Databases for the Study of Educational, Professional, and Political Elites in the Republican China (1911-1949)

James Z. Lee, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Bamboo Ren, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

To better understand the training and employment of educational, professional, and political elites in Republican China, we have created three categories of individual level datasets for the period from 1900 to 1950 including the China University Student Datasets with information for some 400,000 tertiary students, the China Professional Occupation Datasets with information for some 55,000 practicing professionals, and the China Government Employee Datasets with information for some 100,000 late Qing, Beiyang, and Guomindang government employees. In our presentation we discuss issues related to the creation, linkage, and cleaning of these various datasets including tracing individuals from one dataset to another. We conclude with an example of an application, where we use these data to show that in the first half of the 20th century, engineers and engineering students were the product of domestic Chinese state ‘public’ policies governing their education and employment, while (Western) medical doctors and medical students were the product of comparatively ‘private’ international to some extent semi-colonial processes of medical training and employment, producing different institutional organization, different patterns of data coverage, and different histories of these two professions.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 71. Databases for the Quantitative History of China