James Lee's and Cameron Campbell's Research Group 李中清及康文林的研究團隊
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.
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:
Chen Jun, my MA student at Central China Normal University, has shared slides and sample code he produced to help anyone planning to use R to analyze the CGED-Q JSL public releases. The materials are all in Chinese. They introduce how to import the public data into R, create and transform variables, process strings to create variables, and tabulate and graph results. We hope that this will be useful to users of the data.
We are pleased to report that the China Government Employee-Qing (CGED-Q) Jinshenlu (JSL) dataset was one of four to receive the Best Project Award (最佳项目奖 ) at the China Digital Humanities 2022 Annual Meeting held at Renmin University on November 26 and 27.
For more information about the award, please see the final report of the CDH 2022 meeting.
For more information about the CGED-Q JSL, please see the project page at the Lee-Campbell Group Website.
Cameron Campbell presented a talk on Qing officaldom in the Hong Kong University Quantitative history series in November 2022. The video has been upload to Youtube:
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.
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 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!
We just made available for download the China Government Employee Database-Qing (CGED-Q) Jinshenlu 1850-1864 Public Release.This release consists of 341,092 quarterly records of 37,632 (by our linkage) officials who served between 1850 to 1864. The information is drawn from 26 quarterly editions.
We chose 1850-1864 as the next period for a release since it includes the Taiping Rebellion, a major event in 19th century Qing history.
Each record includes information about the post, and if it was occupied, the holder, including their name, province and county of origin, qualification, and other information.
Together with our previous release of 686,945 records for the period 1900-1912, we have now released publicly more than 1,000,000 records from the CGED-Q.
The 1850-1864 and 1900-1912 releases may be downloaded at the HKUST Dataspace, the Harvard Dataverse, and the mirror site at Renmin University Institute for Qing History:
HKUST Dataspace
https://dataspace.ust.hk/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.14711/dataset/E9GKRS
Harvard Dataverse
https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GMQWVZ
Renmin University Institute for Qing History
http://39.96.59.69/DownloadFile/DLFile
Cameron Campbell created a page at his website to share code that may be useful when managing or analyzing the CGED-Q Jinshenlu Public Release. This includes code to create flag variables to help with the selection of records for analysis, as well as code for transforming, cleaning or re-categorizing the contents of key variables.
In November 2021, our coders completed the entry of virtually all the quarterly editions of the rosters of Qing civil officials 縉紳錄 and military officials 中樞備覧 available to the Lee-Campbell Group, including all the editions from the published Tsinghua University Library collection and other editions from the Columbia University and Harvard University libraries, as well as the National Library and Shanghai Library. We are grateful to the staff of all these libraries, in particular the Columbia University Library, for their cooperation in making their library holdings available. We have also located a number of other editions in the Peking University library and the Palace Museum Library, but do not yet have access to these data. We are not aware of any other readily accessible editions in other collections.
The CGED-Q JSL now consists of 4,433,600 records of 327,618 officials for the period between 1760 and 1912. 3,843,644 are records of civil offices in editions of the jinshenlu and 589,956 are records of military offices in editions of the zhongshubeilan. The data are most complete for the period 1830 to 1912. According to our analysis based on our most recent record linkage, of these officials, 261,451 were civil officials, 58,482 were military officials, and 7,685 made appearances as both civil and military officials. Please note that since these counts of numbers of officials are based on record linkage, they may change as we adjust our nominative linkage procedures.
Figure 1 (below) summarizes the coverage of the entered 縉紳錄 editions by decade (black bar) and compares it to the potential coverage if all the editions in different collections were entered. In the 1840s, and then from 1870 to 1912, we have entered at least one edition per year. In the 1830s, and then from 1850 to 1869, we have at least one edition entered for 9 out of 10 years in each decade. Between 1800 and 1830, the coverage of our entered data is spottier. We have at least one edition in 7 out of 10 years in the 1800s, 4 out of 10 years in the 1810s, and 6 out of 10 years in the 1820. From 1760 to 1800, our coverage is less complete, with at least one edition entered every 2 to 4 years per decade.
Figure 1. Entered and Available Editions
Based on our review of the catalogs of other collections, it should still be possible to improve coverage of the last half of the 18th century and first half of the 19th century. The heights of the green bars represent the numbers of years for which at least one edition appears to exist in other collections. Most of these are in the Peking University Library and the Palace Museum. We hope very much to gain access to these collections at some point in the future.
Figure 2 presents a more detailed view of the coverage of the editions so far. From about 1865 onward, we have 3 or 4 editions per year entered all the way to 1911. From 1830 to 1865 or so, we have at least one or two editions per year entered, except for one year each in the 1850s and 1860s where we have no editions at all. Before 1830, it is more common to have one or two editions entered, or none at all.
Figure 2. Entered editions by year
For more details about the CGED, please see the project page.
Addendum – 30 April 2022
Since November 2021, we found five more editions that had been entered but not added to our central work file. This post and the content of related pages has been accordingly updated.