by Yong Zhao
Theoretically the examination was open to all male residents, regardless of family background, age, or years of studying, which meant that every individual had a shot at becoming a member of the ruling elite and thus acquiring wealth, social status, and power. This is why keju has been viewed as such an effective measure for social mobility in an otherwise hierarchical, dictatorial society. From the perspective of the rulers, keju was a tool to identify and recruit the most capable and virtuous individuals into government instead of relying on members of the hereditary noble class, which could become weak and corrupt as time went on.
In terms of its contribution to China and the world, the keju system is said to be the fifth great invention of China, along with gunpowder, the compass, paper, and movable type. As an essential element of the Chinese political system for more than a thousand years, the keju system had an impact on Chinese society and culture that cannot be overstated. Because of its apparent fairness, objectivity, and openness, keju gave birth to the idea of meritocracy, a core value in China and other Eastern Asian countries such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. These countries copied the keju system shortly after its invention in China. Keju also shaped East Asia's most fundamental, enduring educational values. So it is both ironic and understandable that Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Chinese republic, praised keju as the world's best education system and wanted to make sure that its tradition continued—even as he devoted his life to ending imperial rule.
In his proposed Five-Power Constitution, Sun added examination to the traditional legislative, judicial, and executive powers of government as a way to fix the problems of the American-style, three-power democracy. The American democracy, Sun observed, “often makes stupid mistakes,” one of them the inability to elect the most competent leader. In 1921, Sun told the story of a doctor who lost an election to a rickshaw driver because the rickshaw driver was able to communicate with the voters, while the doctor was too knowledgeable to be understood. “Of the two candidates, the doctor certainly is more knowledgeable than the driver but he lost. This is the consequence of a system of popular election without examination.”10 Sun's Five-Power Constitution was successfully implemented by the Republic of China, which now includes executive, legislative, judicial, examination, and control branches of government (or yuan).
“Indeed, with the Chinese system of meritocracy in place, it is inconceivable that people as weak and incompetent as George W. Bush or Yoshihiko Noda of Japan could ever get to the top leadership position,” wrote Zhang Weiwei, a professor at China's Fudan University, in a 2012 op-ed in the New York Times, affirming Sun's view almost a century later. Commenting on the coincidence of the US presidential election with the power transition that takes place in the Chinese Communist Party every ten years, Zhang noted that the Chinese meritocracy just might beat America's popular elections:
Meritocratic governance is deeply-rooted in China's Confucian political tradition, which among other things allowed the country to develop and sustain for well over a millennium the Keju system, the world's first public exam process for selecting officials. China's political and institutional innovations so far have produced a system that has in many ways combined the best option of selecting well-tested leaders and the least bad option of ensuring the exit of bad leaders.11
The Irony of Great Inventions
Voltaire and his fellow Sinophiles would have been startled by the speed of Europe's shift from Sinophilia to Sinophobia. They'd be even more startled to find that their idolized polity not only wasn't emulated by European nations, but instead was shattered by European powers merely a century later. China's great inventions did not stop the Western assault; instead, the Western powers turned those inventions against China. They successfully weakened the Chinese Confucian tradition by spreading Christianity, using copies of the Bible printed, thanks to China, on paper with movable-type technology. They brought powerful warships all the way from Europe to China's doorstep, using the compass the Chinese invented. They delivered many humiliating defeats and garnered tremendous wealth from China using the great Chinese invention of gunpowder.
The fifth great invention, keju, did not help China either. The great Confucian tradition and the rational and intelligent scholar-officials failed to defend the great civilization against “the Western barbarians.” In fact, the keju system has been held responsible for the decline of the Chinese empire.
When the European Jesuit missionaries sent home stories about the glorious Chinese emperor and inspired Sinomania in Europe, China had reached its peak in terms of economy and territory. For the previous millennium, China had been by far the most advanced and most prosperous country in the world. Its technological innovations far outpaced any other nation's until the Industrial Revolution. In the series Science and Civilisation in China, Cambridge University's Sinologist Joseph Needham and his collaborators have shown that China had many more than four great inventions. Since 1954, Cambridge University Press has published twenty-four books in this series.12
Yet all of these great inventions failed to turn China into a modern technological and scientific nation. Unlike modern technological advances, many of China's inventions were never improved to the level necessary to transform society. For example, the Chinese used their compass mainly to help find building locations and burial sites with good fengshui—not to navigate the oceans and expand across the globe as the West did. Gunpowder stopped at a level good enough for fireworks, but not for the modern weaponry that gave the West its military might.
Justin Yifu Lin, a former vice president of the World Bank and well-known professor of economics at Peking University, reviewed the literature about premodern China and concluded: “Most scholars believe that, as early as in the early period of Ming Dynasty (14th century), China had acquired all the major elements that were essential for the British industrial revolution in the 18th century.” In other words, China was almost ready for the Industrial Revolution four hundred years before Great Britain was. “However, industrial revolution occurred in Britain instead of China and Chinese economy was quickly overtaken and lagged behind by western countries,” writes Lin. “Why did the industrial revolution not originate from China, the place that first acquired all the major conditions?” Lin asks the question first posed by Max Weber, and Joseph Needham had puzzled over the same questions: “Why had China been so far in advance of other civilizations” and “Why is not China now ahead of the rest of world?”13
There's no doubt that keju was partly responsible for China's earlier great achievements. According to Lin, China was able to achieve so many technological and scientific innovations because of the size of its population. Rudimentary technological innovations can be made by accident. The probability of such accidents is the same for all societies, and thus the more people in a society, the higher the probability is of accidental inventions. “Before the industrial revolution in the 18th century, technological innovations were mainly realized through accidental discoveries in production process by craftsmen and peasants,” writes Lin. “Because China had a large population, it had a large amount of craftsmen and peasants.”14
People did, however, need a relatively stable society in order to engage in activities that might lead to discovery. They also needed time and certain resources. Keju helped build a unified nation with a large population, so it could have a large pool of accidental discoveries. Keju also provided relative stability and economic prosperity, so people could engage in productive activities pregnant with possibilities of accidental invention.
But keju was also the reason for China's failure to start the Industrial Revolution. After methodically refuting a number of existing hypotheses that attribute the lack of scientific revolution in China to economic reasons (land-people ratio or a repressive political environment), Lin found keju, the imperial exam system, to be the real reason:
Because of this examination system, curious geniuses were diverted from learning mathematics and conducting controllabl
e experiments. Because of this system, the geniuses could not accumulate crucial human capital that was essential for the scientific revolution. As a result, the discoveries of natural phenomena could only be based on sporadic observations, and could not be upgraded into modern science, which was built upon mathematics and controlled experiments.15
A Clever Ploy of Social Control
The diversion of “curious geniuses” from mathematics and scientific experiment was a design feature of the imperial exam system. The entire population was diverted from pursuing anything that might challenge the Confucian orthodoxy and, hence, the imperial order. By design, the system rewarded obedience, encouraged compliance, and fostered homogeneous thinking.
As a system formally initiated by an emperor who seized the throne from his own boss, keju was first and foremost developed to prevent anyone else from repeating the emperor's coup. Yang Jian, Emperor Wen of the Sui dynasty (AD 581–618), served the Northern Zhou (AD 557–581) court as prime minister and a military general. Through bloody murders and military threat, Yang Jian forced the North Zhou emperor to abdicate the throne. Yang then accepted the position of emperor, “in response to people's wishes,” in AD 581. Numerous victorious military campaigns later, he had unified China, joining a land that had been divided into warring kingdoms for more than three centuries.
The emperor's biggest concern was keeping China unified under his family's rule. Learning from his own example, he realized he needed a way to weaken the hereditary power of certain families and tribes. Thus, he needed to find people who could help govern the country without relying on the existing ruling class. He also needed a way to prevent capable talents from rising against the empire and to reinforce among his subjects the need to obey the rightful rule of the Son of Heaven.
We can't know how much Emperor Wen planned and strategized, but the establishment of keju accomplished every one of his goals. Prior to the Sui dynasty, China's rulers had relied on recommendation and inspection to appoint government officials. In the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), most positions of the bureaucracy were filled with individuals recommended by prominent aristocrats and local officials. Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty did implement a partial exam system in which the candidates for the exam were based on recommendations from local officials but the final selection was based on the results of the exam. However, connections and recommendations from the existing elites weighed much more heavily than the exam results. The next dynasties implemented the nine rank system, in which imperial officials were put in place to assess candidates nominated by local officials. Family lines were explicitly used as a criterion for selection, and connections to existing officials were crucial.
To minimize the influence of hereditary power, Emperor Wen improved on the practices of Emperor Wu. First, the recommendation prerequisite was removed so everyone was eligible to take the exam. Second, selection was based strictly on performance in the exam. To make the process even more resistant to corruption and the influence of the powerful, future emperors began to hide the names of the candidates from the examiners. These changes not only reduced the influence of hereditary power but also enlarged the candidate pool, making it easier for the emperors to find the most talented people.
More important, keju presented itself as an objective, transparent, and universally accessible system for social mobility. It gave hope to the masses. Regardless of a man's family lineage and economic conditions, he could achieve power, wealth, and social status as long as he worked hard and succeeded at the exams. In imperial China, government positions were held in the highest esteem. They stood at the top of the professional hierarchy, which ranked craftsmen and merchants at the bottom. Even the richest merchants wanted their sons to gain recognition and raise the family profile through the imperial exam. Keju became the most attractive option for anyone with the slightest ambition—and it left no incentive to pursue anything else.
The keju exams were intensely competitive, and the success rate was quite low. It could take years of hard work to pass even the first level, and many never did. Still, the rewards were so attractive that the arduous journey rarely deterred anyone from trying. “For ten years no one cares about you when you are studying in a cold room,” the Chinese tell their young people, “but the entire world will know you as soon as you succeed.” That saying, which sums up the hardship and reward of education, originated in the keju era.
The irresistible appeal of keju gave the emperor a powerful and cost-effective tool of social control. Through the exams, he could steer people's thinking because they all devoted their resources to studying his required material: the Confucian texts, which advocate obedience and respect for order and harmony. For thirteen hundred years, Chinese emperors were delivered a homogeneous and obedient citizenry in three ways. First, through the exams, they recruited individuals who demonstrated the greatest commitment to Confucian thinking to help defend the status quo and perpetuate the regime. These fortunate scholar-officials became not only devout defenders but also capable promoters of imperial rule. Skilled writers and speakers of Confucian thinking, they were living examples of the benefits of studying for the exam. Second, even those who failed at the exams became defenders and promoters, because often they were hired as teachers to help prepare future generations for the exams. Third, after decades of studying the Confucian texts, even if a man did not become a believer, he would have little time, energy, and resources left to develop the skills, knowledge, and independent ideas needed for a rebellion.
The outcomes of keju were exactly what the emperors wished. “All heroes under the sun have fallen into my trap,” Emperor Taizong exclaimed with gleeful pride as he watched new successful candidates of keju file into his court. Taizong, was the grandson of Emperor Wen. He had encouraged his father to rise against Sui and helped him established the Tang dynasty in AD 618. Taizong became the second emperor of Tang after killing his brother, the crown prince designated to succeed his father as emperor. He then further improved keju and made it a regular and permanent practice in his court. In the Sui dynasty's thirty-eight years of rule, keju was offered only four or five times and selected only twelve candidates in total. But Taizong offered keju annually, and he also presided over special exams to recruit other talents. However, these special exams, which could have given China a more diverse set of talents, were not continued after his rule. He has been credited with codifying keju for future emperors as a powerful method of recruiting talent and cultivating obedience. “Emperor Taizong had truly a long-term strategy, for it gave white hair to all heroes,” wrote the Tang dynasty poet Zhao Gu.
The obedience keju fostered was so attractive that even the non-Han emperors adopted the system after taking over the reign of China. The Mongols, for example, who defeated the Song dynasty in the thirteenth century, eventually adopted keju. The Manchu rulers, after conquering China and establishing the Qing dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century, continued keju and made it the only way for the Han people to gain social mobility.
Change without Difference
Thanks to keju, Taizong and his successors enjoyed generations of citizens who were obedient, compliant, and skilled at literary work. They had similar thoughts, similar skills, and similar talents. As historians John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman observed in their book China: A New History:
Under the empire, men of letters had come to be almost universally examination candidates and therefore classicists and conservatives. Most of the great achievements of Chinese literature had come within this framework of acceptance of the social order and central authority. No monastic sanctuaries, no clash of sectarian faiths, no division between church and state were allowed, as in Europe, to spawn diversity.16
These men were excellent guardians of the existing order, and they helped maintain a unified nation. Their minds were steeped in Confucian philosophy, which forbade them to have any unorthodox thoughts. Their lack of knowledge and skills outside the narrowly defined domains of the imperial e
xam rendered them incapable of putting up a rebellion, even if the thought had occurred to them. “It takes forever for xiucai to launch a successful revolution” is a popular Chinese saying that captures the inadequacies of traditional intellectuals. Xiucai was one of the titles granted to successful candidates of the imperial exam, and it became a generic reference to educated people in China. This is why, in two thousand years, virtually none of the hundreds of regime changes was started or finished by scholar-officials or anyone else with the highest level of Chinese education.
The scholar-officials had finely trained memories, but they were not independent or critical thinkers, nor were they knowledgeable beyond the Confucian classics and certain forms of literary writing. Although they were excellent at perpetuating the past, they failed at inventing the future. In fact, they were a powerful force resisting the invention of a new future. This conservatism was fine for a closed society with an agrarian economy. In that system, peace, stability, and benevolent rulers were far more productive than revolutionary ideas and different perspectives. If the world had stopped in the seventeenth century, China would still be the most prosperous society and keju the most effective way to create and maintain such a society, just as those Jesuit missionaries and European philosophers had imagined.
But the Industrial Revolution changed everything, ushering in a new era in which change became the constant, innovation the norm, and diversity of talents the source of social development. In this new era, keju, which reinforced conservative thinking and homogeneity, changed from a blessing to a curse.