Seminar Vol. 214
Title: The Origin and Consequences of the Commercial Revolution in Medieval China
Speaker: Ting Chen, Hong Kong Baptist University
Time: April 17th, 2020 13:30-15:00
About the speaker:
Ting Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the Hong Kong Baptist University. She also serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Business Analytics and the Digital Economy in the School of Business. Her main fields of interests lie in the Political Economy, Economic History, and Development Economics.
Abstract:
In the 10th century of Song China (c. 960-1268 AD) on the heels of a commercial revolution, the merchants appealed for their children to be permitted to take the civil exam—the route to officialdom in imperial China. Using a uniquely constructed data set, we show that the variation in commercial tax in 1077 and in the average number of market towns across the 1,185 Song counties has a significantly positive effect on both the number of jinshi holders and the share of these achievers who came from a non-aristocratic background—the two variables we employ to proxy for meritocracy. To cope with the growing demand for exam preparations, the merchants established many academies and printed many books—two strong indicators of the rise of human capital investment behind the emergence of meritocracy. To trace the origin of the commercial revolution, we confirm that an institutional reform that forced upon the emperor of Tang by a sudden military rebellion—the “Twice-a-year” Tax Reform around 780 AD—significantly spurred the commercial development in the areas where the Tang’s central government maintained tax control. We then use the boundary of these effectively taxed areas as a spatial RD design to identify the effects of commercialization on meritocracy. Our empirical analysis sheds light on why commercial revolution emerged so much earlier in medieval China, as well as how it turned Chinese political structure from aristocratic to meritocratic based without developing a representative government like in western Europe.
Interested in this webinar? Please contact Feiyan at feiyantang@jnu.edu.cn, or scan the QR code bellow to register by April 16th (12pm local time). The webinar will be held via Zoom.
