Tag: cameron campbell

Paper on kin networks of local officials in History of the Family

Shengbin Wei, Qin XUE and Cameron Campbell just published a paper on the kin networks of local officials in the History of the Family. Here is the link: https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2026.2659970

Along the way, it introduces a new dataset based on Tongguanlu rosters of serving officials that were compiled and distributed towards the end of the Qing. These rosters were notable because they are one of only a few sources that provide information about the kin of holders of Shengyuan (生員) degrees, as well as holders of purchased degrees. For Shengyuan, the only other systematic rosters of which we are are aware are Shengyuanlu (生員綠) that were compiled at the county or prefecture level. Jiang Qin at Shanghai Jiao Tong University recently published an analysis of Shengyuanlu from one county. Information about the kin of large numbers of degree holders should eventually be available from ongoing efforts to digitize large numbers of genealogies, but these may be several years from completion.

This is a revised version of a manuscript that the authors shared at SocArXiv. Please read and cite this published version instead.

Full citation:

Wei, S., Campbell, C., & Xue, Q. (2026). Kin networks of local officials in 19th and Early 20th century China. The History of the Family, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2026.2659970

Here is the abstract:

We introduce a new source for the study of the kin networks, qualifications, and careers of officials in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a dataset constructed from Tongguanlu rosters of officials that include their resumes, degree or other qualifications and rosters of their kin. In contrast with other sources that have been used to study the social origins of holders of high examination degrees including national Jinshi, provincial Juren and exam Gongsheng, Tongguanlu include holders of less prestigious purchased degrees and prefectural Shengyuan exam degrees who accounted for a large share of officials, especially local ones, in the nineteenth century. Information about kin includes not only the names and degrees held by patrilineal father, grandfather, and great-grandfather commonly recorded for national or provincial examination degree holders that have been studied previously, but detailed information about uncles, great-uncles, male cousins, sons, and nephews, and basic information about female kin including mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers, daughters. We provide background on the Tongguanlu as a source, describe how we constructed the dataset, summarize its contents, and then present results on the posts, qualifications, and kin networks of local officials. We show that officials who held purchased degrees and low-level Shengyuan examination degrees were less likely than holders of higher degrees to have other kin who held degrees and that officials with regular and expectant appointments were more likely to have kin with degrees than officials with acting appointments.

New edited volume Quantitative History of China: State Capacity, Institutions, and Development

Cameron Campbell co-edited a volume with Zhiwu Chen and Debin Ma Quantitative History of China: State Capacity, Institutions, and Development that has just been published by Springer.

It is available open access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-96-8272-0

From the description:

This volume showcases a collection of new findings concerning China’s political, social, and economic history and typically based on newly constructed large historical datasets. Most of the work has involved an interdisciplinary team of economists, sociologists, political scientists, historians and econometricians, demonstrating how new big data and quantitative methods may be brought to bear on some of the biggest questions related to China’s development over the past three millennia and on the implications of distant past events on contemporary China. Topics covered range from the roles of war, state formation, religion, culture, finance and institutions in long-run development and technological innovations, to regicide history, to the organization and capacity of the bureaucracy. Contributors include leading figures in the quantitative study of China’s long-run socioeconomic and political history.

Cameron Campbell contributed two chapters, both co-authored with students.

Chapter 6, lead-authored by Chen Jun, originally an MA student of Campbell’s at Central China Normal University, now a PhD student at Renmin University, examines the spatial origins and allocation of military officers in the late Qing. Here is the abstract:

We investigate changes over time in the distribution by province of current post and province of origin for Qing military officers from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. During this period, the Qing faced a variety of military challenges, including domestic conflicts and foreign incursions. The most important was the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), which is already known to have led to large changes in the composition of the Qing military leadership. In turn, senior Hunan-origin military officers leveraged their networks to dominate officer appointments in the coastal provinces. We examine how the Taiping Rebellion, the First Opium War and other crises affected the allocation of officers between provinces, and the recruitment of officers from different provinces. For the analysis, we use the quarterly rosters of military officers Zhongshu beilan, which have been transcribed into a database as part of the China Government Employee Dataset-Qing Jinshenlu (CGED-Q JSL). We show that the allocation of officers by province did not change during the First Opium War, but changed dramatically after the Taiping Rebellion, with a substantial increase in the share of officers allocated to the southeastern coastal provinces, reflecting heightened importance of maritime defense. We also show that there were two phases to the increase in the share of Hunan-origin officers, one at the end of the eighteenth century, and the other, better-known one following the Taiping Rebellion. Finally, we show that exceptions to the rule of avoidance in the appointment of senior military officers became more common for all types of officers from the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, and that afterward, low-, mid-, and high-level officers followed different trajectories. We conclude with an assessment of the implications of our findings for our understanding of the Qing in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 7, co-authored by Cameron Campbell with Shuaiqi Gao, a PhD student at Central China Normal University, examines the influence of disasters on the careers of officials. Here is the abstract:

We investigate one dimension of state capacity in the late Qing Dynasty period: enforcement of regulations for the evaluation of officials. For this, we examine how natural disasters and harvest outcomes influenced the careers of county magistrates between 1820 and 1911. County magistrates were responsible for reporting disasters and dealing with their aftermath. Their response was assessed during their performance evaluations. The clearest rules were for locust infestations: as their occurrence was considered prima facie evidence of negligence and was supposed to result in termination. We show that an infestation increased the chances that an official would cease service. Among disasters with more complex origins and where blame was harder to ascribe, including floods, droughts, epidemics, and famine, only famine increased the risk of ending careers. We conclude that the state enforced these personnel regulations before 1880, but not afterward. Effects of infestation and famine did not vary by whether an official had an examination degree or by the rated difficulty of the county. No systematic time trends in effects of famine or infestation were apparent. Our analysis makes use of career histories of officials in the China Government Employee Database-Qing (CGED-Q) Jinshenlu (JSL) dataset, linked to records of disasters and harvests transcribed from a published compilation.

CGED-Q JSL 1760-1798 Draft Release

We have made available a draft release of the China Government Employee Dataset-Qing (CGED-Q) Jinshenlu (JSL) 1760-1798 data at the HKUST Dataspace:

https://dataspace.hkust.edu.hk/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.14711/dataset/E9GKRS

We expect to release a final version later in the year reflected corrections to any problems identified by users.

We are grateful to Xue Qing and Bijia Chen who spotted issues with the data before it was released.

New paper on the organizational demography of Qing officialdom in 社會科學研究

A paper by Cameron Campbell and Shuaiqi GAO on the organizational demography of Qing officialdom has been published in 社會科學研究. You can read it in its entirety in a post at the journal’s official account. You can download the PDF at the entry for the paper at the journal’s website. The English version is available at Soc ArXiv.

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

Abstract

中国历史官员量化数据库——（清）缙绅录（CGED?Q JSL）中文官的纵向关联记录揭示了19世纪清代文官整体的职业动态。定量分析的结果表明，清代官僚系统的总体情况就像一个当代的大型组织，文官离职率在任职的第一年内很高，然后下降，之后趋于稳定。19世纪下半叶，官员的离职率整体下降，但于清末十年中上升。官员离职率下降导致拥有功名的候缺待补官员群体谋求仕途和进一步晋升的机会不断减少。同时，异途官员的人数不断增加，加剧了官场竞争。不同类别、品级官员的职业动态在不同历史时期的变化趋势差异较大，尤其是高品级官员的离职率对清代后期的官场平衡具有深刻影响。清代文官的职业动态一方面揭示了清代文官组织人口学的基本特征，另一方面也为解释清代特定官员群体或特定时期的官员个案研究提供了重要参考。

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.

New publication using process mining to study the careers of Qing officials in the CGED-Q JSL

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.

A pre-print of the paper is available at Adam’s website: https://adamburkeware.net/papers/burke_et_al_state_snap_qing_icpm2023.pdf

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.

New 大数据与中国历史 Chinese translation of Cameron Campbell’s and James Lee’s 40 year career retrospective is now available

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.

The full text is available here.

Here is a link to the volume’s page at Dangdang in case you want to order:

http://product.dangdang.com/29580832.html

The English language original of our retrospective is available here: https://hlcs.nl/article/view/9303

Here is the complete reference for the Chinese language translation:

康文林 (Cameron Campbell)，李中清 (James Lee). 2023. 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 in 付海晏 Ed. 大数据与中国历史研究. 第4辑. Beijing:社会科学文献出版社 Social Sciences Academic Press (China), 74-114.

English version of forthcoming paper on the organizational demography of the Qing civil service

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:

The Organizational Demography of the Qing Civil Service, 1830-1911

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:

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.