血浓于水:精英亲缘网络与古代中国的国家建设

Blood Is Thicker Than Water:Elite Kinship Networks and State Building in Imperial China

长期以来,社会科学研究认为以亲缘为基础的制度会阻碍国家建设。文章指出,当精英网络在地理上遍布全国时,亲缘网络就能跨越地区间的差异,将利己的精英团结起来建设一个强国家,这是因为国家能在广阔的领土上提供保护与正义的规模经济。对此,文章以北宋熙丰变法期间官员对变法的偏好为例进行了讨论。文章利用官员的墓志铭建构了他们个人的亲缘网络,并从档案中搜集了有关他们政治态度的数据。在控制了官员个体、家庭与地理特征后,统计分析表明,官员亲缘网络在地理分布上的跨度越大,官员就越倾向支持变法。文章的发现强调了精英的社会结构在促进国家建设方面发挥的重要作用,有助于我们理解古代中国的国家建设,对以往欧洲中心主义文献中未充分研究的对象也提供了有益的补充。

A long tradition in social sciences scholarship has established that kinship-based institutions undermine state building. This paper argues that kinship networks, when geographically dispersed, cross-cut local cleavages and align the incentives of self-interested elites in favor of building a strong state, which generates scale economies in providing protection and justice throughout a large territory. This paper evaluates this argument by examining elite preferences related to a state-building reform in 11th century China. This paper maps politicians’ kinship networks using their tomb epitaphs and collect data on their political allegiances from archival materials. Statistical analysis demonstrates that a politician’s support for state building increases with the geographic size of his kinship network, controlling for a number of individual, family, and regional characteristics. Findings of this paper highlight the importance of the elite social structure in facilitating state development and help understand state building in China—a useful, yet understudied, counterpoint to the Euro-centric literature.