Minority bureaucrats' networks and career progression: evidence from the Chinese maritime customs service

Yan Hu and Stephan Maurer

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Do minorities benefit from social networks? In this paper, we study this question using the historical example of China's first modern bureaucratic organization, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Drawing on newly digitized personnel records from 1876-1911, we first show that the Chinese clerks employed by the service were predominantly Cantonese. Using the plausibly exogenous transfers of clerks across stations, we then estimate that a non-Cantonese (minority) clerk benefited significantly from meeting at least one colleague from his same province and dialect. Such connections led to faster promotion and a 5.6% salary increase, with even stronger effects when meeting a clerk who was either senior or of high quality.

Keywords: Chinese maritime customs service; social connections; wages; promotion; minorities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-12-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2138.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2138

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().