Origins of Power Actors in Historical China: How War Made Some Regions Produce More Elites than Others

• In Event: Institution Building in Historical and Contemporary Contexts

Abstract

China’s political history is often written as the biography of a few power actors, reflecting the belief that these elites shaped the nation’s trajectory of state-building and socioeconomic development. However, it remains unclear why some regions produced more power actors and, consequently, influenced history more than others. To explore the underlying drivers of regional political power distribution, we utilize a comprehensive dataset spanning from 206 BCE to 2020 CE and show that throughout Chinese history a region’s past war exposure was a key determinant of its ability to nurture political elites. Employing an instrumental variable, we further establish that frequent wars caused some regions to contribute more political elites to the national bureaucracy. Multiple channels are examined through which war increased a region’s production of elite officials. The first channel involves aristocracy membership, whereby war heroes were rewarded with hereditary aristocratic titles, enabling them to pass down positions of power through generations. The second is state capacity building, in which the imperial government established more counties and more cities in war-torn areas, thus providing more positions of power and increasing the local density of officials. The third is defense capacity building, wherein regions with frequent wars constructed additional military garrisons, subsequently raising the number of locally nurtured elite officials. Lastly, there is the clan-building channel, in which frequent wars prompted locals to organize their lineages more cohesively, enhancing intra-clan resource-pooling and allowing more descendants to enter the bureaucracy via the civil service examinations.

Authors

• Wanda Wang, The University of Hong Kong

• Zhiwu Chen, The University of Hong Kong

• Xiaoyang Zhang, The University of Hong Kong