The Impact of Crises on the Careers of County Magistrates in Qing China, 1830–1912

We investigate one dimension of state capacity in the late Qing Dynasty period: enforcement of regulations for the evaluation of officials. For this, we examine how natural disasters and harvest outcomes influenced the careers of county magistrates between 1820 and 1911. County magistrates were responsible for reporting disasters and dealing with their aftermath. Their response was assessed during their performance evaluations. The clearest rules were for locust infestations: as their occurrence was considered prima facie evidence of negligence and was supposed to result in termination. We show that an infestation increased the chances that an official would cease service. Among disasters with more complex origins and where blame was harder to ascribe, including floods, droughts, epidemics, and famine, only famine increased the risk of ending careers. We conclude that the state enforced these personnel regulations before 1880, but not afterward. Effects of infestation and famine did not vary by whether an official had an examination degree or by the rated difficulty of the county. No systematic time trends in effects of famine or infestation were apparent. Our analysis makes use of career histories of officials in the China Government Employee Database-Qing (CGED-Q) Jinshenlu (JSL) dataset, linked to records of disasters and harvests transcribed from a published compilation.