Lineage genealogies as a new source for researching the occupational structure of twentieth-century China: Tradition (partially) transformed

The tradition of compiling <i>jiapu</i> (Chinese lineage genealogies) was revived in the 1980s, and around 2% of the new generation of <i>jiapu</i> began to document male and female occupations comprehensively. These transformed new <i>jiapu</i> allow for quantitative estimation of the occupational structure of twentieth-century China, for which arguably reliable census data are only available from 1982 onwards. This study created, from scratch, the Yangtze <i>Jiapu</i> Dataset comprising 210,383 occupational observations. This paper outlines the methodologies for estimating occupational structure with the <i>jiapu</i> data. The <i>jiapu</i> data shed new light on existing estimates for the late nineteenth century and 1933, as well as the occupational statistics in the 1980s and 1990s.