Sein and Isaac Souede Professorship in Economic History

For more than 1,300 years, China's imperial civil service examination was the world's most enduring system of elite recruitment. When the Qing court abolished it in 1905, a pillar of imperial order came down. That rupture is one of several turning points through which scholars now reconstruct how China became the country it is: why some institutions held a vast empire together, while others sowed revolution, and how elite networks, religion, climate, and even earthquakes reshaped the fate of the state.

Professor Ying Bai is a professor in the Faculty of Business and Economics at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). Before joining HKU, he taught at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he was Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the CUHK–UCSD Joint Laboratory on Chinese Economy. He uses modern statistical methods and novel datasets to study how institutions, culture, and conflict have shaped development.

His research has shown that the abolition of the civil service exam destabilised regions that had long depended on it for social mobility, while also releasing talent into modern enterprise and overseas study. Over a thousand years of Chinese history, gaining or losing the status of provincial capital transformed a region's economic geography. In a study of the Taiping Rebellion—the deadliest civil war in modern history—he and his co-authors traced how Zeng Guofan's elite networks mobilised armies and then rewired national power.

Culture and belief run through the same agenda. Protestant missionaries, he has shown, raised urbanisation and industrialisation in nineteenth-century China mainly by founding schools and hospitals, not by converting the population. Climate shocks helped sustain two millennia of conflict between the Han Chinese and nomadic peoples. Even minor earthquakes, read as signs that the Mandate of Heaven had weakened, could trigger unrest—evidence that legitimacy, not only material damage, can decide political stability.

These studies speak to a larger puzzle: why China and the West followed such different paths into the modern world. His current projects continue this agenda, with a particular focus on the costs of political hierarchy and on censorship in late imperial China.

Professor Bai's research has appeared in Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, the International Economic Review, and the Journal of the European Economic Association. His papers are taught at Harvard, MIT, and other leading universities. He received the 2021 Masahiko Aoki Award, the 2018 Distinguished CESifo Research Affiliate Award, and the CUHK Young Researcher Award. He serves as associate editor of the China Economic Review and the Journal of Comparative Economics.

He received his B.A. from Shandong University, his M.A. from Peking University, and his Ph.D. from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.