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Throughout Chinese history, heredity and ability inevitably overlap. On the one hand, the Chinese state rewarded achievement with hereditary rights and privileges. On the other hand, Chinese parents rewarded what ability their children had, through a system of familial education and parental, especially maternal, dedication (Hsiung 1994). As a result, in late imperial China, as in contemporary China, nurture could supply what nature lacked. Privileged children consequently often did far better than other children their age. This was especially true in rural Liaoning, where position in the traditional household hierarchy was dictated largely by heredity. Bannermen followed a life course from one family relationship to another in a fixed progression determined at the time of their birth by their parentage and their birth order. The timing of relationship transitions depended on two events over which individuals had virtually no control: when household heads died, and when households divided. In consequence, within the household system there was little opportunity for social mobility. In contrast, there was considerable mobility outside the household in the banner hierarchies of occupation and organization. According to the rules and regulations of the banner system, bannermen could earn position in the occupational and organizational hierarchies through their ability, regardless of their position in the household hierarchy. Under ideal circumstances, talented men fated by the circumstances of their birth to a life at the bottom of the household hierarchy could still rise in social mobility. In rural Liaoning, the Eight Banners, in other words, could have been the rural equivalent of the elite “ladder of success” (Ho 1959). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Daoyi, all together 1,400 men rose in the banner hierarchy: 400 in the occupational hierarchy and 1000 in the organizational hierarchy. These men in theory were the elite of rural banner society. They were assumed to be the most capable. They were stipulated to be the best paid. And they were supposed to be the most powerful. If they were as privileged in fact as they were in theory, this should be apparent in their demographic behavior. We have already seen in Chapter 7 how marriage, fertility, and even mortality were related to position in the domestic hierarchy. In this chapter we explore how they were also related to position in the banner hierarchies. We divide our chapter into two sections, each with its own methodology. In section I, we follow the arithmetic methodology used in Chapter 7 to analyze the distribution of privilege within the household, calculating measures of demographic performance—the proportion married, and the number and sex ratio of children “born”—according to the various categories of banner service. In section II, we introduce logistic regression to compare the effects of position in the banner and household hierarchies on demographic behavior and determine their relative importance. In so doing, we differentiate not only the degree of demographic privilege enjoyed by the household and banner hierarchies over ordinary men, but also the degree of privilege within these hierarchies. Thus we see whether artisans were above soldiers, and whether civil officials were on equal footing with military officials. While we have a clear understanding of the normative ordering of position within the household, our knowledge of the banner hierarchy is much less complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Daoyi, the most important organization above the level of the household was the Eight Banner system, in particular its occupational and organizational hierarchies. These overlapping hierarchies were the principal link between individuals and households on the one hand and the state on the other. The occupational hierarchy supplied the state with skilled manpower. The organizational hierarchy provided the local civil, fiscal, judicial, and military leadership, and in fact was the lowest layer of formal government administration in rural Liaoning. The Eight Banner registers provide detailed information on the position of individuals within these two hierarchies, recording the obligations, occupations, and offices of every adult male every three years. These data are an important source not only for the study of the structure of rural social hierarchy, but also for the study of social mobility within that hierarchy. Furthermore, when combined with our knowledge of household relationships and household structure from previous chapters, they enable us to analyze the interactions between the occupational, organizational, and household hierarchies in our population. In this chapter we describe both Eight Banner hierarchies. We do this because no similar study yet exists and because our understanding of rural banner society is consequently extremely rudimentary. In section I, we focus on the age pattern of entry to and exit from banner service, and the relationship with such life course events as marriage and headship. In sections II and III, we describe the occupational and organizational hierarchies. Finally in section IV, we provide some measures of career mobility within and between these two overlapping hierarchies. Banner service The basic unit of the Eight Banner occupational hierarchy in Daoyi was the adult male, or ding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]