Ideology and Human Capital: How Imperial China Was Democratized

Abstract: By employing the number of Chinese studying in Japan to proxy for the effect of exposure to a democratic-cum-nationalist ideology in the context of the 1911 Chinese Revolution, we find that an additional overseas student in a county can significantly account for higher participation in democratic parties (0.234-0.239), greater representation in the provincial assembly (0.328-0.437), and more frequent upheavals (0.238-0.368) in that county. But the effects of ideology are heterogeneous, patterned systematically upon academic specialization and level of educational attainment. In particular, upheavals were distinctly more frequent in counties where the overseas students predominantly majored in arts and social sciences.