Job Market Paper
The Rise of the Chinese Clan. (With James Kung, UoM). [SSRN][Latest Revision]
Presentation: APEBH 2026 (Scheduled), Nankai, Tsinghua-PKU Economic History Workshop, CESA 2025, Global GLO-JOPE Conference 2025, EHA 2025, PacDev 2025, SYSU, Fudan, XMU, UoM, UWA, ANU, ZJU
Abstract: For centuries the Chinese clan functioned as a socio-cultural and economic organization. Yet, its evolution over time remains underexplored. By leveraging a historical natural experiment over a newly digitized dataset covering 800 years (c. 1136–1935), we find that the Ritual Reform of 1536 contributed to 31 % of the growth in ancestral halls - the hallmark of clans. By allowing commoners to worship their first ancestor, the reform effectively expanded clan size and increased the demand for ancestral halls construction. Historically, the more clannish counties experienced higher population growth, more developed markets, and provided more public goods.
Publications
The Shadow Cost of State Violence: Evidence from Bureaucratic Purges in China.
[Accepted at Comparative Political Studies]
Epidemics and Conflicts: Lessons from Imperial China.
(With Zheng Su, SJTU and Xun Cao, PSU). [PDF]
[Accepted at International Studies Quarterly]
A Social History of Gift Exchange in S Village: 1949–1978.
(Research before Ph.D)
2018, In Huilin Lu et, al. (Eds.), Selected Outstanding Sociological Master’s Theses from Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Renmin University (2017) (pp. 311–369), Beijing: China Development Press.