In conjunction with the next public release of data from the CGED-Q JSL, there will be a research conference and training workshop at Central China Normal University July 28-August 3 in conjunction with the next public release of data from the China Government Employee Dataset-Qing (CGED_Q) Jinshenlu. The conference will be July 29 and July 30. Papers that make use of Jinshenlu and related sources are welcome. The training workshop will be July 31-August 2.
Here is the announcement of the research conference in Chinese:
The article was one of seven journal articles selected for inclusion in the History (历史) category in April 2024《中国社会科学文摘》(China Social Science Digest). https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/WYe_MogUK_DA2EfPHe2FqA
We study the organizational demography of the Qing civil service from 1830 to 1911. Before the 20th century, the Qing bureaucracy was one of the largest non-military organizations in the world in terms of numbers of regular employees. At any given time, approximately 13,000 officials held formal appointments. We present the basic features of its organizational demography using data on nearly all civil officials with formal appointments from 1830 to 1912. We make use of longitudinally linked records of officials in the China Government Employee Database – Jinshenlu (CGED-Q JSL) to reconstruct rates of exit from service, the career lengths of officials, and the number of years since first appointment for currently serving officials. While previous studies of the Qing have examined turnover in specific types of posts, they have not considered the dynamics of complete careers. We find that exit rates in the first year of service were high and then low and stable afterward. While most officials only served for a short time, currently serving officials were relatively experienced. We also show that rates of exit from service declined for much of the last half of the 19th century, and then increased in the first decade of the 20th century. Declining turnover in the last half of the 19th century would have reduced opportunities for degree holders seeking posts and for officials seeking promotion at a time when the number of holders of purchased degrees competing for posts was increasing. We also compare different categories of officials. The results not only illuminate basic features of the organizational demography of Qing officialdom, but also provide a baseline for interpreting results from case studies of specific groups of officials or specific time periods.
Here is the full reference:
康文林 (Cameron Campbell) and 高帅奇(Gao Shuaiqi). 2024. 清代文官的组织人口学研究, 1830-1911 (The Organizational Demography of the Qing Civil Service, 1830-1911). 社会科学研究 (Social Science Research). 1:157-169.
Cameron Campbell organized a meeting on Chinese Historical Databases: Sources, Methods, Prospects on January 11 and 12, 2024 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
The meeting is one in a series of activities intended to promote the development of research infrastructure for studying China’s past organized under the auspices of and with support from the RGC Areas of Excellence Project Quantitative History of China (Chen Zhiwu PI). Staff from the HKUST School of Humanities and Social Sciences, including Lee-Campbell Group RA Shengbin Wei, provided logistical support.
The meeting brought together historians and social scientists constructing databases suited for the quantitative analysis of Chinese history. Participants from Hong Kong, mainland China, and Europe introduced their databases. These included projects that were already complete, others were in progress, and some were in the planning stages. Presentations and discussion focused not only on the content of the databases and prospects for analysis, but nuts and bolts issues related to the construction, preservation, documentation and dissemination of the databases. Several presentations covered techniques being used to automate the creation of databases, including OCR, tokenization, entity recognition, and record linkage.
Lee-Campbell Group members including Cameron Campbell, Dong Hao, Gao Shuaqi, Chen Jun, Wu Yibei, James Lee, Hou Yueran and Matt Noellert made presentations introducing their databases.
In addition to the presenters, other faculty and students attended as observers.
The meeting concluded with the development of plans for training workshops for historians to help them learn how to construct databases and make use of existing ones.
The Lee-Campbell Group met in person at HKUST on December 4, 2023. This was our first in-person meeting of nearly all of the affiliates of the group since before 2020. Group members discussed their ongoing projects and their plans for future work. 15 participants attended in person, and another 3 joined online.
Adam Burke at the Queensland University of Technology lead-authored a paper “State Snapshot Process Discovery on Career Paths of Qing Dynasty Civil Servants” that introduces a new process mining technique he calls ‘state snapshot process discovery’ and illustrates it by application to our CGED-Q JSL data on the careers of jinshi officials. Cameron Campbell is a co-author. The paper has been accepted for presentation at the 5th International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM2023), in Rome, Italy, in October 2023.
Here is a figure from the paper that summarizes the empirical reconstruction of the careers of first and second tier (一甲 and 二甲) jinshi in the years after they earned their degree. One of the attractions of the CGED-Q JSL for demonstrating this technique was that there were canonical career pathways specified by regulations for such high-ranked degree holders, thus it was possible to assess whether the empirical results derived from the data were consistent with the canonical career pathways. We hope that extensions of this technique, and possibly other techniques, can be used to explore the trajectories of officials with more mundane qualifications.
For this paper, Cameron Campbell helped Adam and the other collaborators (Sander Leemans and Moe T. Wynn) understand the data that we provided, and advise on adjustments to accommodate undocumented or otherwise unanticipated features of the data in successive iterations, and then assist in the writing of sections related to the data and the historical context, background on the social science studies of careers, the interpretation of the results.
We are happy to collaborate with computer scientists and other researchers developing techniques for understanding careers and trajectories more generally in complex longitudinal data, who need data like the CGED-Q to showcase their approaches.
Chen Jun has created a training guide (in Chinese) to help anyone who would like to learn how to use R to analyze the CGED-Q JSL Public Releases. The PDF file is available for download here.
Chen Jun has produced other resources including slides and sample code for R, and they and the training guide are all available at this page.
The 4th edition of the annual 大数据与中国历史 (Big Data and Chinese History), edited by Fu Haiyan at Central China Normal University, is out now from 社会科学文献出版社 (Social Science Documents Publishing House). It includes a Chinese translation of my and James Lee’s career retrospective, summarizing our work over the last four decades constructing and analyzing historical population and other databases for China.
社會科學研究 (Social Science Research) published by the Sichuan Academy of Social Science has accepted our paper “The Organizational Demography of the Qing Civil Service, 1830-1911” and tentatively scheduled it for publication in 2024. In the meantime, they have given permission for us to share the original English language version:
Please cite the Chinese language version if you refer to it:
康文林 (Cameron Campbell) and 高帅奇(Gao Shuaiqi). 2024. 清代文官的组织人口学研究, 1830-1911 (The Organizational Demography of the Qing Civil Service, 1830-1911). 社会科学研究 (Social Science Research). 1:161-173.
The paper is largely descriptive. It uses the CGED-Q JSL to measure the turnover of officials, career lengths, and years since appointment for currently serving officials. It was inspired by the older literature on organizational demography that sought to relate the performance of organizations to aggregate ‘demographic’ features such as their turnover, length of service and so forth. We hope that it will be a useful reference for anyone studying Qing officialdom. Previous studies of the dynamics of Qing official have focused on the lengths of appointments to specific posts, and turnover in those posts, rather than entire careers.
Here is the abstract:
We study the organizational demography of the Qing civil service from 1830 to 1911. Before the 20th century, the Qing bureaucracy was one of the largest non-military organizations in the world in terms of numbers of regular employees. At any given time, approximately 13,000 officials held formal appointments. We present the basic features of its organizational demography using data on nearly all civil officials with formal appointments from 1830 to 1912. We make use of longitudinally linked records of officials in the China Government Employee Database – Jinshenlu (CGED-Q JSL) to reconstruct rates of exit from service, the career lengths of officials, and the number of years since first appointment for currently serving officials. While previous studies of the Qing have examined turnover in specific types of posts, they have not considered the dynamics of complete careers. We find that exit rates in the first year of service were high and then low and stable afterward. While most officials only served for a short time, currently serving officials were relatively experienced. We also show that rates of exit from service declined for much of the last half of the 19th century, and then increased in the first decade of the 20th century. Declining turnover in the last half of the 19th century would have reduced opportunities for degree holders seeking posts and for officials seeking promotion at a time when the number of holders of purchased degrees competing for posts was increasing. We also compare different categories of officials. The results not only illuminate basic features of the organizational demography of Qing officialdom, but also provide a baseline for interpreting results from case studies of specific groups of officials or specific time periods.
Here’s a figure from the paper, presenting time trends in rates of exit from service in the next three months for officials with different amounts of experience:
We were pleased to learn that Yu Bai, Yanjun Li, and Pak Hong Lam had just published a paper “Quantity-quality trade-off in Northeast China during the Qing dynasty” in the Journal of Population Economics using the public release of the CMGPD-LN! We hope their paper along with other recent publications by others using the dataset will inspire others to use it.
