Thammasat University students interested in China, history, business, sociology, economics, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 20 June Zoom webinar on Twilight of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy: Keju, Officeholding, and Assortative Mating in the Tang.

The event, on Thursday, 20 June 2024 at 8am Bangkok time, is presented by the Centre for Quantitative History and Faculty of Business and Economics, Hong Kong University (HKU).

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of Chinese economic history.

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://hku.zoom.us/webinar/register/5917014007444/WN_YPvPG1gRQrWHFT9L5hpGdA#/registration

The event announcement states:

Data from the distant past provide fertile ground for testing social science theories of education and social mobility. Erik H. Wang of the New York University and his team constructed a dataset from 3,640 tomb epitaphs of males in China’s Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), containing detailed information about ancestral origins, family background, and career histories of the deceased elites. Their statistical analysis yields evidence of a transition away from an aristocratic society in three key trends: 1) family pedigree mattered less for career achievement over time, 2) passing the Imperial Examination (Keju) became an increasingly important predictor of one’s career achievement, and 3) father’s position always mattered throughout the Tang, especially for men who did not pass the Keju. Erik and his team’s findings cast doubt on historical studies portraying the medieval Chinese aristocracy as self-perpetuating during this era. These works appear to “select on the dependent variable” when analyzing biographical data.

During this Quantitative History Webinar, Erik will present models that correct for the biases incurred in these studies. The new findings reaffirm earlier, classic works that suggested a chronic decline of the aristocracy via the rise of Keju. The aristocracy’s advantage in officeholding had already been in clear decline long before the wars and upheavals of the late 9th and early 10th centuries that allegedly ended the aristocracy. The twilight of medieval Chinese aristocracy, according to the data, began in as early as the mid-seventh century CE. The advantage of ancient great houses gradually vanished and individuals’ educational achievement became increasingly important for their career success. Erik will also discuss new results on Keju and assortative mating among the Tang elites.

Discussant: Javier Cha, Assistant Professor of History, HKU

In 2021, Dr. Wang coauthored a paper, From Powerholders to Stakeholders: State-Building with Elite Compensation in Early Medieval China for the American Journal of Political Science.

Its abstract:

How do rulers soften resistance by local powerholders to state-building efforts? This paper highlights a strategy of compensation, where elites receive government offices in exchange for relinquishing their localist interests, and become uprooted and integrated into the national political system as stakeholders. We explore this strategy in the context of the Northern Wei Dynasty of China (386-534 CE) that terminated an era of state weakness during which aristocrats exercised local autonomy through strongholds. Exploiting a comprehensive state-building reform in the late 5th century, we find that aristocrats from previously autonomous localities were disproportionately recruited into the bureaucracy as compensation for accepting stronger state presence. Three mechanisms of bureaucratic compensation facilitated state-building. Offices received by those aristocrats: (1) carried direct benefits; (2) realigned their interests toward the ruler; and (3) mitigated credible commitment problems. Our findings shed light on the “First Great Divergence” between Late Antiquity Europe and Medieval China.

From the paper’s introduction:

Enhancing state capacity is difficult. Across space and time, state-building efforts often fail because they provoke resistance from potential reform “losers” with vested interests in the status quo. Local powerholders, in particular, can block or undermine such efforts using the considerable powers available to them.

How can state-builders weaken elite resistance? We highlight an important yet often overlooked strategy: directly compensating the losers through prestigious and powerful positions in the bureaucracy that facilitate interest realignment and credible commitment.

Exploiting a major state-building reform in Early Medieval China (ca. 220-589 CE), we find that powerholders in regions previously lacking state penetration saw their political careers greatly improved since the reform in exchange for relinquishing local autonomy to the state.

The theoretical inquiry addressed here also relates to a historical puzzle. The so-called “barbarian” invasions brought down the Western Roman Empire and precipitated the “Feudal Revolution,” which arguably underlied the political divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. In contrast, the Chinese Empire was destroyed by similar episodes in the Early Medieval Period, but managed to re-consolidate within two centuries.

We focus on a critical juncture in this “First Great Divergence”: the state-building Reform of 485-486 CE (hereafter “the Reform”). In studying how Reform proponents softened elite resistance, we highlight bureaucracy as a key mechanism explaining the different trajectory taken by China.

The Reform, carried out under the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534 CE), revived the mobilization capacity of the Chinese state for centuries to come. It enabled the state to levy taxes and military service on peasants who were previously controlled by local aristocrats through fortified castles (“strongholds”), and deepened state penetration especially in regions with aristocratic dominance. Faced with severe challenges to their fiscal autonomy, the aristocracy had incentives to undermine the Reform. Thus, for the Reform to succeed, the ruler needed to directly compensate aristocrats in stronghold regions as potential losers by giving them lucrative offices in the bureaucracy.

We hand-collect and geocode datasets on the career histories and personal information of 2,590 elites of Northern Wei from official histories and tomb epitaphs. We also geocode mentions of pre-existing fortified castles (“strongholds”) from the 4th century. With the collapse of political order, peasants sought shelter at strongholds controlled by local aristocrats and became their private clients, invulnerable from taxation and conscription by the state.

We therefore use the existence of strongholds to measure the lack of prior state penetration.

Using a difference-in-differences (DD) strategy, we find that the treatment group—prefectures with strongholds—experienced a substantial, sustained surge in the number of aristocrats recruited into the imperial bureaucracy compared with the control group, prefectures without strongholds, during and after the Reform.

Sensitivity analyses show that our result is robust to a considerable degree of survival bias. We present evidence supporting a compensatory interpretation of our result: recruitment was not driven by population expansion or rising demand for elites with specific characteristics, and clans with higher resistance threat saw more members recruited.

We unpack three mechanisms of compensation with a triple-differences (DDD) strategy at the individual-time level. First, aristocrats from stronghold prefectures were more likely to hold higher-ranked and more prestigious offices after the Reform, indicating that compensation carried actual benefits to offset the loss of vested interests. Second, bureaucracy facilitated interest realignment between local powerholders and the regime. Stronghold aristocrats were more likely to take senior posts in the national, but not regional government; and more likely to serve as regional governors of jurisdictions away from home. This shows that state-builders tried to transform aristocrats into national stakeholders, and adopted a rotation strategy to reduce their localist orientation.

Last, the compensation deal needed to be credible, such that reneging on it would be politically costly for the ruler. Our theory highlights that offices which help their holders develop alliance networks – i.e. senior national offices, and personnel offices in charge of the recruitment, evaluation and promotion of bureaucrats – could mitigate the commitment problem. We show that stronghold aristocrats were more likely to take both offices in the post-Reform period.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)