Events

Past Event

Understanding Qing Officialdom Through Big Data

April 18, 2023
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
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School of International and Public Affairs, 420 West 118th Street, Room 918, New York, NY 10027 Show Map

Speaker: Cameron Campbell, Chair Professor, Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)

Moderator: Junyan Jiang, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University

Cameron Campbell will give a talk based on his historical database. He will present findings on the social origins, qualifications, and career dynamics of 19th century Qing civil officials that support, complicate and contradict the assumptions and stylized facts about the selection and promotion of officials that underpin much recent quantitative research on Qing social, economic, and political history. The findings are drawn from the ongoing analysis of the China Government Employee Dataset-Qing (CGED-Q) which the Lee-Campbell Group began to construct in 2014.

Speaker's Bio: Cameron Campbell is Chair Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Before joining HKUST in 2013, he was Professor in the Department of Sociology at UCLA and an affiliate of the California Centre for Population Research (CCPR) at UCLA. His research focuses on demography, stratification and inequality in historical China and in comparative perspective. With other members of the Lee-Campbell group, he studies official, educational, and professional elites in China from the middle of the 18th century to the present. He also leads the study of the Qing civil service from the middle of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century by construction and analysis of a database of office holders called the China Government Employee Database-Qing (CGED-Q). He is involved in two other major projects with the Lee-Campbell Group that involve the creation and analysis of large, longitudinal, individual-level databases from archival records: a study of the social origins and careers of university students, professionals, and other elites in the first half of the twentieth century and a study of rural society in mainland China from 1949 to the mid-1960s using village-level microdata. His papers have appeared in such journals as American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Demography, Population Studies, and Demographic Research. I was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2004 and a Changjiang Scholar at Central China Normal University from 2017 to 2020. For 2022-23, I will be a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

This event is sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Registration:

  • To attend this event in-person, please register HERE. *Please note that non-CUID holders need to show proof of their primary series and one booster dose of COVID-19 vaccines.
  • To attend this event online, please register HERE.

Contact Information

Julie Kwan