Gao Kao and China’s civil service exam trace their origin to, and are modelled on, an ancient Chinese institution, Keju, the imperial civil service exam established by the Sui Dynasty (581-618). It can be translated as ‘subject recommendation’. Toward the end of its reign, the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) abolished it in 1905 as part of its effort to reform and modernise the Chinese system. Until then, Keju had been the principal recruitment route for imperial bureaucracy. Keju reached its apex during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). All the prime ministers but one came through the Keju route and many of them were ranked at the very top in their exam cohort.
Keju was sheer memorisation. Testing was based primarily on the Confucian classics. And there was a lot to memorise. There were some 400,000 characters and phrases in the Confucian classics, according to Benjamin Elman’s book A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (2000). Preparation for the Keju began early. Boys aged as young as three to five began to practise their memorisation drills. After the immediate environs of their families, Keju was their first exposure to the world. Keju, which was open only to the male gender, was fiercely competitive. Using figures provided by Elman, during the Ming dynasty, 1 million regularly took the qualifying tests and, of these, eventually about 400 would make it to the final Jinshi round. Passing the first tier of Keju, known as the provincial exam, was a lot easier – working out to be 4 per cent on average during the Ming. Still, this was more cut-throat than getting into Harvard in most years.
The prestige of Keju was such that even an emperor coveted its bona fides. According to a legend, an emperor in the late Tang dynasty (618-907) hung on the wall of an imperial palace a wooden tablet proudly displaying his Keju degree – only it was fake. The emperor had it made for himself. This credentialism pervades officialdom today. Many Chinese government officials claim PhD degrees – earned or otherwise – on their résumés.
Much of the academic literature focuses on the meritocracy of Keju. The path-breaking book in this genre is Ping-ti Ho’s The Ladder of Success in Imperial China (1962). One of his observations is eye catching: more than half of those who obtained the Juren degree were first generation: ie, none of their ancestors had ever attained a Juren status. (Juren was, at the time, the first degree granted in the three-tiered hierarchy of Keju.) More recent literature demonstrates the political effects of Keju. In 1905, the Qing dynasty abolished Keju, dashing the aspirations of millions and sparking regional rebellions that eventually toppled China’s last imperial regime in 1911.
The political dimension of Keju goes far beyond its meritocracy and its connection to the 1911 republican revolution. For an institution that had such deep penetration, both cross-sectionally in society and across time in history, Keju was all encompassing, laying claims to the time, effort and cognitive investment of a significant swathe of the male Chinese population. It was a state institution designed to augment the state’s own power and capabilities. Directly, the state monopolised the very best human capital; indirectly, the state deprived society of access to talent and pre-empted organised religion, commerce and the intelligentsia. Keju anchored Chinese autocracy.
The impact of Keju is still felt today, not only in the form and practice of Gao Kao and the civil service exam but also because Keju incubated values and work ethics. Today, Chinese minds still bear its imprint. For one, Keju elevated the value of education and we see this effect today. A 2020 study shows that, for every doubling of successful Keju candidates per 10,000 of the population in the Ming-Qing period, there was a 6.9 per cent increase in years of schooling in 2010. The Keju exams loom as part of China’s human capital formation today, but they also cultivated and imposed the values of deference to authority and collectivism that the Chinese Communist Party has reaped richly for its rule and legitimacy.
But isn’t it the case that the West – Prussia, then the United Kingdom and the United States – all had their own civil service exams? How is it possible that a strong bureaucracy complemented rather than supplanted political and religious pluralisms in the West? (...)
In his book Strong Societies and Weak States (1988), Joel S Migdal identifies a common problem in the developing world – the struggle of the state to acquire autonomy and capabilities. China, through history and today, is exactly the opposite. The state dominates society. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is autocratic but his autocracy pales in comparison with that of China’s president Xi Jinping. Harassed and targeted by the state, opposition parties are still legal and tenuously legitimate in Russia and some of Putin’s critics command a sizeable following. Even the power to commit violence – war fighting – was outsourced to a private force, the mercenaries led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an arrangement not even remotely conceivable in China.
Since 2013, against the increasingly dictatorial Xi, there have been two prominent critics of the president and both were dispensed with summarily. Unlike Putin who has to rely on extra-legal means to silence his critics, suggesting some formal constraints on him, Xi directed the full apparatus of the Chinese state after his critics. (...)
An ultimate autocracy is one that reigns without society. Society shackles the state in many ways. One is ex ante: it checks and balances the actions of the state. The other is ex post. A strong society provides an outside option to those inside the state. Sometimes, this is derisively described as ‘a revolving door’, but it may also have the positive function of checking the power of the state. State functionaries can object to state actions by voting with their feet, as many US civil servants did during the Donald Trump administration, and thereby drain the state of the valuable human capital it needs to function and operate. A strong society raises the opportunity costs for the state to recruit human capital but such a receptor function of society has never existed at scale in imperial China nor today, thanks – in large part, I would argue – to Keju.
Keju was so precocious that it pre-empted and displaced an emergent society. Meritocracy empowered the Chinese state at a time when society was still at an embryonic stage. Massive resources and administrative manpower were poured into Keju such that it completely eclipsed all other channels of upward mobility that could have emerged. In that sense, the celebration by many of Keju’s meritocracy misses the bigger picture of Chinese history. It is a view of a tree rather than of a forest. The crowding-out effect of Keju is captured succinctly in a book from the late 19th century:
Since the introduction of the examination system … scholars have forsaken their studies, peasants their ploughs, artisans their crafts, and merchants their trades; all have turned their attention to but one thing – government office. This is because the official has all the combined advantages of the four without requiring their necessary toil …This is the larger impact of Keju. Its impressive bureaucratic mobility demolished all other mobility channels and possibilities. Keju was an anti-mobility mobility channel. It packed all the upward mobility within one channel – that of the state. Society was crowded out, and over time, due to its deficient access to quality human capital, it atrophied. This is the root of the power of Chinese autocracy and, I would argue, it is a historical development that is unique to China and explains the awesome power of Chinese autocracy.
by Yasheng Huang, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Excerpt from the scroll Viewing the Pass Lists, traditionally attributed to Qiu Ying (1494-1552).
Image: Excerpt from the scroll Viewing the Pass Lists, traditionally attributed to Qiu Ying (1494-1552).
