this resolution, the ministry of interior organized a training school in the autumn of 1941 to teach local officials the essentials of modern censustaking. Ch'en Ta was invited to lecture at the school. In March 1942 the directorate of budgets, accounts, and statistics and the Szechwan provincial government took a census of three hsien in the Chengtu plain.

Ch'en Ta summarized the result of these experimental wartime censuses and other prewar population surveys in a study entitled Population in Modern China. Ch'en prepared the manuscript in the late months of 1944 and sent it to William F. Ogburn in January 1945. It was published as an article in the American Journal of Sociology in July 1946 and then as a book by the University of Chicago Press. Ch'en later summarized additional research done on the Kunming Lake region population in a paper, "Internal Migration and Social Change in China during the War," prepared for the January 1949 Institute of Pacific Relations conference at Hot Springs, Virginia. Ch'en Ta's work in the Kunming area during the war was the most ambitious and successful demographic investigation conducted in China up to that time, with the possible exception of a vital statistics experiment conducted in part of a hsien in Kiangsu province in the early 1930's by Warren Thompson and others. Most of the field work was carried out by school teachers with the assistance of local officials. Since he made no provisions for a field check of completeness of enumeration, Ch'en had no means of assessing the quality of the work apart from personal observations regarding the indifference of the local officials and certain obvious errors in the data. The greater part of Population in Modern China is devoted to comparing the results of the Kunming investigations with data from earlier experimental hsien censuses. Despite its inadequacies, Ch'en Ta's work in the Kunming Lake region between 1939 and 1944 represented an important advance in demographic field research in China. After the Japanese surrender, he participated in plans for a national census of China. However, unstable political conditions and the recurrence of civil war ended any possibility of the census being taken at that time. Ch'en Ta reviewed his wartime experiences in a volume, Lang-chi shih-nien [ten years of wandering], published in 1946. He visited the United States to attend the Bicentennial Conference on Far Eastern Culture and Society held at Princeton University in April 1947, after which he went to England to attend an international conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations. In recognition of his achievements in sociological research, Ch'en was elected a member of Academia Sinica in 1948. During the early years of Communist rule, the name of Ch'en Ta was hardly to be found in the news from China. Never interested in politics, he was excluded from the official work of the new governmental system and from teaching at Tsinghua. He lost his position in 1951, after nearly 30 years as a faculty member. Conventional courses in sociology disappeared from university curricula the following year. Ch'en did not take part in the nation-wide census carried out under Communist direction in 1953, although he did analyze some of the data collected in the census. Reportedly, he spent most of his time on employment data that he had collected during the years before 1945. At the beginning of 1957, however, Ch'en Ta took part in an important symposium on population research at Peking, the first known meeting of its kind in China after 1949. At that meeting he presented the principal paper, entitled "New China's Population Census of 1953 and Its Relation to National Reconstruction and Demographic Research." He advocated birth control through contraception and delayed marriage to achieve a lowering of the birth rate. .Ch'en's paper was sent to the August 1957 session of the International Statistical Institute held in Stockholm, Sweden.

Ch'en continued to make notable public statements in 1957. In March, speaking in the capacity of a member of the National Committee of the Second Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, he joined Wu Ching-ch'ao and other academicians in urging the oganization of a population research institute and the restoration of the subject of demography to the college curriculum. In the May 1957 issue of the magazine Hsin chien-she [new construction] and in several speeches, he again advocated delayed marriage and contraception as means of curbing the population expansion. The Chinese Communists, in the wake of the Hungarian revolt of late 1956, were inviting and cajoling Chinese intellectuals to criticize past policies and acts of the regime, and Ch'en Ta continued to speak out on the topic of population. He stated that the accuracy of the 1953 census could not be assessed, since independent checks on field work and basic- and intermediate-level tabulations had not been made. In June 1957, he was named a member of the enlarged Scientific Planning Commission of the State Council at Peking. During the rectification drive in the autumn and winter of 1957, Communist party stalwarts heaped abuse on Ch'en Ta, Fei Hsiao-t'ung (q.v.), Wu Ching-ch'ao, and other sociologists who were said to be rightists associated in an alleged plot against the Communist regime; their supposed leaders were Chang Po-chün and Lo Lung-chi (qq.v.). These attacks led to Ch'en's expulsion from the Scientific Planning Commission in March 1958. Despite his uncertain status, Ch'en was named a member of the National Committee of the Third People's Political Consultative Conference in April 1959. His classification as a rightist was rescinded in 1961.

In 1916, the year of his graduation from Tsinghua College, Ch'en Ta married a daughter of one of his primary school teachers, whose surname was Yao. She bore Ch'en three sons, one of whom died in infancy, and one daughter. His elder son, Ch'en Hsu-jen, graduated from Nankai University in 1942. His younger son, Ch'en Hsu-tu, after graduation from Reed College, did graduate work and taught at Stanford University. In 1962 Ch'en Ta was reported to be living in Peking with his daughter and her husband.