American Political Science Review
Is Blood Thicker Than Water(-and-Earth)? Partisanship Geography in Imperial China and the Limits of Quantitative History
2026-07-29
Using Wang Anshi’s Reform as a case study, Yuhua Wang’s “Blood is Thicker Than Water” ( American Political Science Review , 2022) argues that geographically dispersed kinship networks incentivize political elites to support the building of a strong state, whereas geographically concentrated kinship networks undermine state building. In this article, I improve the sample with the help of additional historical records and show that the reported correlation fails to replicate when either the control issue or the outlier issue is considered. I then propose two alternative hypotheses on the role of kinship network dispersal in Wang Anshi’s Reform, based on two common explanations of its partisanship geography in Chinese historical scholarship, that is, status competition and policy adaptiveness. After examining those hypotheses respectively, I reflect on the limits of quantitative history that this case illustrates.