Careers of Officials in East Asia and Beyond, Past and Present

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This session introduces a comparative approach to the study of bureaucracy and officialdom in East Asia and beyond by bringing together researchers examining the career dynamics of government officials in historical and contemporary China, historical Korea and historical Ethiopia. Their papers investigate the role of qualifications and other features of individual and family background on the chances of appointment, promotion, and exit. They also assess how the posts in which officials served shaped their subsequent promotion chances, with emphasis on whether service in specific posts were especially likely to lead to promotion or eventual attainment of high office. For their analysis, the papers deploy a variety of novel methods to newly constructed large, individual-level, longitudinal databases of employment records of civil servants from the different settings. Collectively, results from the papers will illuminate continuity and change in the career dynamics of officials China from the Qing to the present. The results will also delineate similarities and differences in the dynamics of official careers in Qing China and Joseon Korea, where civil service exams played a key role in the recruitment of officials. More generally, the results and discussion will help define an agenda for future research on bureaucracy and officialdom that moves beyond studies of specific countries at particular points in time to emphasize comparison across time and space.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 7: Politics and History

Individual Presentations

• Career Trajectories of County Magistrates in Qing China - Cameron Dougall Campbell, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Bijia Chen, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; James Lee, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Spatial Mobility as a Governance Tool in the Chinese Bureaucracy - Ling Zhu, Stanford University; Xueguang Zhou, Stanford University

• The Bureaucratic Path for the Family in Pre-modern Joseon Dynasty - Sangkuk Lee

• Uncovering Bureaucratic Hierarchies Using Career Paths - Franziska Barbara Keller, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Chair

• Yiqing Xu Stanford University

Discussants

• Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Josef Woldense University of Minnesota, Twin Cities