Title:  Long Live Keju! The Persistent Effects of China’s Civil Service Examination System

Speaker: Professor James Kung

Time: 14th March, 18:30

Venue: Godlen Hall

Abstract: A predominant feature of Chinese civilization is the widely-diffused respect for learning. We argue that this is due to the effect of China’s civil service examination system (keju), an incredibly long-lived institution in Chinese history. Using the variation in the density of jinshi across 278 Chinese prefectures in the Ming-Qing period (c. 1368-1905) to proxy for this effect, we provide evidence showing that a doubling of jinshi per 10,000 population leads to an 8.5% increase in years of schooling in 2010. Our evidence thus suggests how in some cultures it is education rather than material wealth that is considered important as a transfer to the next generation. While the persistent effect of keju can be attributed to a multitude of factors including educational infrastructure, social capital, and so forth, cultural transmission represents a key channel through which the widely-diffused respect for learning is transmitted across generations. 

Profile: Prof. James Kung is Griffin Chair in Economic History in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourn. Before joining UniMel, he was tenured as the Issac R. Souede Professor in Economic History of Business School at the University of Hong Kong, and the Yan Ai Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science of Technology (HKUST).

His research interests are steeped in the economic history of China, its institutions and its political economy of development. Early on in his career, he was attracted to the “New Institutional Economics”, a passion that led to his studying the effects of institutions on development by examining a variety of topics ranging from the failure of a collectivized agriculture to the miraculous rise (and fall) of the township-and-village enterprises in rural China—a social laboratory I found utterly fascinating.