Power for a Price

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