Category: publication

Hao Dong publishes a new Chinese article in 社会学研究 on the effect of China’s cooling-off period policy on trends in divorce registration

Hao Dong has just published a single-authored paper in the top Chinese-language sociology journal 社会学研究 (Sociological Studies) titled 此情或可待：“离婚冷静期”规定对离婚登记数量趋势的影响 (A Wait Perhaps Worthwhile：The Influence of a “Cooling-off” Period on Trends in Divorce Registration)

Here is the Chinese abstract and English translation:

本文关注“离婚冷静期”规定对离婚登记数量趋势的影响，间接探讨了冲动等不可观测主观因素在我国离婚决策中的角色。基于民政部2018—2021年省—季度统计数据，辅以国家统计局、裁判文书网、百度指数等数据，本研究通过事件研究和双重差分等政策评估方法交叉验证发现，“冷静期”使得各省各季度离婚登记数量平均减少1.03~1.32万对，较前三年降低了33%~42%。在以往复婚较普遍、青年离婚占比较大、对“冷静期”等离婚相关信息搜索较多的地区降幅更大，揭示了部分潜在作用机制。

This study examines the influence of a 30-day “cooling-off” period policy on trends in divorce registration,shedding light on the intervention on certain unmeasurable subjective factors-including impulsiveness-in divorce decisionmaking in China. The analysis employs province-quarter-level data of divorce registration from the Ministry of Civil Affairs in 2018-2021 and further incorporates data from the National Bureau of Statistics,China Judgements Online,and the Baidu Index. Based on the policy evaluation methods,such as the event-study and difference-in-differences,evidence consistently suggests a substantial influence of the policy,which reduces 10.3-13.2 thousand divorces per province per quarter on average,amounting to a decline of 33-42% compared to the previous three years. Moreover,the influence appears to be greater in provinces with more previously divorced couples restoring their marriages,more divorces between young couples,or more internet searches about the policy and divorce-related information,highlighting some potential mechanisms underlying the intervention.

Congratulations Hao Dong!

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Hao Dong publishes a new article in Demography on post-1900 trends in educational assortative marriage in China

Hao Dong and his collaborator Yu Xie have published a paper in Demography titled “Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage in China Over the Past Century.”

Here is the abstract:

In the past century, China has undergone rapid and dramatic social and economic changes. This article describes trends in educational assortative marriages of cohorts born in 1906–1995 in China. We measure educational attainment relatively as an individual’s percentile position in the education distribution of a 10-year birth cohort and study trends using comparable, easy-to-interpret couple rank-rank correlations. We analyze microdata samples from the 1982, 1990, 2000, and 2010 China censuses and the 2015 1% intercensus survey and nationally representative surveys between 1996 and 2018. We find a large and steady increase in educational assortative marriage over the past century, except among those born in 1946–1965, whose schooling and marriage were impacted by the Cultural Revolution. Our study highlights the critical roles of social, political, and economic contexts in shaping trends in educational assortative marriage.

Congratulations Hao Dong and Yu Xie!

New paper by others using CMGPD-LN

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.

Here is a link to their paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-022-00933-x

We are eternally grateful for the support from NICHHD that allowed us to prepare the CMGPD-LN for release, and to ICPSR for hosting the dataset.

James Lee, Bamboo Ren, and Chen Liang Publish an Updated Version of their 2020 China Quarterly Article “Meritocracy and the Making of the Chinese Academe, 1912-1952”

Cover of Khanna and Szonyi’s edited volume Making Meritocracy

 

In “Meritocracy and the Making of the Chinese Academe Redux, 1912-1952”, a chapter in the new Oxford University Press volume edited by Michael Szonyi and Tarun Khanna Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from antiquity to the present, James Lee, Bamboo Y. Ren, and Chen Liang update the figures, maps, tables and related text from their earlier China Quarterly article to include domestic student data from five additional Chinese universities as well as data on many more overseas Chinese students from foreign universities.

Web page for Making Meritocracy at Oxford University Press

Full reference:

Lee, James, Bamboo Y. Ren, and Chen Liang. 2022. Meritocracy and the Making of the Chinese Academe Redux, 1912-1952. In Michael Szonyi and Tarun Khanna, eds. Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India. Oxford University Press, 137-169.

HKUST colleague Lawrence Zhang contributed a chapter to the same volume:

Sheth, Sudev and and Lawrence L. C. Zhang. 2022. “Meritocracy in Early Modern Asia: Qing China and Mughal India.”  In Michael Szonyi and Tarun Khanna. Eds. 2022. Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 85-117.

 

Chinese Translation of Campbell’s and Lee’s Historical Chinese Microdata: 40 Years of Dataset Construction by the Lee-Campbell Research Group

A Chinese translation of Cameron Campbell’s and James Lee’s Historical Life Course Studies paper “Historical Chinese Microdata. 40 Years of Dataset Construction by the Lee-Campbell Research Group” is forthcoming in a volume of Big Data and the Study of Chinese History 大数据与中国历史研究. The title of the translation is 中国历史量化微观大数据：李中清–康文林团队40年学术回顾. This paper reviews all of our projects since 1979, including construction of datasets and the study of topics in population, family, and social mobility. Pending the appearance of the volume, we are making a PDF of the translation available.

Here is the PDF of the Chinese translation of Historical Chinese Microdata. 40 Years of Dataset Construction by the Lee-Campbell Research Group.

Here is the English language original, in case you missed it.

 

New paper on nominative linkage in the CGED-Q in Historical Life Course Studies

Cameron Campbell and Bijia Chen published a paper “Nominative Linkage of Records of Officials in the China Government Employee Dataset-Qing (CGED-Q)” in Historical Life Course Studies. It shares their experience with nominative linkage in the CGED-Q. It is  intended to be useful to others who are engaged in large-scale, automated nominative linkage (disambiguation) of individuals in historical Chinese-language sources.

While the approach that they arrived at after many iterations may be specific to the CGED-Q and its contents, the summary of the challenges will be of broader interest, and the methods should at least be a roadmap for others with related projects. Major issues the paper documents and then addresses include the use of variant orthographies for the same character in different editions or sources, replacement of characters with ones that look similar but are actually completely different, replacement of characters with homophones, inconsistencies in the writing of the names of counties, and changes in boundaries that led the same county to be associated with different provinces in different sources or editions.

The complete tabulations that are the basis of the tables in the paper are also available. These include the frequencies of surnames and given names in the CGED-Q JSL, and the frequencies of discordance across record of the same individual in the recording of surnames, characters in given names, and place of origin. The tabulations can be downloaded at the HKUST and Harvard Dataspaces:

https://dataspace.hkust.edu.hk/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.14711/dataset/M8HQEA

https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/4OSP8V

Those not specifically interested in linkage may still be interested in the tabulations of surnames and characters in given names.

ERRATA

Footnote 21 on page 245 states that “Huguang湖廣” refers to “Hunan and Guangdong”. Ma Ziyao has written to point out that “In most cases, however, it has been a legacy term for Hubei and Hunan. The “guang” here originally comes from Guangxi during the Yuan but should not be mistaken for the Qing-era Liangguang兩廣 region to the south of Hunan.” We are grateful to Ma Ziyao for bringing this to our attention.

Xue Qin publishes lead-authored article on officials in the Ministry of Personnel in the late Qing using the CGED-Q

Xue Qin published a lead-authored article on officials in the Ministry of Personnel in the late Qing that uses the CGED-Q. The title of the article is 清季改革视阈下吏部官员群体的人事递嬗与结构变迁(1898—1911）——以《缙绅录》数据库为中心 Change and Constancy: The Personnel Evolution and Structural Change of the Ministry of Personnel during the Reform in Qing Dynasty —— Based on China Government Employee Database – Qing (CGED-Q). The article appeared in 社会科学研究 (Social Science Research). Cameron Campbell was the second author.

Here is the Chinese language abstract:

吏部是传统政治体制下的重要行政部门之一。自戊戌变法起至清末新政，官制改革使官员的人事嬗递与群体构成发生了整体性的重大变化。然而，从《缙绅录》记载来看，进士和举人在吏部的任职和仕途变化与官制改革前相比变化较小，这与其他新设部门的官员群体有着明显差异。这一方面体现了清代的官员群体构成和官员迁转秩序具有一定稳定性，改革在较短时间内难以彻底改变固有结构;另一方面也凸显了自上而下的改革没有使清廷走出传统的制度困境。缓滞的改革措施和不尽如民意的改革效果，成为清廷统治陷入困局的重要原因。

Complete reference:

薛勤 (Xue Qin) and 康文林 (Cameron Campbell). 2022. 清季改革视阈下吏部官员群体的人事递嬗与结构变迁(1898—1911）——以《缙绅录》数据库为中心 Change and Constancy: The Personnel Evolution and Structural Change of the Ministry of Personnel during the Reform in Qing Dynasty  —— Based on China Government Employee Database – Qing (CGED-Q). 社会科学研究 (Social Science Research). 2(259):173-182.

Congratulations Xue Qin!

 

Hao Dong publishes a new article in PNAS on social mobility trends in post-revolution China

Hao Dong, together with Yu Xie, Xiang Zhou, and Xi Song published a new article “Trends in social mobility in postrevolution China” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Hao is a co-corresponding author on this article. Xi Song is an alumnae of the Lee-Campbell Group and has previously co-authored with Cameron Campbell and James Lee.

Here is the abstract:

In this paper, we study long-term trends in social mobility in the People’s Republic of China since its inception in 1949, with two operationalizations: 1) intergenerational occupational mobility and 2) intergenerational educational mobility. We draw on an accumulation of administrative and survey data and provide comparable estimates of these measures for birth cohorts born after 1945. To help interpret the results, we compare trends in China to those in the United States for the same birth cohorts. We find an increase in intergenerational occupational mobility in China due to its rapid industrialization in recent decades. Net of industrialization, however, intergenerational occupational mobility has been declining for recent cohorts. Intergenerational educational mobility in China shows a similar declining trend. In addition, mobility patterns have differed greatly by gender, with women in earlier cohorts and from a rural origin particularly disadvantaged. We attribute the general decline in social mobility to market forces that have taken hold since China’s economic reform that began in 1978. In contrast, social mobility by both measures has been relatively stable in the United States. However, while social mobility in China has trended downward, it is still higher than that in the United States, except for women’s educational mobility.

Full reference:

Xie, Yu, Hao Dong, Xiang Zhou, and Xi Song. 2022. “Trends in social mobility in postrevolution China.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 7, e2117471119

Newly published volume 3 of Big Data and the Study of Chinese History (大数据与中国历史研究) includes chapters by Lee-Campbell Group members

Volume 3 of Big Data and the Study of Chinese History 大数据与中国历史研究，第三辑, edited by Fu Haiyan 付海晏 of the Central China Normal University School of History and Culture 华中师范大学历史文化学院 and published by the Social Sciences Academic Press (China) 社会科学文献出版社, contains a number of chapters related to Lee-Campbell Group Projects, or by members of the Lee-Campbell Group.

Here is a link to the complete Chinese language text of the State views and Local Views paper at Weixin: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/wGfMhYIogXHlVGwosIp5_Q

Here is an announcement of the volume at the web page of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Modern History web page. The book should be available for order online in the coming weeks.

Chapters by Lee-Campbell Group members include the following:

An introduction by Bijia Chen to the process of constructing the CGED-Q, its current status, and its future prospects:
“中国历史官员量化数据库——清代”的建设过程、现状与前景 (陈必佳)

A Chinese translation of a paper by Cameron Campbell and James Lee comparing the recording of families in genealogies and household registers in Qing Liaoning that originally appeared in History and Computing. It shows that there were biases in genealogies beyond what has been recognized in earlier literature:
从国家和地方的角度看人口记录和行为 (康文林 李中清 翻:谌畅)

Essays by James Lee, Yuxue Ren, and Liang Chen on big data and quantitative history:
大数据与中国社会经济史 (李中清)
在定量分析与传统史学研究方法之间 (任玉雪)
如何做好的量化历史研究 (梁晨)

Two papers by Lee-Campbell Group PhD students Yang Li and Xue Qin:
金陵大学学生来源与毕业走向（1928—1937）(杨莉)
《拓务统计》与日本殖民统治(薛勤)

The volume also includes a paper by an MA Student in the Central China Normal University program in Historical Big Data, Cai Xiaoying, that uses the publicly released CGED-Q Jinshenlu 1900-1912 Public Release, and is based on a paper that she originally wrote for the Historical Big Data class that Cameron Campbell taught in Wuhan in 2019:
清末地域回避制度实施之再探 (蔡晓莹)

Hao Dong publishes a new article in the History of the Family on adopted children’s survival differentials and gender differences in Tokugawa Japan

Hao Dong and our long-time collaborator and friend Satomi Kurosu have just published a paper in the History of the Family titled “Gendered survival differentials of adopted children in northeast Japan, 1716–1870”

Here is the abstract:

Adoption was an important strategy for early-modern Japanese families to function and continue. This study is the first to systematically examine whether survival chances differ between adopted and non-adopted children and how gender moderates the survival differentials in historical Japan. We take advantage of individual-level panel data drawn from local household registers in northeast villages and towns between 1716 and 1870 consisting of 71,677 annual observations of 10,587 children aged 1–14, of whom 384 were adopted. Our event-history analysis takes a rich set of household characteristics and local economic context into account. We also apply matching and within-family comparison approaches to account for the unequal sex and age distribution of records between adopted and non-adopted children and unobserved systematic differences between households. We find substantial survival differentials between adopted and non-adopted children, which further vary by sex. Compared with non-adopted children of the same gender, adopted boys enjoyed survival advantages, while adopted girls suffered from elevated mortality risks. Moreover, the gendered survival differentials of adopted children were particularly apparent among those aged 5–9 rather than at older ages. In line with the patriarchal norms, these findings imply potentially different familial expectations for boy and girl adoptions in shaping child survival differentials.

Congratulations Hao and Satomi!