In this paper, I examine the determinants of interethnic marriage in Shuangcheng County in northeast China from 1866 to 1913. Shuangcheng's inhabitants were a mixture of Han, Manchu, Mongol, Xibo, and other ethnicities who belong to the Eight Banners Garrison. Our data consists of roughly 1.3 million observations of 107,890 individuals in the China Multigenerational Panel Dataset-Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC), including for each household, their ethnicity, along with other key social, economic and demographic characteristics. Using registered ethnicity as well as surnames as markers of ethnicity, we show that even though during the Qing dynasty non-Han bannermen were superior to Han bannermen in terms of social and political status, under the Eight Banners Garrison System in Shuangcheng, the...[ Read more ]

In this paper, I examine the determinants of interethnic marriage in Shuangcheng County in northeast China from 1866 to 1913. Shuangcheng's inhabitants were a mixture of Han, Manchu, Mongol, Xibo, and other ethnicities who belong to the Eight Banners Garrison. Our data consists of roughly 1.3 million observations of 107,890 individuals in the China Multigenerational Panel Dataset-Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC), including for each household, their ethnicity, along with other key social, economic and demographic characteristics. Using registered ethnicity as well as surnames as markers of ethnicity, we show that even though during the Qing dynasty non-Han bannermen were superior to Han bannermen in terms of social and political status, under the Eight Banners Garrison System in Shuangcheng, they did intermarry in larger numbers. Our results suggest intermarriage was more prevalent than suggested by regulations or folklore. We show that the chances of intermarriage were affected by village and family context and individual characteristics. Local marriage market composition was important: males who lived in a village with higher percentage of residents of the same ethnicity were less likely to intermarry. Meanwhile, among the Han, having a non-Han given name also increases the chances of marrying a non-­Han wife. Tendencies to intermarry also ran in families: for non-Han men, the chance of marrying a Han wife was greatly increased when their mother had a Han surname. We also found a clear time trend through our analysis that intermarriage between Han and non-Han people became more common after 1900. Results on effects of socioeconomic status are largely inconclusive, except that there is some suggestion that high status Manchu males were less likely to intermarry.