New Books In East Asian Studies

The Qing dynasty's office purchase system (juanna) allowed men to legally and openly pay for appointments in the civil service — enabling them to skip the much-lauded civil service examination entirely. Thoroughly forgotten by historians and often dismissed as "corruption," Lawrence Zhang's meticulous book, Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), unpacks this system. Through a thorough analysis of archival and other print sources — including personnel files, lists of buyers, and late Qing novels — Zhang shows that office purchase was widespread, common, and an important part of the state's recruitment strategy.   By upending the "ladder of success" narrative of the Qing, Zhang's book challenges the characterization of the Qing as a meritocracy and calls into question how we (and historians) today think of merit. As he writes in the book: "The link between wealth and power has always been one of the most important relationships in any organ