{"id":10106,"date":"2025-11-11T12:29:01","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T12:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/?p=10106"},"modified":"2025-11-11T12:29:01","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T12:29:01","slug":"passing-the-exams-all-in-the-family-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2025\/11\/passing-the-exams-all-in-the-family-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Passing the Exams-All in the Family edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a long history of talking about the Ladder of Success in Imperial China, and if the Chinese bureaucracy really was a Career Open to Talent. This was also one of the few topics where you had enough data to actually do some vaguely social science type stuff, which made it a very popular topic for a long time.<\/p>\n

If you want a nice summary of a lot of this literature you can look at “Kin Networks and Exam Degree Attainment in 19th Century China: An Analysis Based on Tongnianchilu” by \u00a0Cameron Campbell, Qin XUE, Shengbin WEI Preprint available here\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

They also answer the question. \ud83d\ude42 Specifically, the question Ho Ping-ti asked a long time ago. How many exam passers were “new men”, from families that did not have a history of exam passing?<\/p>\n

With modern methods you can get better data. The authors tell us that the Tongnian Chilu (\u540c\u5e74\u9f52\u9304) and Mingjing Tongpu (\u660e\u7d93\u901a\u8b5c). contain self-reported information for 950,927 relatives of 34,313 19th century degree holders.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you1<\/a><\/sup> code in all the data you can get pretty good statistics on how many exam passers had relatives who passed the exams. Ready? Here it is.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As you can see, the\u00a0Jinshi<\/em> (which was the degree you really needed to get a job and have a career at this point) group reported only 28.4 % without any kin with degrees2<\/a><\/sup> This is less than the 32.9% who had 10 or more relatives with degrees.(It is not clear to me if they count relatives who had purchased a degree, although given that the data is self-reported I would guess that they are all treated the same. )<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Juren<\/em> (who might get a job) and\u00a0Gongsheng<\/em> (future schoolteachers) report radically different numbers. So this seems a pretty clear set of evidence that the lower ranks of exam passers had men from “lower” families, but at the top those with ink in their veins predominated.<\/p>\n

Now just add some stuff on buying degrees<\/a>, and you are all set to teach about this.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/osf.io\/preprints\/socarxiv\/s2u3w_v1<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

  1. Or the people you hire with grant money  ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li>

  2. The article talks about how they define kin and how the lower degree winners reported fewer kin in general, perhaps skewing the results  ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    There is a long history of talking about the Ladder of Success in Imperial China, and if the Chinese bureaucracy really was a Career Open to Talent. This was also one of the few topics where you had enough data to actually do some vaguely social science type stuff, which made it a very popular…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[153,159,163],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-qing","category-social-history","category-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-2D0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10106"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10125,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10106\/revisions\/10125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}