Preliminary Programme

In 1905, the abolition of the civil examinations which had ensured the stability of the imperial system since the Song dynasty (late 10th century) profoundly reconfigured the processes of elite selection in China. In the waning years of the Qing dynasty, foreign education, particularly studies in the United States, became a prerequisite for the young generations of Chinese elites. These foreign-educated elites have fueled contradictory representations, either dismissed as “bourgeois intellectuals” by Marxist historians or celebrated as pioneers and modernizers that saved the Chinese nation through their Western knowledge.
This paper seeks to revisit this black-and-white picture through a data-driven study of American University Men of China (the members of a leading Sino-American alumni organization) based on a roster published in 1936. Our methodology consists in the systematic collection of biographical data on these elites from a wide range of multilingual sources (who’s who directories, periodicals, Wikipedia) in order to analyze their trajectories and networks from a transnational and multigenerational perspective (from the mid-19th to the early 1950s).
We proceed in two steps. First, we reconstruct the individuals’ life trajectories including their family, social and geographical backgrounds, their educational curricula, and their later professional careers. We confirm that the majority came from affluent merchant and literati families based in southeastern provinces and attended prestigious universities on the American East coast (Columbia, Harvard), but we also reveal more complex patterns of social and spatial mobility. In contrast to the previous generations selected through the imperial examination system, American-educated elites were offered a wider range of professional opportunities beyond officialdom. The second section further analyzes their social and professional networks. We show that alumni and professional organizations played a crucial role in building the American-returned students (liumei) as a new social group in post-imperial China. These emerging organizations did not replace but complemented and sometimes conflicted with older modes of social relations based on kinship and native place. We also show that these American-educated elites efficiently mobilized their bicultural networks to secure the financial resources, business contacts and political connections which were necessary to their professional success in China and overseas.
Finally, this data-driven study of the first global elites in modern China provides a valuable counterpoint to the mainstream narratives of imperialism and Chinese nationalism that have prevailed to date. (Show less)

Recent works on occupied China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) have brought much of the focus on the operation of Japan-supported institutions in occupied China. Yet, the legitimate national government remained in place throughout the war, albeit weakened by the loss of most of its territory and of all major cities. Nevertheless, the need to cope with extreme situations contributed to making the state a more central and interventionist actor in all fields of public action in the areas that it ruled and provided the matrix on which the Chinese state redeveloped after the war, including after 1949 in Taiwan and on the mainland. While there has been much debate about the nature of state transformation in modern China— a process of state involution or a technocratic turn sustaining a developmental state — little work has been done on the primary actors of the state structure during wartime.
This paper aims to fill this gap by proposing a systematic analysis of all the individuals holding executive positions in the state apparatus of nationalist China. I select the year 1944 for two reasons: the first is documentary. In 1944, the Chinese government published a complete survey of its institutions and all the actors therein, including detailed biographical information. The second reason is temporal. The year 1944 represents almost the last year of the seven-year war and the apex of its evolution before Japanese defeat and the rush to overcome the Chinese Communist Party and the beginning of a new phase of military action.
This paper is based on three major sources: the official 1944 survey serves as our reference material to identify, categorize and document the government elites; the Modern China Biographical Database that seeks to document all historical actors in modern China (1830-1949), especially the data collected on elites; Wikipedia biographies in both Chinese and English, that we have extracted from Wikipedia and turned into a specific corpus.
This paper seeks to examine the profile of the government elites (place of origin, generational groups, education, family background) and their political, professional, and social trajectory up to when they appeared in the 1944 survey. My aim is to shed light on the nature of the government elites, on their circulation within, as well as in and out of the state apparatus before and during the war, and on the power configurations that resulted from their ties within this apparatus and with society at large. To achieve this objective, I will implement three major methods: data mining based on the Histtext application that we have developed to search and mine historical sources, as well as machine-learning based question-answer pipelines to refine further data retrieval; network analysis through two-mode networks or hypergraphs for more complex configurations; sequence analysis to analyze more specifically the career patterns of the bureaucratic and military elites. I hope to provide an overview that clarifies both the chronology of the state at war and the roles of key actors within it. (Show less)

Taking advantage of three newly available big historical data sets we compare the social and spatial origins of elite scientific Chinese researchers with students at elite Chinese universities and establish six salient differences.

• First, in the first half of the twentieth century, elite university students mostly come from business families, while academicians in the Chinese Academies of Science and Engineering and ‘experts’ selected by the Chinese Association of Science and Technology Experts mainly come from professional, especially academic, families
• Second, while many elite university students in the second half of the twentieth century also came from urban working class families, this was not true for academicians and experts, almost none of whom came from factory families and who instead came increasingly during the twentieth century from farm families
• Third, while other academicians and experts continued to come from academic families, these families were from rural communities and small towns instead of large cities. Indeed, even the academicians and experts who came from business and civil servant families compared to academic families, were as likely to come from rural farms and small county towns as from large cities
• Fourth, the dominance of Chinese academician and experts from professional, academic, and especially farm families suggests that personal interest in an academic research career over other careers was an important hitherto neglected factor in deciding who became an elite academic in China
• Fifth, the comparatively smaller numbers of academicians and experts from civil servant, business, office, and factory families also suggests that personal disinterest in an academic research career was equally important
• Finally, regardless of their aspirations, it is unlikely that such future academicians and experts could have overcome their humbler spatial origins, family background, and secondary education, were it not for the availability of outside public funding. In that sense, the increasing inequality of elite university students in the Republic of China and equality in the Peoples Republic of China is largely a product of public policy (Liang et al 2012, 2013)

The newly expanded datasets are the China University Student Dataset – Republic of China , which includes almost 150,000 students to graduate from an elite Chinese university during the first half of the 20th century, the China University Student Dataset – Peoples Republic of China which includes over 250,000 students to graduate from three elite Chinese university – Peking University, Suzhou University, and Zhejiang University - during the second half of the 20th century, and the China Academician and Expert Dataset which includes detailed biographical data on some 5000 Chinese Academicians and Experts who lived during the century from 1920 to 2020. The proposed paper should be especially relevant to the concerns of the ESSH Elites and Forerunners Network since it focuses on the confluence of “academic, educational, industrial, intellectual, technocratic elites,” as well as on the “continuity, rearrangement, and rupture of elites after regime change. (Show less)