Family Backgrounds of Officials in the Late Qing (1830-1911) and Beiyang (1911-1924)

Cameron Campbell, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Shengbin WEI, HKUST
Qin Xue, Central China Normal University

To assess whether the abolition of imperial exams in China in 1905 and the fall of the Qing in 1911 and its replacement by the Beiyang (??) government led to changes in the social origins of the officials who constituted the ruling elite in late 19th and early 20th century China, we use a newly constructed dataset based on Tongguanlu (???) rosters of local officials that their resumes and information about their kin to compare the family backgrounds of civil officials who served in the late Qing (1830-1911) and early Beiyang (1911-1924) governments. For this comparison, this analysis will consider the family backgrounds of a much wider range of officials than are being examined in other studies. In contrast with the Classmates Books (Tongnian Chilu ????and Mingjing Tongpu ????) that only record Metropolitan (Jinshi ??), Provincial (Juren ??) and Tribute (Gongsheng ??) exam degree holders and which recently have been used in other studies of the family backgrounds of officials, Tongguanlu include holders of purchased Jiansheng (??) and Tribute degrees (????), as well as the lowest-level degrees Shengyuan (??). Our expectation is that the holders of lower exam degrees and less reputable purchase degrees will have less prestigious family backgrounds than holders of higher-level Metropolitian, Provincial and Tribute degrees in the sense that they will have fewer ancestors or other kin who themselves held degrees.

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 Presented in Session 209. Drivers and Consequences of Advantage and Disadvantage