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Historians have long been perplexed by the complete disappearance of the medieval Chinese aristocracy by the tenth century—the “great clans\" that had dominated China for centuries. In this book, Nicolas Tackett resolves the enigma of their disappearance, using new, digital methodologies to analyze a dazzling array of sources. Tackett systematically mines thousands of funerary biographies excavated in recent decades—most of them never before examined by scholars—while taking full advantage of the explanatory power of Geographic Information System (GIS) methods and social network analysis. Tackett supplements these analyses with extensive anecdotes culled from epitaphs, prose literature, and poetry, bringing to life women and men who lived a millennium in the past. The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy demonstrates that the great Tang aristocratic families adapted to the social, economic, and institutional transformations of the seventh and eighth centuries far more successfully than previously believed. Their political influence collapsed only after a large number were killed during three decades of extreme violence following Huang Chao’s sack of the capital cities in 880 CE. 2015 James Breasted Prize, American Historical Association

This paper studies how the abolition of an elite recruitment system—China's civil exam system that lasted over 1,300 years—affects political stability. Employing a panel data set across 262 prefectures and exploring the variations in the quotas on the entrylevel exam candidates, we find that higher quotas per capita were associated with a higher probability of revolution participation after the abolition and a higher incidence of uprisings in 1911 that marked the end of the 2,000 years of imperial rule. This finding is robust to various checks including using the number of small rivers and short-run exam performance before the quota system as instruments. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with the interpretation that in regions with higher quotas per capita under the exam system, more would-be elites were negatively affected by the abolition. In addition, we document that modern human capital in the form of those studying in Japan also contributed to the revolution and that social capital strengthened the effect of quotas on revolution participation.

China's Futures cuts through the sometimes confounding and unfounded speculation of international pundits and commentators to provide readers with an important yet overlooked set of complex views concerning China's future: views originating within China itself. Daniel Lynch seeks to answer the simple but rarely asked question: how do China's own leaders and other elite figures assess their country's future? Many Western social scientists, business leaders, journalists, technocrats, analysts, and policymakers convey confident predictions about the future of China's rise. Every day, the business, political, and even entertainment news is filled with stories and commentary not only on what is happening in China now, but also what Western experts confidently think will happen in the future. Typically missing from these accounts is how people of power and influence in China itself imagine their country's developmental course. Yet the assessments of elites in a still super-authoritarian country like China should make a critical difference in what the national trajectory eventually becomes. In China's Futures, Lynch traces the varying possible national trajectories based on how China's own specialists are evaluating their country's current course, and his book is the first to assess the strengths and weaknesses of \"predictioneering\" in Western social science as applied to China. It does so by examining Chinese debates in five critical issue-areas concerning China's trajectory: the economy, domestic political processes and institutions, communication and the Internet (arrival of the \"network society\"), foreign policy strategy, and international soft-power (cultural) competition.

Established in 221 BCE, the Chinese empire lasted for 2,132 years before being replaced by the Republic of China in 1912. During its two millennia, the empire endured internal wars, foreign incursions, alien occupations, and devastating rebellions--yet fundamental institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural features of the empire remained intact.The Everlasting Empiretraces the roots of the Chinese empire's exceptional longevity and unparalleled political durability, and shows how lessons from the imperial past are relevant for China today. Yuri Pines demonstrates that the empire survived and adjusted to a variety of domestic and external challenges through a peculiar combination of rigid ideological premises and their flexible implementation. The empire's major political actors and neighbors shared its fundamental ideological principles, such as unity under a single monarch--hence, even the empire's strongest domestic and foreign foes adopted the system of imperial rule. Yet details of this rule were constantly negotiated and adjusted. Pines shows how deep tensions between political actors including the emperor, the literati, local elites, and rebellious commoners actually enabled the empire's basic institutional framework to remain critically vital and adaptable to ever-changing sociopolitical circumstances. As contemporary China moves toward a new period of prosperity and power in the twenty-first century, Pines argues that the legacy of the empire may become an increasingly important force in shaping the nation's future trajectory.

Current literature suggests two kinds of congruence that come into play when students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds enter elite universities: academic fit and social fit. Yet, in most of the studies on habitus transformation, the differences between the two are seldom mentioned. This may imply that the transformation of one aspect guarantees success in the transformation of the other aspect. In this article, we present the data from an ongoing longitudinal study on a group of academically successful rural students at four Chinese elite universities. We will show how they start with a compartmentalized fit between their original habitus and the elite milieu they enter, and how this pattern tends to produce two different types of outcomes: “habitus transformation” and “habitus hysteresis.” Importantly, with either of these outcomes, these students do not have to experience “hidden injuries of the class,” alienating themselves from families and former peer groups.

In Body, Ritual and Identity: A New Interpretation of Yan Yuan, Yang Jui-sung has demonstrated that the complexity of Yan's ideas and his hatred for Zhu Xi in particular need be interpreted in light of his traumatic life experiences, his frustration over the fall of the Ming dynasty, and anxiety caused by the civil service examination system.

The governance of multidimensional relative poverty is a key challenge in rural poverty alleviation in the new era, as well as an important practice of the implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in China. Based on provincial fiscal and financial data as well as data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this article employs multilevel linear regression and structural equation modeling to empirically examine the impact and mechanisms of fiscal investment in agriculture on multidimensional relative poverty among farmers. The research results indicate that fiscal investment in agriculture can effectively alleviate multidimensional relative poverty among rural households, and this conclusion still holds after the robustness and endogeneity tests of traditional measurement and Double Machine Learning. However, differences in household characteristics affect the performance of fiscal poverty alleviation. Households in the central and western regions, with larger family sizes, younger members, and lower levels of education, exhibit higher policy responsiveness. In terms of mechanisms, digital inclusive finance and social capital serve as important channels for fiscal multidimensional poverty reduction. However, attention should be paid to the positive lag effect of digital inclusive finance and the risk of “elite capture” in households with low levels of social capital. Accordingly, the article recommends that fiscal spending should be increased and made more efficient, with precise policy measures, strengthened institutional coordination, and efforts to cultivate optimal levels of social capital. While the article is limited by data availability to allow for a more in-depth and complex discussion, it still provides insights for fiscal strategies aimed at building high-quality shared prosperity.

Recent research at Liangzhu in China documents the settlement as a fortified town dating from 3300–2300 BC, accompanied by an impressive system of earthen dams for flood control and irrigation. An earthen platform in the centre of the town probably supported a palace complex, and grave goods from the adjacent Fanshan cemetery include finely worked jades accompanying high-status burials. These artefacts were produced by a complex society more than a millennium before the bronzes of the Shang period. The large-scale public works and remarkable grave goods at Liangzhu are products of what may be the earliest state society in East Asia.

The existing scholarship has developed six main explanations to account for the success of the Chinese Revolution, which has been anomalous for major paradigms derived from cross-national comparisons. Methodologically, we use a social geographical approach to test these existing explanations systematically by constructing and analyzing a unique dataset of Communist growth in 93 counties in the three most contested provinces during its most pivotal period of ascendence. Theoretically, we advance and test an alternative perspective, based on the groundwork of Tocqueville and Fei Xiaotong, that integrates the state-centric theory, elite theory, and cultural analysis. Our perspective emphasizes the interplay between state centralization and local elite structure, which leads to intensified state extraction and local elite fracturing, thus creating favorable conditions for revolution. The quantitative analysis strongly supports the importance of the Japanese invasion but provides limited support for many other conventional explanations. The analysis largely confirms the Tocqueville-Fei perspective on state centralization, elite fracturing, cultural change, and revolution. The findings are buttressed by a detailed case study of Lianshui County. The study unveils a common structural challenge that a modernizing state faces in an agrarian status society, to recreate its political legitimacy while disrupting local elite structure. It also sheds historical light on the evolution of state-society relationship through the Chinese Revolution.

PurposeThis study explores the motives and objectives of sports sponsorship in China, taking into account the sports, social and cultural contexts. It also adopts a comparative approach to examine the sponsorship of elite and grassroots sports events in China.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopts a qualitative approach, employing semi-structured interviews with representatives of nine companies sponsoring elite and/or grassroots sports events in Western China. The data were analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis.FindingsIn China, sponsors are frequently driven to sponsor elite sport events by a sense of obligation and responsibility to the country, whereas their motives to sponsor grassroots sport events is primarily influenced by sincerity and goodwill. Chinese companies consider brand awareness, exposure and the relationship with the government and authorities as key factors for sponsorship, and use sponsorship to achieve market-related objectives.Originality/valueCompanies’ sponsorship motives and objectives have received significant attention in the literature, but mainly in Western countries. In the context of China, this study identifies how sponsors utilize social networks to shape their motives and objectives. It also reveals certain patterns common with the current literature, as well as specificities such as how the roles of the government and authorities are linked to the contingent economic and social context of the country. Furthermore, the differences between elite and grassroots sports events sponsorship are explained.