In Chinese history, the gentry has a specific meaning and refers to the shen-shi or the class of landowners which had passed the bureaucratic examinations in the Ming and Qing dynasty.
In recent years, some historians have questioned the usefullness of gentry as a description and have pointed out that many landowners did not have bureaucratic degrees and that many with degrees were not wealthy or powerful.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump