The Rise of the Chinese Meritocracy: The Transformation of Elite Culture in Tenth-Century China

FAIN: FEL-257285-18

Nicolas Tackett
University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)

Research, data analysis, and writing leading to publication of a book on the development of meritocracy in 10th-century China and development of associated open-access online databases.

This project explores the sudden appearance in the tenth century of a meritocratic culture that dramatically transformed Chinese elite society and constituted the ideological foundation of China's famous civil service exams. My first book used GIS, social network analysis, and a huge biographical database to explain the physical demise of China’s aristocracy. I now complement this sociopolitical study with a study that explains the accompanying cultural shift—from an “aristocratic” ethos to a “meritocratic” ethos—which I treat in large measure as a product of the rampant migration of the era. Using new digital tools, I will map out the primary routes of elite migration during the 10th c., and assess how migration correlated with a package of cultural changes (including burial culture, language dialect, as well as articulations in literary texts of new “meritocratic” ideals). By the end of the fellowship period, I plan to have completed a full draft of a new book manuscript.

Associated Products

“Violence and the 1 Percent: The Fall of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy in Comparison to the Fall of the French Nobility.” (Article)
Title: “Violence and the 1 Percent: The Fall of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy in Comparison to the Fall of the French Nobility.”
Author: Nicolas Tackett
Abstract: This article responds to Jonathan Dewald’s “Rethinking the 1 Percent” by examining the case of the “medieval Chinese aristocracy” during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). It proposes that we conceptualize an elite not as a social class with a static relationship to state power and the economic means of production, but rather as a network of families better positioned than any other group in society to overcome new challenges brought about by changing circumstances. From this perspective, one better understands how an elite can survive the demise of institutions that once protected it, the emergence of rival elites tapping into new sources of wealth, and even a revolutionary social movement. The demise of the medieval Chinese aristocracy—as was true of many elites in world history—came as a consequence not of gradual change but rather of catastrophic violence spanning two decades at the turn of the tenth century.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/124/3/933/5509658?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Primary URL Description: article abstract + subscribers' access to full article
Access Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Historical Review
Publisher: American Historical Association

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