Lee-Campbell group members Chen Liang, Hao Dong, Yunzhu Ren and James Lee published an article 江山代有才人出——中国教育精英的来源与转变 (Social Transformation and Elite Education: Changes in the Social and Geographic Origins of China’s Educated Elites 1865-2014) in the May 2017 issue of 《社会学研究》 (the Chinese-language journal Sociological Studies). Using data from the China Government Employee Database-Qing (CGED-Q) and the China University Student Dataset – Republic of China and Peoples Republic of China (CUSD-ROC and CUSD-PRC) they contrast the profound changes in social and geographic origins of China’s educated elite in four distinct periods: 1865-1905, 1906-1952, 1953-2003, and 2004-2014. They conclude that these fundamental transformations reflect the ability of the Chinese system of educational testing to legitimate new elites in different eras with different recruitment criteria, rather than merely to reproduce the intergenerational transmission of existing elites, as is the case of elite education in many other parts of the world.
The English and Chinese language abstract as well as a PDF of the paper (in Chinese) are available for download here: