The Literary Inquisition: The Persecution of Intellectuals and Human Capital Accumulation in China

Abstract

Imperial China used an empire-wide system of examinations to select civil servants. Using a semiparametric matching-based difference-in-differences estimator, we show that the persecution of scholar-officials led to a decline in the number of examinees at the provincial and prefectural level. To explore the long-run impact of literary inquisitions we employ a model to show that persecutions could reduce the provision of basic education and have a lasting effect on human capital accumulation. Using the 1982 census we find that literary inquisitions reduced literacy by between 2.25 and 4 percentage points at a prefectural level in the early 20th century. This corresponds to a 69% increase in the probability of an individual being illiterate. Prefectures affected by the literary inquisition had a higher proportion of workers in agriculture until the 1990s.

Plague, Politics, and Pogroms: The Black Death, the Rule of Law, and the Persecution of Jews in the Holy Roman Empire

“…Pascali (2016) studies the role played by Jewish moneylenders in medieval and renaissance Italy. Other research has explored the long-run consequences of the Spanish inquisition (Vidal-Robert, 2014) and the persecution of individuals for speech crimes in Qing dynasty China (Koyama and Xue, 2015).…”

The long-run effects of religious persecution: Evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

“…This matters because education is a key determinant of economic performance (22); it can be a more reliable predictor than geography or institutions for income levels, both across countries and within them. Its positive effects are well-documented historically: For example, Protestant regions of Prussia in the nineteenth century were richer because literacy rates there were higher (57), areas of South America where the Jesuits-a pro-education order-established missions continue to have higher literacy and output today (58), and the political persecution of intellectuals arguably reduced human capital formation in China (59).…”

Inter-lingual Homophony: Neige as a Demonstrative/Filler in Mandarin Chinese

“…As Manchu rulers became increasingly attuned to subtleties of Chinese words that potentially conveyed Ming loyalism and insurgency, repressive campaigns in the form of literary inquisitions were initiated by the Shunzhi Emperor (1644-1661) and adopted by subsequent emperors (Zelin 2002;Chiem 2017). Furthermore, during the High Qing era (1660-1794), scholar-officials who were candidates of a meritocratic empire-wide examination system called 科举 keju also fell prey to massive purges in the form of literary inquisitions, which sabotaged the perceived benefits of studying for the examination system (Wong 2012;Koyama & Xue 2015). Despite being regarded as the pinnacle of the Qing dynasty, the eventful Qianlong reign (1736-1795) is simultaneously construed as a debased, stagnant era that still impinges upon modern China, in that it was one of the most stringent periods in terms of imposing cultural Studia Orientalia Electronica 9(1) (2021): 138-153 regulations (Woodside 2002;Rawski 2004;Liu 2006: 169;Wang 2014: 155).…”