Cultural sustainability through kinship networks: A quantitative analysis of marriage strategies in Qing China’s literary lineages (1644–1911)

This study examines how marriage-network position was associated with recorded literary visibility among Qing literary families. Using Xu Yanping’s Genealogical Networks of Literary Lineages in the Qing Dynasty (2010), we reconstructed a reproducible surname–location-level marriage network from an OCR-based machine-readable corpus. After OCR correction, node normalization, and removal of self-loops, the final analytical dataset contained 5,197 parseable marriage records, 657 focal literary-family nodes, 2,704 total family nodes including non-focal marriage partners, and 3,541 distinct weighted family-pair edges. We calculated weighted degree, unweighted degree, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, community structure, and global network indicators. To avoid overclaiming from incomplete examination-degree information in the OCR corpus, we used a conservative Literary Capital Proxy (LCP) based on observable literary-output clues and confirmed female-writer clues. Regression models with province-clustered robust standard errors show that unweighted degree, measured as the number of distinct marital partner families, is positively associated with LCP after controlling for record exposure and regional differences. Weighted degree shows a weaker and less consistent association. Betweenness centrality is negatively associated with LCP in the exposure-adjusted models, while eigenvector centrality is not statistically significant. These findings suggest that the breadth of direct marital connections was more consistently related to recorded literary visibility than repeated marriage volume, brokerage position, or connection to already central families. The results should be interpreted as associational rather than causal, because marriage ties, literary visibility, wealth, officeholding, education, regional culture, and archival survival may have shaped one another. The study contributes a transparent network-based framework for examining kinship, marriage, and cultural transmission in Qing China.