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The Making of Bad Gentry: The Abolition of Keju, Local Governance, and Anti-Elite Protests, 1902–1911

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2022

Yu Hao ,
Zhengcheng Liu ,
Xi Weng  and
Li-an Zhou
Yu Hao*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Peking University, School of Economics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. E-mail: maxhao1003@pku.edu.cn
Zhengcheng Liu
Affiliation:
Ph.D. candidate, Business School, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. E-mail: kevin_liu@connect.hku.hk.
Xi Weng
Affiliation:
Professor, Peking University Guanghua School of Management, Beijing, Beijing, China. E-mail: wengxi125@gsm.pku.edu.cn
Li-an Zhou
Affiliation:
Professor, Peking University Guanghua School of Management, Beijing, Beijing, China. E-mail: zhoula@gsm.pku.edu.cn
*
E-mail: maxhao1003@pku.edu.cn
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Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of the abolition of the civil service exam on local governance in early twentieth-century China. Before the abolition, local elites collected surtaxes that financed local public goods, but they were supervised by the state and could lose candidacy for higher status if they engaged in corrupt behavior. This prospect of upward mobility (POUM) gave them incentives to behave well, which the abolition of the exam removed. Using anti-elite protests as a proxy for the deterioration of local governance, we find that prefectures with a higher POUM experienced more incidents of anti-elite protests after the abolition.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 82 , Issue 3 , September 2022 , pp. 625 - 661
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association

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Footnotes

We thank the editor, Dan Bogart, and anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and guidance. We are also grateful for helpful comments from Ying Bai, Zhiwu Chen, Duol Kim, James Kung, Ruixue Jia, Xiaohuan Lan, Nan Li, Cong Liu, Chicheng Ma, and workshop/seminar participants at Peking University, University of Hong Kong, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Fudan University. Hao thanks the financial support from the Seed Grant for Young Scholars at Peking University, and Zhou acknowledges financial support from the Research Center for Comparative Economic History at Peking University. Weng acknowledges financial support from the NSFC (Grant No. 71973002).

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