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Blood is Thicker Than Water: Elite Kinship Networks and State Building in Imperial China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2022

YUHUA WANG Open the ORCID record for YUHUA WANG [Opens in a new window]
YUHUA WANG*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, United States
*
Yuhua Wang, Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University, United States, yuhuawang@fas.harvard.edu.
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Abstract

A long tradition in social sciences scholarship has established that kinship-based institutions undermine state building. I argue that kinship networks, when geographically dispersed, cross-cut local cleavages and align the incentives of self-interested elites in favor of building a strong state, which generates scale economies in providing protection and justice throughout a large territory. I evaluate this argument by examining elite preferences related to a state-building reform in eleventh century China. I map politicians’ kinship networks using their tomb epitaphs and collect data on their political allegiances from archival materials. A statistical analysis demonstrates that a politician’s support for state building increases with the geographic size of his kinship network, controlling for a number of individual, family, and regional characteristics. My findings highlight the importance of elite social structure in facilitating state development and help to advance our understanding of state building in China—a useful, yet understudied, counterpoint to the Eurocentric literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 116 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 896 - 910
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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