Abstract

"How the Civil Wars Won? The Persistent Effects of Ming-Qing Social Conflicts"

Beining LIU, The University of Hong Kong (201937007@uibe.edu.cn)

We demonstrate that pre-modern social conflicts, particularly peasant uprisings, can contribute to explaining the development patterns of human capital investment in contemporary China. We document a strong positive correlation between the incidence of peasant uprisings during the Ming-Qing period and current local human capital investment. By employing solar eclipses as an exogenous variation to instrument historical social conflicts, we establish that this relationship is causal. Combining contemporary survey data at the individual and family levels, we find that prefectures with more frequent social conflicts tend to exhibit stronger public cohesion and a richer educational tradition, leading individuals and families to have higher demand for education.