Category: publication

English language paper introducing the CGED-Q published in the Journal of Chinese History

Our paper providing an introduction in English to the China Government Employee Dataset-Qing (CGED-Q) is now available at the Journal of Chinese History. The paper is lead-authored by Bijia Chen and is based on the second chapter of her PhD dissertation, which she defended in 2019. The paper will appear in the July 2020 issue.

Here is the abstract:

We introduce the China Government Employee Database—Qing (CGED-Q), a new resource for the quantitative study of Qing officialdom. The CGED-Q details the backgrounds, characteristics and careers of Qing officials who served between 1760 and 1912, with nearly complete coverage of officials serving after 1830. We draw information on careers from the Roster of Government Personnel (jinshenlu), which in each quarterly edition listed approximately 12,500 regular civil offices and their holders in the central government and the provinces. Information about backgrounds and characteristics comes from such linked sources as lists of exam degree holders. In some years, information on military officials is also available. As of February 2020, the CGED-Q comprises 3,817,219 records, of which 3,354,897 are civil offices and the remainder are military. In this article we review the progress and prospects of the project, introduce the sources, transcription procedures, and constructed variables, and provide examples of results to showcase its potential.

Bijia Chen is now a postdoc at  the Renmin University Institute of Qing History.

For more information about the CGED-Q, please see the CGED-Q project page.

Errata

Page 2 – Footnote 1 – line 10 – Zhenan should be Zhinan

Page 3- second line in paragraph after heading ‘Origin, current status, and future plans…’, ‘ongoing of study’ should be ‘ongoing study’

Page 3 – Footnote 6 – line 2 – Lishi Yanjiu should be Qingshi Yanjiu

Page 8 – Footnote 22 – line 1 – Jizhi should be Jiazhi

Page 8 – Footnote 26 – line 1 – Jijie should be Ji

 

Paper on assortative marriage in rural Shanxi during the mid-20th century published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility

Our paper “Education, class and assortative marriage in rural Shanxi, China in the mid-twentieth century” has been accepted at Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. The paper is lead-authored by XING Long at Shanxi University and co-authored by group members Cameron Campbell, Xiangning Li, Matthew Noellert and James Lee. A pre-print is now available open access at the site: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0276562419302367. This is something we have been working on for a while and it is great to see it coming out. More information about the larger project and the data is available here.

Here is the abstract:

This paper examines the consequences of political, economic and social change in mid-twentieth century China for patterns of assortative mating by both education and class. Traditionally in China, marriages were arranged by parents, and ideally matched families of similar socioeconomic status. However, the Marriage Law passed by the People’s Republic of China in 1950 promoted free choice and forbade arranged marriage and other interference by families in the marriage decisions of their children. Later, Land Reform, Collectivization and other movements had profound impacts on rural household organization and social relations. We investigate their effects on assortative mating by using novel linked administrative data compiled in rural Shanxi Province in North China in the mid-1960s. These data record the education and family class labels (jiating chushen) of spouses for 1459 couples in 30 villages. The class labels were assigned in the 1950s based on family landholding before the Land Reform and became hereditary. We find that class label had effects above and beyond those of education, suggesting that assortative mating studies that only consider education overlook an important dimension of social status in marriage patterns, and thereby overstate the overall permeability of boundaries between social groups. Furthermore, by comparing couples according to whether they married before or after 1949, we find that patterns of homogamy and hypergamy remained highly stable in the face of substantial social transformation after 1949.

Bijia Chen publishes comment on jinshenlu 縉紳錄 as a source

At the end of 2019, Bijia Chen published an extensive note in the Qing History Journal (清史研究) on the importance of the jinshenlu 縉紳錄 as a source of information on the Qing Civil Service, providing clarification and explanation in response to some possibly misleading points made in a 2018 清史研究 article. The full reference for and link to Bijia’s article are below.

陈必佳 (Bijia Chen). 2019. 再论《缙绅录》记载的准确性及其史料价值 (Re-visiting the Accuracy and the Robustness of the Jinshenlu as an Historical Source), 清史研究  (The Qing History Journal), 2019 (4) 129-133.
http://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?filename=QSYJ201904013&dbcode=CJFQ&dbname=CJFDTEMP&v=

 

Paper on Banner officials in the Qing civil service 1900-1912 published in 清史研究

Our student Bijia Chen’s lead-authored paper on Banner officials in the Qing civil service between 1900 and 1912 recently appeared in 清史研究 (Studies in Qing History). The paper is titled 清末新政前后旗人与宗室官员的官职变化初探——以《缙绅录》数据库为材料的分析 (The Transition of Banner and Imperial Lineage Officials During the Late Qing Reform Period: Evidence from the Qing Jinshenlu Database) and examines how officials who were Bannermen were affected by the reforms and other changes in the New Government period (新政时期). The paper is available for download here:

http://qsyj.iqh.net.cn/CN/abstract/abstract2384.shtml

The paper makes use of the China Government Employee Database-Qing (CGED-Q) which we are constructing from the 缙绅录 and related materials. More detail about this project is available here.

Paper on interethnic marriage during the Qing designated “Editor’s Choice” by the journal Demographic Research

The paper “Interethnic marriage in Northeast China, 1866-1913” co-authored by current Lee-Campbell group PhD student Bijia Chen, Lee-Campbell group PhD graduate Dong Hao (now an Assistant Professor at Peking University) and Cameron Campbell that was published this year in Demographic Research has been named Editor’s Choice by the journal’s editorial board as one of the best papers published in volume 38. The paper examines patterns of intermarriage between Han and Manchu in a frontier population in northeast China from the mid-19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. It finds that intermarriage between the two groups was not uncommon and also increased over time. The chances of intermarriage depended on village and family context as well as individual socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. The article is available Open Access here:

https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol38/34/default.htm

The complete list of Editor’s Choice papers is available here:

https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/editors_choice.htm

Paper on ethnic intermarriage during the Qing by Lee-Campbell Group members

Lee-Campbell group student Bijia Chen, former student Hao Dong and Cameron Campbell recently published a paper in Demographic Research on ethnic intermarriage in Shuangcheng, Heilongjiang, during the late Qing:

https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol38/34/

This paper grew out of Bijia’s MPhil thesis. It uses registered ethnicity of males and inferred ethnicity of wives to examine marriage between Han, Manchu, and others within the Banner populations in Shuangcheng in the late 19th century. Wife’s ethnicity was inferred from her surname. The population is a useful one to study because the Han, Manchu and others who composed it were all part of the Banners, and marriages between them were not subject to rules that forbade or discouraged marriage between Banners and non-Banners. In other words, it is an opportunity to study boundaries between Manchu and Han in a setting where they were not subject to regulations on Banner/non-Banner marriage that would have had the side effect of making Manchu/Han marriage difficult in most other parts of China.

The analysis uses the CMGPD Shuangcheng database, which is available for download from ICPSR:

https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/35292

New Article on Changes in the Social and Geographic Origins of China’s Educated Elites (1865-2014) Published in 《社会学研究》

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:

http://www.shxyj.org/Magazine/Show?id=18161

Review Article by Song and Campbell on Multi-generational Data for Social Science Research Published in Annual Review of Sociology

Xi Song and Cameron Campbell’s review article of multi-generational microdata for social science research published in the Annual Review of Sociology is now available as a preview, with publication scheduled for this summer:

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112157

This comprehensive review introduces the major sources of multi-generational, longitudinal data that can be analyzed in the study of demographic and stratification processes. The emphasis is on data that are already available publicly, or by application. The review also surveys major research questions in the study of multi-generational processes, and the methods used for analyzing these data.

 

 

Computer Scientists Use CMGPD to Develop Visualization Tools for Genealogical Data

Qu Huamin (HKUST Computer Science) and collaborators have been using the China Multigenerational Panel Dataset-Liaoning to test and showcase visualization tools they have been developing for multidimensional genealogical data. Multidimensional refers to the fact that the genealogical data not only identify ancestors and kin, but describe additional characteristics. They recently published a paper describing these tools and the results of applying them to CMGPD in the IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7909028/. While developing their tools and testing them with the CMGPD, they have consulted frequently with members of the Lee-Campbell Group not only about the data, but the needs of likely users. This collaboration between historians, social scientists, and computer scientists is an example of the sort of cross-disciplinary interaction and engagement that is common at HKUST.

The tools that Professor Qu and his collaborators are developing allow for the visualization of these characteristics, highlighting ancestors or kin with specified traits, while at the same time organizing the presentation as a traditional family tree. This allows for visualization of patterns within families, for example, whether certain outcomes are more apparent in specific family branches, or whether lineage experienced changes in specific time periods.

University of Washington Press Publishes Paperback Edition of Li Ji’s “God’s Little Daughters: Catholic Women in Nineteenth-Century Manchuria”

Li Ji’s book God’s Little Daughter’s has now been published in paperback by University of Washington Press. Congratulations Li Ji! For more information about the book, please see its page at the University of Washington Press website.

Here is a picture of the paperback on display at the publisher’s stand at the 2017 Association for Asian Studies in Toronto: