matthew noellert – Lee-Campbell Group 李康研究團隊

New article on the urban migration of rural elites in The China Quarterly

A new article by Matthew Noellert and Xiangning Li on the urban migration of rural elites in the early PRC is now available online in The China Quarterly: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741024001516. The article uses data from an urban county seat included in the CRRD-SQ dataset.

Abstract:

We present findings from historical microdata that suggest former rural elites effectively preserved their socio-economic advantages into the early People’s Republic of China (PRC, circa 1949–1965) by exploiting urban–rural differences in government policies. In particular, former rural elites were three to four times more likely than poor peasants to move to a nearby town, and this urbanization was highly associated with socio-economic privileges in a rapidly developing economy, including both income and educational opportunities. We also find evidence that after 1949, former rural elites who did urbanize were more likely than their poor peasant counterparts to find industrial jobs.

摘要：

基于历史微观数据的发现表明，在中华人民共和国建国后直至文革前（1949–1965），建国前的乡村精英（地主和富农）通过利用国家政策对城乡的差异有效地维持了原来的社会经济优势。具体地说，地富相比贫农迁移到县城的可能性要高出三到四倍。在经济快速发展的情况下，这样的城市化（移民）带来了收入和教育机会等多种社会经济优势。我们还发现，建国后在迁移到县城的人群中，地富比贫农更有可能在工业找到工作。

Here is the full reference:

Noellert, Matthew, and Xiangning Li. 2025. “Internal Migration and the Continuity of Local Elites in North China, 1949–1965.” The China Quarterly, February, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741024001516.

The print version will appear in June 2025, Vol. 262.

University of Michigan Press publishes Matt Noellert’s New Book on Communist Land Reform using the CRRD-LR

Matt Noellert’s first book, Power over Property: The Political Economy of Communist Land Reform in China, was published in September 2020 by the University of Michigan Press and is now available for ordering online in various formats.

Power over Property is based on Matt’s PhD dissertation and uses the CRRD-LR dataset to demonstrate the primacy of political entitlements in shaping social and economic outcomes in twentieth-century China.

Matt Noellert begins new position as Associate Professor of Asian Economic History at Hitotsubashi University

Lee-Campbell Group member, Matthew Noellert, has taken up a new Associate Professor position at Hitotsubashi University in Kunitachi, Tokyo, Japan, beginning September 1, 2020. Hitotsubashi specializes in social sciences and is one of the best universities in Japan for economic research. Hitotsubashi is also famous for being one of the top four most selective universities in Japan (based on entrance exam score).

Matt is honored to join Hitotsubashi’s prestigious Faculty of Economics. He looks forward to expanding his research on rural reconstruction to include comparisons between northeast China and other regions within China, as well as international comparisons with Japan and Korea.

Matt earned his PhD at HKUST in 2014, studying with James Lee and Cameron Campbell. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Shanxi University 2014-2016 working with Long XING and Yingze HU and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Iowa from 2016-2020.

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.