East Asia Workshop: Politics, Economy and Society Presents

Elite Recruitment and Political Stability:

The Impact of the Abolition of China’s Civil Service Exam System

 

Ruixue Jia

Assistant Professor

School of International Relations and Pacific Studies

University of California, San Diego 

 

4:30-6pm, Tuesday

December 2, 2014

Pick Lounge, 5828 South University Ave.

Abstract

This paper studies how the abolition of an elite recruitment system – China’s civil exam system that lasted over 1,300 years – affects political stability. Employing a panel dataset across 262 prefectures and exploring the variations in the quotas on the entry- level exam candidates, we find that higher quotas per capita were associated with a higher probability of revolution participation after the abolition and higher incidence of uprisings in 1911 that marked the end of the 2,000 years of imperial rule. This finding is robust to various checks including using the number of small rivers and short-run exam performance before the quota system as instruments. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which the abolition affected citizens’ prospect of upward mobility (POUM) more in regions with higher quotas under the exam system. In addition, we document that modern human capital also contributed to the revolution and that social capital strengthened the effect of quotas on the participation in the revolution.

 

 

Workshop website: http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/eastasia/

Student coordinator: Wen Xie (wxie@uchicago.edu)

Faculty sponsors: Dali Yang, Dingxin Zhao and Zheng Michael Song

 

This presentation is sponsored by the Council on Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences and Center for East Asian Studies. Persons with disabilities who believe they may need assistance please contact the student coordinator in advance.