The Qing dynasty office purchase system (juanna), which allowed individuals to pay for appointments in the government, was regarded in traditional Chinese historiography as an inherently corrupt and anti-meritocratic practice. It enabled participants to become civil and military officials while avoiding the competitive government-run examination systems.
Lawrence Zhang's groundbreaking study of a broad selection of new archival and other printed evidence-including a list of over 10,900 purchasers of offices from 1798 and narratives of purchase-contradicts this widely held assessment and investigates how observers and critics of the system, past and present, have informed this questionable negative view. The author argues that, rather than seeing office purchase as a last resort for those who failed to obtain official appointments via other means, it was a preferred method for wealthy and well-connected individuals to leverage their social capital to the fullest extent. Office purchase was thus not only a useful device that raised funds for the state, but also a political tool that, through literal investments in their positions and their potential to secure status and power, tied the interests of official elites ever more closely to those of the state.
The Qing dynasty office purchase system (juanna), which allowed individuals to pay for appointments in the government, was regarded in traditional Chinese historiography as an inherently corrupt and anti-meritocratic practice. It enabled participants to become civil and military officials while avoiding the competitive government-run examination systems.
Lawrence Zhang's groundbreaking study of a broad selection of new archival and other printed evidence-including a list of over 10,900 purchasers of offices from 1798 and narratives of purchase-contradicts this widely held assessment and investigates how observers and critics of the system, past and present, have informed this questionable negative view. The author argues that, rather than seeing office purchase as a last resort for those who failed to obtain official appointments via other means, it was a preferred method for wealthy and well-connected individuals to leverage their social capital to the fullest extent. Office purchase was thus not only a useful device that raised funds for the state, but also a political tool that, through literal investments in their positions and their potential to secure status and power, tied the interests of official elites ever more closely to those of the state.
Lawrence Zhang is Associate Professor in the Division of Humanities, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Through his careful and comprehensive analysis of a diverse array
of sources, Zhang demonstrates that office and degree purchase
played an important but until recently mostly unappreciated role in
the appointment and selection of officials during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries…This is an important study, with
implications for our understanding of Qing officialdom and
society.
*International Journal of Asian Studies*
With exacting research and sweeping vision, Lawrence Zhang has
offered the most sophisticated study yet written of how the Qing
state and Chinese society negotiated the path to office. By showing
that the examination system can only be understood in relation to
office purchase, Power for a Price becomes one of those rare books
that genuinely transforms our understanding of late imperial
China.
*Matthew W. Mosca*
Lawrence Zhang's book is the most important study of Qing-dynasty
official recruitment and elite formation to appear within the last
twenty years. Zhang demonstrates that, as part of the strategic
portfolio of many of the era's most successful officials and
lineages, the purchase of degrees, offices, and shortcuts to
appointment complemented Confucian education and examination
success. Far from being the stigmatized last resort of exam
failures in the desperate last decades of the dynasty, direct
purchase of degrees and offices in fact constituted a regular,
approved practice right through the Qing, providing a steady source
of revenue (not unlike the sale of bonds) that enabled the imperial
state to tap private wealth by promising repayment through future
appointment. Far from being a betrayal of social mobility, the
relatively low price of the lower degrees and offices made purchase
a far more realistic route to upward mobility than examination
alone, which tended to reinforce and reproduce elite status. This
book will be required reading for all historians of China.
*Matthew Sommer*
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