Every book has its history. The history of the present volume began in 1996 when Arthur P. Wolf (Stanford University), Chuang Ying-chang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) and Theo Engelen (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands) started a comparative research program on the demographic history of Taiwan and the Netherlands, called Population and Society in Taiwan and the Netherlands. It is a collaboration of Taiwanese, US and Dutch historians and anthropologists studying the differences in family formation and demography in two countries considered prototypical for the European and the Asian population regimes. The comparison of these regimes itself has a long history from Thomas Malthus via John Hajnal to James Lee. Originally, the core of the comparison was the classical dichotomy of the world into a Western-European and a Chinese demographic pattern, the first characterized by late marriage and a high incidence of celibacy, the other by young and universal marriage. The resulting implicit assumption was that, in the Maltusian terminology, the European population was regulated through preventive checks, the Chinese through positive checks. According to James Lee et al. this typology does not do justice to Chinese society. They refer to the Malthusian vision as mythology and are convinced that Chinese actors have displayed a so called proactive behavior throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

In Population and Society in Taiwan and the Netherlands the participants have refrained from indulging in sweeping generalisations. Instead, they collected large databases on both sides of the Eurasian continent and tried through empirical research on the micro level to let the data speak. This third volume of Life at the Extremes. The demography of China and Europe presents the results of a comparison between two provincial towns, Lugang in Taiwan and Nijmegen in the Netherlands. These results are also evaluated within the larger discussion mentioned.

The research underlying this book has been made possible with the support of the Dutch Organization for Scientific research (nwo), Taiwan's Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the home institutions of the authors, Radboud University Nijmegen and the Program for Historical Demography of the Academia Sinica, Taiwan. A grant from the Taiwanese National Science Organization enabled Theo Engelen to spend the academic year 2004-2005 at the Institute of Ethnology of the Academia Sinica.