Demographic information obtained from Chinese epitaphs from the 7th to 10th centuries reflects sociological trends observed in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. When studying social mobility in modern industrialized countries, scholars often draw on information from sources such as the World Economic Forum or the U.S. General Social Survey. However, exploring similar trends in previous centuries presents greater challenges, as it is much more difficult to obtain relevant statistics from these periods.
However, a social science research team has now found a way to study career advancement in medieval China (AD 618-907) through epitaphs from the Tang Dynasty. These epitaphs include the ancestry, names, official positions (such as minister of household affairs, minister of Dali Temple, imperial censor, etc.) of the deceased's father and grandfather, as well as the deceased's professional experience and educational diploma - these are sample data points for measuring social mobility across generations.
Notably, their analysis shows that education during this period was a catalyst for social mobility.
"Epitaphs written in medieval China, including the Tang Dynasty, often describe a person's life in great detail in stylized prose and poetry, which contain detailed information such as the ancestral origin, family background and career history of each deceased," said Wen Fangqi, assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University.
Erik H. Wang, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at New York University, added: "This information reflects to a certain extent the content of contemporary social mobility surveys."
Wang studies historical political economy, while Wen studies social mobility in contemporary society. Recognizing the high level of data quality embedded in these epitaphs, they realized these artifacts were vessels for their scholarly interests. Later, they invited New York University sociology professor Michael Hout to join the project. Hout was Wen Jiabao's thesis advisor and a well-known scholar who studies social stratification and mobility.
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), show that the pattern of relationships between social origin, education and adult achievement is somewhat similar to that seen in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The researchers extracted data from 3,640 male epitaphs as well as reliable historical materials (such as dynastic records and family trees compiled by third parties) for analysis, revealing the decline of aristocracy and the rise of elite politics in China's medieval period 1,300 years ago.
Researchers discovered a specific reason for this development: whether the deceased had passed the imperial examination, which was developed during this period to select civil servants. They found that the civil service exam, used until the early 20th century, was a catalyst for social mobility—much like higher education in the United States since at least the 1960s.
The authors write: "After about AD 650, passing the civil service examinations had an increasingly smaller impact on career success in the bureaucracy, while passing the civil service examinations had an increasing impact. Furthermore, passing competitive examinations may even have equalized the chance of later success, since the status of the father was not a factor in the official rank of men who passed the civil service examinations."
"Education is central to our understanding of intergenerational mobility." Many consider this a 20th-century development. However, we can see in data from centuries ago that there are phenomena linking origin, education, and occupation that closely resemble contemporary patterns.
Compiled source: ScitechDaily