Regional Quotas and The Rise of Native Place Ties: Evidence from Chinese Civil Service Examinations, 1368-1580

Enying Zheng, Peking University
Wei Hong, Tsinghua University
Yasheng Huang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Rongzhu Ke, Zhejiang University

With a growing interest in the effect of the native place ties on political elites, we turn to the historical contingencies that transformed the seemingly natural hometown attachment into a salient social group boundary and a political currency. Extending historical scholarship, we argue that although the emergent local identities in the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279) following the demise of the aristocratic families functioned as a macrostructural precondition, it was the enforcement of a regional quota system on the long-standing civil service examinations (605-1904) in the early Ming dynasty (1368-1644) that made native place ties matter. In line with the state making social groups thesis, the quota system consolidated a place-based group boundary, crystalizing informal local identities into an administrative and social classification regulating the access to resources (i.e., education, examination quotas, and likelihood of becoming political elites). Additionally, the concurrent rise of native place associations founded by and serving people from the same place provided an organizational basis to further develop and enrich native place ties. We corroborate this argument using the regional origin information on the students who passed the examinations in Southern Song dynasty, the pre-quota Ming dynasty, and the post-quota Ming dynasty. We further contend that once native place ties assumed priority in patterned social interaction, they began to affect the civil service examination process and outcomes. Our analysis of micro level information on students and examiners’ places of origin, literary specialty, and family members shows that an examiner tended to favor the students from the same province by moving up their places in a ranking order, and this effect was negatively related to the state capacity but positively related to the political stake an examiner had in his hometown.

See paper

 Presented in Session 54. States, Elite, and Capital