these reported crude death rates have almost never been revealed, and the data could have been based on the total number of registered deaths compiled from localities throughout the whole country or only from selected areas of the country. Because of the possibility of serious underregistration of deaths or reliance on an unrepresentative sample of localities, analysts of China's population have been reluctant to take these reported death rates at face value. Infant mortality rates, as occasionally reported for cities or rural areas, are often implausibly low, so that serious underregistration of infant deaths in particular appears likely.2 Reported data on China's level of mortality have been scattered and of questionable validity, but data on the age pattern of mortality for the country as a whole have not been reported at all. It is likely that nationwide data on registered deaths by age were never collected until recently, and, therefore, that the government had no more idea of China's pattern of mortality since 1949 than foreign analysts.
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