Technology Shocks, Relative Productivity, and Son Preference: The Long-Term Impact of Historical Textile Production Meng Xue George Mason University Abstract This paper seeks to better understand the historical determinants of son preference among Han Chinese. I test the main hypothesis that historical textile production increased women’s labor productivity, improved their social status, and affected the evolution of son preference. I exploit county-level variation in textile production, following a technology shock in the 13th Century, to identify the causal impact of historical textile production. I find that places with historical textile production have lower son preference today. The findings are robust to alternative measures of gender attitudes. Keywords: Culture, textile production, son preference, historical persistence I Introduction Son preference is observed in many developing countries. With the advent of sex-selective abortion methods, people have become able to manipulate the sex of newborns. In recent years, son preference has resulted in phenomenal sex ratio imbalances (SRI) in South Korea, Taiwan, Mainland China and India. To examine the causes of son preference, scholars have looked at various socio-economic determinants including per capita income, education, female labor participation, total fertility and culture. In studying sex selection among East Asian countries, culture is pivotal: Confucianism, the common cultural factor, is likely to be responsible for sex imbalances in South Korea, Taiwan and Mainland China’s SRI (Gupta 2003). Today’s China features high levels of SRI, which reflects the intensity and persistence of son preference that has survived the persistent communist rule aiming to eliminate gender differences. Figure 1 China’s Sex Ratios for Age 0 Source: Fifth National Population Census (2000) In fact, China’s SRI has been the most severe in East Asia in the past decade. The state’s one-child policy limits the family’s ability to produce more children to accomplish the goal of having a son, and naturally, demand for sex-selective technology has increased. In the 2000 Census, the national average sex ratio for Age 0 is 118:100, which means every 118 boys are born with only 100 girls. Yet, a wide range of sex ratios (from 81:100 to 196:100) are found in different regions (Figure 1). This paper proposes that regional differences in son preference can be partially explained by historical textile production during the 13th and 16th century, which has marginally shifted the gender culture towards being more daughter-preferring. An exogenous textile technological innovation dating back to 13th century China provides us a unique opportunity to study the evolution of gender culture and its impact on the rest of society. In the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), Huang Dao Po, a Shanghai-born lady (1245—1330), made a breakthrough on both spinning and weaving technology, after she traveled back from a remote island south of mainland China – Hainan Island. She made the most advanced textile tool of the time, a pedal spinning wheel with three spindles, which resembles Spinning Jenny, the British-version multi-spindle spinning machine invented 1764-1770. She acquired the technology initially from Li People, an ethnic group residing in Hainan Island. Huang’s innovation made cotton fabrics cost-effective first time in history (Bray 1997: 215; Kuhn 1998: 212). The decision to begin textile production for different regions was most affected by technology accessibility and geo-climatic suitability. 1There is 1 Seeing the merits of cotton fabrics, Government encouraged cotton cultivation and textile production (Zurndorfe 2009) throughout the Yuan and Ming Dynasty. The founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty even made it a law that little evidence showing the decision on textile production was constrained by pre-existing gender culture. Textile production that took place in private homes gave women in all possible places a good opportunity to help their family, no matter whether they were educated or not educated, with or without children, had or had no rights to participate in public activities. According to Pomeranz, textile production was an ancient-Chinese version of “womanly skills” (Pomeranz 2003). (Women in rural areas were the bulk of producers.) Textile production was a favored economic activity, precisely because it continued to confine women at home. One advantage of this paper is it exploits variations in historical textile production on a relatively homogenous sample. Using data from one country can avoid the complication of international comparability of data.2 Furthermore, I focus on areas that have been historically inhabited by Han Chinese, as those are the areas affected by the technology innovation. By restricting my attention to Han-Chinese regions, I can minimize the impact of unknown observables and unobservables on the question studied in this paper. As no massive migration has taken place between textile regions and non-textile regions since the inception of textile production, this approach is credible. Literature on China’s historical textile production has been mostly on the impact of textile production on the pre-modern Chinese economy (Pomeranz 2005, Huang 1990, Goldstone 1996, Li 1998 & Elvin 1999) during late Ming and Qing Dynasty (after 1600), as part of the attempt to explain why an industrial revolution did not each household should cultivate at least half a mou1 of cotton out of ten mou of land or beyond—this policy later proved to be unrealistic for places unsuitable for cotton cultivation. 2 This issue has been pointed out by many authors, including Barro(1991) happen in China. The mainstream view along those lines is women in China worked too much at too low a cost, leading to a stagnant economy featuring little technology advances; unlike Britain, where textile production was mechanized in less than thirty years after the invention of Spinning Jenny, China’s textile manufacture was not mechanized until five hundred years after its equivalent of Spinning Jenny. This “work too much, too cheap” development path is the so-called “involution”, a concept first created by Philip Huang. Contrary to this view, Pomeranz points out that in the 18th Century, women's earning power was much closer to their husband than were English women of the same period, based on his calculation of the rice-buying power of cotton cloth (Pomeranz 2005:243). He also argues women in textile production were able to make more contribution to their family than they previously did, working alongside their husband in the fields. Based on Pomeranz’s view, I make a further claim that rapidly rising earning power can affect the well-being of women and change people’s son preference. In examining historical origins of existing cross-cultural differences in beliefs and values regarding the appropriate role of women in society, Alesina, Giuliano and Nunn (2013) point out that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution of gender norms. This paper argues that change in gender relative productivity could direct the evolution of gender culture in different directions. This paper consists of six sections. The second section lays out the conceptual framework. The third section lists data sources. The fourth section discusses the main empirical strategy. The fifth section summarizes results and robustness tests. The sixth section concludes the paper. II Conceptual Framework I examine the effect of the positive productivity shock generated by the textile technological innovation on the value of women, their importance to the family, and their social status. It is hypothesized that the value of women increased as their earning power grew, inducing a change in gender culture. This hypothesis predicts women’s participation in textile production Yuan/Ming Dynasty is negatively correlated with son preference in contemporary China. An increase in women’s productivity can simultaneously increase the value placed on daughters and on wives. One of the most important implications of Pomeranz's research is the value placed on daughters: a family's capacity to survive and to profit from its work relied upon "an optimal mix of family members of particular ages and sexes" (Pomeranz 2005:249). Holding the cost of having daughters constant, the additional benefit of making daughters work before they are married increases the willingness to have daughters. For a woman’s parents, her pre-marriage textile work can turn her into a winning asset; she would otherwise be a losing asset, as in historical China, her value to her parents would go down to zero on the date of marriage. In the case of marriage, women’s higher productivity provides higher future incomes for the family, making acquisition of a wife closer to an investment than mere consumption. Absent the exit option to divorce, I cannot really apply a household bargaining model to Ming-Dynasty China3, which provides a 3 In a bargaining model with divorce being the threat point, the wage increase of a woman can clearly affect her bargaining power within the marriage by improving her welfare at the threat point. mechanism through which women improve their intra-household status. Nevertheless, women’s ability to make their own living, when marriage ends for irresistible reasons, does open up more options to them. It was possible for widows in areas where textile production was prevalent to continue to live a decent life. As remarriage was overall discouraged after Song Dynasty, textile production allowed women to ensure their materialistic well-being even in the absence of the marriage institution, while not corrupting their morals4. I postulate specific aspects of gender culture, i.e. son preference, can change in response to a major shift in relative productivity, and once it changes, it tends to persist against small, random economic and social changes over the time. Bishi (2001)’s studies on the economics of cultural transmission demonstrate how exactly values pass down generations; this paper, however, mainly focuses on cultural evolution and historical persistence. III Data To study the long-term impact of historical textile production, I link historical textile production with current outcomes of interest, measured at the county level. In this research, I rely on China Historical GIS’s time-series province and prefecture data. As longitudinal county-level data are only available for a small geographic area (no more than a few southern provinces) and a short time frame (starting from 1911), I use the place name lookup system to extend my research to more areas and earlier in the history by manually matching the historical and current presence of each county. 4 The "three submissions" and the "four virtues" promoted by the Confucian school. The historical documents I use, mostly prefecture-level chronicles, contain information on produces and manufactured products of a great number of counties, among which a smaller number of counties have cotton and/or cotton cloth as their local specialties. I construct an indicator variable to reflect textile production: the variable equals one if cotton cloth is a major product, and zero otherwise. I primarily use the county-level Fifth National Population Census (2000), prefecture-level Chinese City Statistical Yearbook (CCSY, from 1996 to 2000) and NASA's Ocean Biology Processing Group’s distance to nearest coast dataset5 to construct the outcome variable and covariates. Sex ratios for all age groups are available, but sex ratio for Age 0 is of special interest to this paper, as it closely measures son preference realized by sex-selective abortion. To overcome the potential underreporting issues of newborn girls in 2000, I also extract sex ratios for this specific cohort from 2005 1% National Population Sample Survey and from Sixth National Population Census (2010). The Census contains information on education attainment, urban/rural household registration, percentage of agriculture in total GDP, total fertility rate, household size, ethnic population and migration, all on the county level. Per capita GDP is measured on the prefecture level, obtained from 2000 CCSY. Distance to coast measures the distance from the geographic center of a prefecture to the nearest coast. From a total of 3279 counties, I select a sample of 1856 counties, 227 prefectures and 17 provinces or directly governed city regions. I exclude all provinces with no 5 http://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/DOCS/DistFromCoast/, original 0.04-degree data set historical local chronicles, and I include neither non-territory nor non-Han regions in the Ming Dynasty. Because I focus on Han-Chinese regions in this paper, my sample excludes all ethnic autonomous provinces, prefectures and counties. After applying the aforementioned rules of exclusion, I do include all other prefectures and counties, whether a local government existed in that area back in Ming Dynasty. According to geographic proximity and cultural similarities, I divide seventeen provinces into eight regions: North (Hebei, Shandong & Henan), East (Shanghai, Jiangsu & Zhejiang), Mid-South(Hunan & Hubei), Sichuan & Guizhou, Fujian, Shaanxi, Shanxi & Guangdong. To complement my empirical strategy, I perform an instrumental variable analysis with the use of climate data. I mainly use 30-year monthly average relative humidity across 10’ *10’ space (CRU CL 2.0) from high-resolution gridded climate datasets obtained from the Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia, UK. IV Empirical Strategy I derive both OLS and IV estimates of the effect of historical textile production on today’s son preference. The baseline model is , where is an outcome of interest, i denotes counties, is my measure of the historical textile production for County i, and is a vector of socioeconomic characteristics. Running OLS does not help to exclude reverse causality, for instance, past gender culture may well determine the choice of textile production as well as today’s son preference. Little evidence suggests that is true; textile production has been viewed quite harmless by traditional Chinese gender culture. Prior to the introduction of new spinning and weaving technology, women had always been working at home performing sericulture.6 Though gender culture is unlikely to directly block women’s participation in textile production, the decision to adopt textile production might still be correlated with unobservables, such as technology diffusion, location accessibility and backwardness; ability to invest in the textile machinery, past income levels and son preference; women’s talent and capability; and other endowments that might have an effect on today’s son preference. To overcome potential endogeniety, I perform an instrumental variable analysis. I use various geo-climatic variables to construct instruments for textile production. Ideally, I want to build a comprehensive measure of textile suitability comprising a wide range of geo-climatic variables. In practice, I focus myself on studying the most critical condition to textile production—relative humidity in the environment. Upon research into textile production, I find cotton processing requires a very humid atmosphere (60%-70%) so that fibers are pliable enough to be twisted into thread. In the process of weaving, desirable relative humidity (78-80%) is even higher (“Textile World Record,”1908). Areas without high enough relative humidity usually make no cloth or cloth of very poor quality. As the 14th century technology constrains the ability to artificially increase indoor humidity, relative humidity in the natural environment is a deciding factor on textile production. Closeness to ideal relative 6 Silk was officially part of in-kind tax payments for many hundreds of years, until it was eventually partly replaced by cotton cloth. No explicit cultural barriers seemed to exist to block textile production; moreover, the working environment of textile production was highly compatible with culturally favored female seclusion and foot-binding. humidity, therefore, makes a good instrument for adoption of textile production. To create a textile suitability instrument, I measure and aggregate the differences between monthly average relative humidity and optimal relative humidity for spinning and weaving. Based on the knowledge that ideal minimum relative humidity for weaving is 75%, a higher-than-75% monthly-average relative humidity will be recorded as “excellent”, receiving a score of “1”. Once below 75%, going down every 5% will increase the value by 1, all the way up to 57. By adding up the monthly scores over 12 months, a county will receive a total score ranging from 12 to 60. I, therefore, build an index of textile production geo-climatic suitability, in which a low score (closeness to ideal relative humidity) translates into high suitability. For the convenience of interpretation, I take the negative value of all scores in the actual IV regression, so the sign of instrument will be positive, when more suitable climate predicts textile production. The logic behind this instrument is the closer distance between actual relative humidity and ideal relative humidity, the more suitable the climate is for textile production, and the more likely textile production will emerge and endure. Hence, relative humidity at the right level, via the channel of textile production, should predict a higher son preference. To satisfy the exclusion restriction, an instrument needs to be uncorrelated with error term, i.e. relative humidity should influence son preference only through the channel of textile production. If relative humidity is negatively correlated with son preference, for example, IV will overestimate the effect of textile production. However, little evidence suggests 7 -20~0=1, "Excellent", 0.01~5=2, "Good", 5.01~10=3, "OK", 10.01~15=4, "Poor", 15.01~=5, ”Bad”. humidity helps women to improve social status. In fact, son preference is much higher in southern provinces, which are on average more humid, than in northern provinces. V Main Results Table I provides summary statistics. Table II reports the results of OLS estimates. The first column summarizes the baseline estimates, which suggest historical textile production lowers today’s sex ratio by 2.9 boys per hundred girls. Adding a squared term of per capita income will increase the coefficient of historical textile production to 0.031, i.e 3.1 boys per hundred girls. In the second column, ethnic is added to control for the presence of non-Han Chinese, most of whom have no tradition in son preference. The negative sign is consistent with the common belief that gender culture is more egalitarian within ethnic minorities. 1% increase in percentage of ethnic population decreases sex ratio by 0.1 boy per hundred girls, significant at 1% level. The third column includes two controversially endogenous variables: total fertility rate and household size. I use these two variables as a proxy for traditionalism. A high total fertility rate signifies being at the early stage of demographic transition; a large household size could indicate the presence of an extended family, which facilitates the transmission of traditional values. Results show household size is positively correlated with sex ratio, but total fertility rate is not a statistically significant influence on sex ratio. The disadvantage of using these two variables are both may well be the outcome of son preference, rather than the cause: high total fertility and household size can entirely be a pure outcome of conducting high-parity births in order to pursue male decedents. For this reason, Column III is the only regression that includes these two variables, and it appears that inclusion of these two variables does not significantly change the partial correlation of historical textile production with son preference. The last two columns deal with heterogeneity across subsamples. In the fourth column, I simply drop the counties with a relatively large ethnic population (more than 10%). Not too surprisingly, exclusion of ethnically diverse counties increases the size of coefficient in front of historical textile production. The fifth column tackles migration. Counties located in a prefecture where massive recent in-migration takes place are excluded from the sample in this regression. The deciding rule is if a prefecture has more than 10% of the total residents being so-called “floating residents” who are not locally registered, any counties in that prefecture will not be included in the sample. Again, this restriction of the sample further increases the size of the coefficient of my variable of interest. In all five columns, the estimates show that in counties with historical textile production, any forms of sex selection are less likely to happen, i.e. daughters are more likely to be born. All standard errors are robust standard errors. Coefficients are negative and statistically significant at 1% level across all regressions. The estimated coefficients for the control variables are generally as expected: sex ratio decreases with women’s attainment of education, and decreases with men’s. In all specifications, higher per capita income lowers sex ratio. Percentage of non-agricultural household registration is negatively correlated with sex ratio, consistent with the belief that sex selection happens more frequently to high-parity births which are more permissible among people with rural household registration 8 . The sign of provincial capital dummy is not well understood. It is unclear why being a provincial capital predicts a higher sex ratio, at least in some specifications. Percentage of agriculture in total GDP is controlled on a quartile level in the same way as distance to coast is controlled. The general tendency is the more reliance on agriculture an economy has, the higher the sex ratio is, reflecting the demand for male labor in a pre-industrial society. Distance to coast is more complicated to interpret, since a big part of the inland China is culturally non-Han. Counties that are farthest away from the coast (4th quarile) actually have the lowest son preference, but otherwise coast to coast increases son preference. Alternative sex ratios are used to test the hypothesis; results are not included here for brevity. The results are somewhat striking: historical textile production shapes the sex ratio in the total population as well. A statistically significant relationship exists, though on a much lower magnitude, between historical textile production and sex ratio in the total population, suggesting that the “missing women” phenomenon possibly existed before the enforcement of one-child policy and use of sex-selective abortion. In fact, it is a well-documented fact that both female infanticide and neglect for female infants are practiced to achieve the goal of having more boys and fewer girls (Goodkind 1996). One obvious concern for this paper is whether the total variations are driven by only a small number of the counties. This concern arises from the superiority of the 8 This is the so-called 1.5-child policy among rural households: a second birth is permitted when the first child is a girl. economic environment in the Lower Yangtze Delta Region (Jiangsu Province & Zhejiang Province) throughout the history. This is a valid concern, since Zhejiang & Jiangsu (Jiang-Zhe) was indeed the center of the textile production with abundance of skilled labor; both provinces also supplied the national market with highest-quality cloth. One can argue that Jiang-Zhe is a special case: Jiang-Zhe was first exposed to the textile technology innovation; Jiang-Zhe also had high-quality land, intelligent and hard-working women, and likely more fair gender attitudes both in the past and at the present. Jiang-Zhe’s combination of many nice qualities behind its top textile industry also raises the question how exogenous the adoption of textile production was. To address such concerns, my first step is to re-estimate the main equation without all the counties in Jiang-Zhe. It turns out the estimates are roughly the same, and my model does not lose its appeal in the absence of Jiang-Zhe. To cope with the endogeniety concerns posed by the special case of Jiang-Zhe, and other potential endogeniety problems, I introduce relative humidity as an instrument. Table III summarizes the IV estimates. Panel A of Table III reports estimates of the specifications from Table II, but historical textile production as the dependent variable and the textile suitability as an additional explanatory variable. The estimates show that the adoption of textile production is positively correlated with an environment suitable for the textile production. Panel B of Table III reports second-stage 2SLS estimates. Instrumented historical textile production continues to lower today’s sex ratio. That is to say, having a textile-friendly environment is associated with lower son preference today. The magnitude of the IV coefficients is consistently greater than the OLS estimates. A possible explanation for this is reversal of fortune of less populous areas in the industrialization of China. Treaty ports that emerged in the 19th century, which later became the most economically advanced areas in China, were intentionally built outside old towns to facilitate new urban development. A more recent example is five special economic zones built from the scratch in the 1980s. Industrialization and modernization has taken place in areas which had low level of development (including textile production) back in Ming Dynasty. With more wealth accumulation, higher female education attainment, and a large service industry, treaty ports and special economic zones have developed social conditions in favor of women today. Selection introduces a positive relationship between historical textile production and sex ratio today, biasing the negative OLS estimates towards zero. Industrialization and modernization certainly complicates my study. As historical persistence is more of the case in a relatively stable environment, needless to say, historical textile production is most accurate in predicting son preference in pre-industrialized China. Though a big part of China remains agrarian and pre-modern, there is no denying that the economic miracle in the past few decades has led to fundamental changes to social values, some of which might happen to be working in the reverse direction of the influence of historical textile production. VI Conclusion I find current differences in son preference among Han Chinese are indeed shaped by historical textile production which increased women’s productivity relative to men’s in the past. Historical textile production marginally advanced the position of women in recent seven hundred years. By exploiting a technology shock to textile production in the 13th Century, I isolate the impact of textile production on the evolution and persistence of gender culture. By estimating a simple OLS equation, I confirm the hypothesis that historical textile production lowered today’s son preference. To overcome potential endogeniety, I perform an instrumental variable analysis, as well as historical analysis, to demonstrate the decision to participate in textile production was independent of past gender culture. Other than its contribution to the literature on the evolution of gender culture, this paper complements the literature on pre-modern Chinese economy. My findings provide evidence that men and women in rural China were ready to adopt new technology and active in making decisions what to specialize. Counter to stereotypical views on women being suppressed in pre-modern China, this paper suggests women’s position in textile regions improved over the time. Table I Summary Statistics Variable Sex ratio Historical textile production Men's years of education Women's years of education Per capita GDP % ethnic population % non-agricultural household registration Provincial capital dummy % agriculture in total GDP Region dummy Distance to coast % floating population Observation 2218 2218 Mean 1.18003 .0852119 Std. Dev. .1362603 .2792597 Min .8088479 0 Max 1.9316 1 2218 8.182074 1.088603 2.48 12.49 2218 7.083084 1.287191 .86 11.28 2149 2218 2218 8585.385 7.576794 26.17538 9650.489 20.01744 23.28466 2282.008 0 2.36 133304.6 99.28 98.91 2181 .1137093 .3175307 0 1 2218 60.96193 28.24991 .05 96.59 1888 2174 2181 3.353284 379.9389 .0175009 2.251933 317.3284 .3005426 1 .0866663 -.2932602 8 1175.69 4.732937 Table II: Country-level OLS estimates (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Historical textile production -0.0297*** (0.00738) -0.0293*** (0.00737) -0.0280*** (0.00734) -0.0305*** (0.00747) -0.0371*** (0.00940) Men's years of education 0.0405*** (0.0107) 0.0352** (0.0109) 0.0422*** (0.0110) 0.0437*** (0.0120) 0.0400*** (0.0113) Women's years of education -0.0160+ (0.00955) -0.0230* (0.00986) -0.0223* (0.00998) -0.0358*** (0.0102) -0.0169+ (0.0102) Log of per capita GDP -0.0450*** (0.00724) -0.0452*** (0.00728) -0.0370*** (0.00764) -0.0447*** (0.00752) -0.0594*** (0.00977) % non-agricultural household registration -0.00157*** -0.00118*** -0.00113*** -0.00109*** -0.00160*** (0.000247) (0.000272) (0.000279) (0.000299) (0.000302) 0.0161+ (0.00915) 0.0192* (0.00923) 0.00924 (0.00928) 0.0230* (0.00949) 0.0349** (0.0133) -0.00103*** (0.000243) -0.00115*** (0.000263) Provincial capital dummy % ethnic population Total Fertility Rate -0.0152 (0.0154) Household size 0.0599*** (0.0110) Quartiles of % agriculture in total GDP Quartiles of distance to coast Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Region Dummies Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes 1856 0.317 0.310 35.62 1856 0.332 0.324 33.25 1688 0.350 0.343 37.97 1658 0.289 0.281 31.10 Observations 1856 R2 0.308 Adjusted R2 0.301 F 35.87 Standard errors in parentheses + p < 0.10, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001 Table II: County-level 2SLS estimates. (1) Closeness to ideal humidity F-stat Traditional textile production Hausman test (p-value) Hanson J Ethnic counties In-migration counties TFR & Household Size Socioeconomic Controls Geographic Controls Obversations (2) (3) (4) Panel A. First stage 2SLS estimates. Dependent variable: Historical textile production (5) 0.00439*** (0.00107) 10.21 0.00439*** 0.00443*** 0.00477*** (0.00107) (0.00107) (0.00116) 10.40 9.486 9.934 Panel B. Second-stage 2SLS estimates 0.00264* (0.00103) 5.067 -0.446** (0.147) 0.0003 0.000 Included Included Excluded Yes Yes 1856 -0.448** (0.147) 0.0003 0.000 Included Included Excluded Yes Yes 1856 -0.738* (0.329) 0.010 0.000 Included Excluded Excluded Yes Yes 1658 Standard errors in parentheses + p < 0.10, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001 -0.294* (0.132) 0.025 0.000 Included Included Included Yes Yes 1856 -0.485** (0.149) 0.000 0.000 Excluded Included Excluded Yes Yes 1688 References Alesina, A, Paola Giuliano and Nathan Nunn, 2013. “On the Origin of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough,” forthcoming in Quarterly Journal of Economics. doi: 10.1093/qje/qjt005 Barro, R., 1991. "Economic Growth in a Cross Section of Countries," Quarterly Journal of Economics 106, 407-444. Gupta, M.D., 2003. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 2942 CHC. 1998. The Cambridge History of China, 8: The Ming Dynasty Part 2, “Communication and Commerce”. 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