Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China

Benjamin A. Elman

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674726932
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de China

During China's late imperial period (roughly 1400-1900 CE), men would gather by the millions every two or three years outside official examination compounds sprinkled across China. Only one percent of candidates would complete the academic regimen that would earn them a post in the administrative bureaucracy. Civil Examinations assesses the role of education, examination, and China's civil service in fostering the world's first professional class based on demonstrated knowledge and skill.While millions of men dreamed of the worldly advancement an imperial education promised, many more wondered what went on inside the prestigious walled-off examination compounds. As Benjamin A. Elman reveals, what occurred was the weaving of a complex social web. Civil examinations had been instituted in China as early as the seventh century CE, but in the Ming and Qing eras they were the nexus linking the intellectual, political, and economic life of imperial China. Local elites and members of the court sought to influence how the government regulated the classical curriculum and selected civil officials. As a guarantor of educational merit, civil examinations served to tie the dynasty to the privileged gentry and literati classes--both ideologically and institutionally.China did away with its classical examination system in 1905. But this carefully balanced and constantly contested piece of social engineering, worked out over the course of centuries, was an early harbinger of the meritocratic regime of college boards and other entrance exams that undergirds higher education in much of the world today.

PART I

Becoming Mainstream: “Way Learning” during the Late Empire

CHAPTER 1

Ming Imperial Power, Cultural Politics, and Civil Examinations

SINCE THE EARLY EMPIRE of Qin and Han (ca. 221 BCE–220 CE) and the medieval era of Sui and Tang (581–907), China’s government balanced between the emperor and bureaucracy. The interests of each dynasty were never uniformly decided in favor of the ruler or his officials. Nor was there an essentialized “state” that served the emperor and his court without resistance from the bureaucracy and the scholar-officials serving there. Nevertheless, the late imperial government was in important ways semiautonomous from the landed gentry elites who filled the bureaucracy via civil examination success. The ruling house maintained its pedigree for an imperial aristocracy whose interests were often asymmetrical with the class-based interests of gentry elites. The court thought through its politics based on its own interests. In other words, the partnership, however troubled at times, between the Ming state and the literati mattered historically.¹

During non-Han-led dynasties, such as the Mongol Yuan (1280–1368) and Manchu Qing (1644–1911), court interests could supersede bureaucratic or local Han elites. Given the differences between imperial interests and literati values, each dynasty redefined the partnership between the ruler and gentry-officials. This dynamic arrangement made imperial political culture vital and adaptive. In the first reigns of the Ming (1368–1644), however, the balance of power tilted in favor of the ruler and further altered the generally peaceful story of the overlap between the court and literati ideals before the Mongol conquest.

Early Ming rulers enforced a terror that curtailed the executive branches of the bureaucracy. For a time between 1380 and 1402, they carried out bloody political purges that made it seem as if emperors were at last all powerful. Ming “autocracy,” as it has since been called, was not the end of the partnership between state and society, however. Despite the growth of the court’s power, literati were still able to prevail on early Ming emperors to enhance the role of “Way learning” in government. Some have interpreted this enhancement simply as the political legitimation of Ming autocracy. But why choose Cheng-Zhu (Cheng Yi [1033–1107] and Zhu Xi [1130–1200]) “Way learning” then? Ming emperors needed their officials to rule effectively and still used relatively impartial civil examinations to choose them. Rulers also made the values of their gentry elites the sacred doctrines of the dynasty because, in part, that is what Ming elites and rulers themselves professed.²

Why did Song dynasty “Way learning” become imperial orthodoxy in late imperial China? Why was so much political violence required? In raising these two questions, we move from the timeless integrity of educational and cultural positions to the political, social, cultural, and economic contingencies of ideas in particular historical contexts. Instead of just interrogating ideas in “texts” for their universal “meaning,” we also decipher how they reveal the particular “contexts” of those whose actions were informed and served by references to those ideas. This chapter will address the ideals of “Way learning” and their historical uses by Ming-Qing rulers, scholar-officials, and literati.³

Early Ming Developments

Wang Anshi’s (1021–1086) failure to reform the Song dynasty (960–1280) government in the 1060s and 1070s alarmed everyone. Some Song scholar-official elites led by Cheng Yi, Cheng Hao (1032–1085), and other classical savants devised new arguments, later called “Way learning,” to renegotiate Wang’s statecraft initiatives by shifting the rhetoric from favoring an activist political economy to returning to a conservative moral agenda. This post–Wang Anshi conservative vision provided a convincing set of metaphysical doctrines and ethical teachings that stressed character development. These teachings held that (1) the moral cultivation of the literatus was the basis for self-awakening, (2) family and lineage accord derived from improving individual character, and (3) the moral cultivation of officials would yield an enlightened statecraft. Thereafter, one of the most compelling literati ideals was achieving sagehood.⁴

“Way learning” advocates faced several dilemmas after the Song capital of Kaifeng unexpectedly fell to an invading army of Jurchen in 1127, however. The Song now found itself surrounded by several independent and relatively equal dynasties in East Asia, the most important being the Khitan Liao (916–1125) and Jurchen Jin (1115–1234). The dynamic role of the Khitan and Jurchen peoples in setting up dynasties in northeast China meant that each could legitimately claim as its raison d’être the rebuilding of a “Greater China.” Song remnants retrenched by moving the Song capital south in 1127 to the ocean port of Hangzhou in Zhejiang province. Far from landlocked Kaifeng on the North China Plain, the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1280), as it was called, survived precariously as one of several claimants of the legacy of the greater Tang imperium.⁵

Spreading as part of this southern turn in Song politics and society, “Way learning” slowly but surely addressed the southern literati need for growing autonomy in a time of political decentralization. Those who appreciated the potential affinity between literati autonomy and “Way learning” after 1127 made a virtue out of Song weakness. Literati, not the dynasty or the ruler, represented the values of moral cultivation and sagehood ideals. After the demise of Wang Anshi’s reforms and the loss of the North, for example, literati well inland in southeastern Jiangxi province and in the nearby southern Zhejiang fortress city of Wuzhou (renamed “Jinhua” in the Ming) became prominent advocates of “Way learning.” Their influence grew in the Mongol era. Coincidentally, it was in Wuzhou, which he renamed, that Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398), the future first Ming emperor, and his troops sojourned while enduring a brutal civil war.⁶

During the Song and Yuan, the spread of “Way learning” orthodoxy was localized in places such as Wuzhou. Moreover, “Way learning” and imperial politics were vacillating partners in the waning years of the Southern Song. For example, the Southern Song state officially labeled “Way learning” as “heterodox” (xiexue) circa 1197, placing Zhu Xi under house arrest until his death.⁷ During the succeeding Yuan dynasty, a limited partnership between Mongol courtiers and a few Han scholar-officials helped persuade Kublai Khan and his successors to draw up orthodox guidelines for a partial revival of Song imperial examinations, which resumed in 1314. The Yuan held only fifteen metropolitan examinations, however, and only 1,136 palace degrees (jinshi) were awarded between 1315 and 1368, an average of just twenty-one per annum, far below the over 39,000 distributed under the Song at a rate of 124 annually.⁸

Moreover, many literati scholars, generally prevented from joining the Yuan dynasty as high officials, turned to alternative careers. Disgruntled or impecunious literati chose unconventional careers ranging from medicine to the literary and theatrical arts. Literati eremitism, a legitimate Chinese response to alien rule, also meant that when the Ming dynasty officially replaced the Yuan, the new ruler would have to find ways to attract local scholars into government service. The emperor’s ability to recruit talented men and assign them positions in the bureaucracy and local governance was central to his legitimacy, but early Ming emperors wanted this collaboration on their terms.⁹

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, “Way learning” remained a widespread but still localized literati persuasion, enough so, however, that it was one of the major candidates to become the Ming’s mainstream vision of itself.¹⁰ But this chapter will show it took Ming historical events to forge and consummate the supremacy of “Way learning.” The Cheng brothers’ works and Zhu Xi’s collected commentaries, for example, may have become the core curriculum for the limited late Yuan civil examinations, but the massive reproduction of Cheng-Zhu learning as state orthodoxy dates from the early Ming. After a false start in 1368, the Cheng-Zhu persuasion gained political muscle as an orthodox dynastic ideology in 1384 when it was transmitted through dynasty-wide civil examinations from local counties and prefectures to provincial and imperial capitals. Examination questions traveled from the top down. Candidates came from the bottom up. The emperor, however, still had to ensure that the bidirectional process enshrined his legitimacy, too, and not just that of the culturally ambitious literati.

Fresh from his victories over his bitter rivals in the Yangzi delta, Zhu Yuanzhang in the 1360s foresaw a government under the emperor balanced between a civil and military bureaucracy. It was by no means certain after the reigns of Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongol horsemen that the civil bureaucracy would automatically preside over its military counterpart. Would the Ming civil examinations, for example, follow the literary focus of Southern Song and Jin dynasty tests? Or would they continue the Yuan precedent in favor of “Way learning” and scrap the Song balance between metrical composition and classical essays?¹¹

According to the Yuan literatus Yu Ji (1272–1348), the official recognition granted the Cheng-Zhu “school of principle” had been one of the Mongol dynasty’s major accomplishments.¹² Through the intervention particularly of the southern Zhejiang literatus Liu Ji (1311–1375), who had passed the 1333 Yuan palace examination and subsequently became one of Zhu Yuanzhang’s most trusted advisers beginning in 1366, the emperor chose Yuan models based on “Way learning” for testing candidates for office.¹³

A year before he ascended the throne in 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang announced his plans to hold civil and military service examinations to recruit officials. The message he had derived from his early Wuzhou/Jinhua supporters was clear: the literatus would again be actively recruited for public service. To bridge civilian, cultural, and ethnic gaps in the imperial system that had emerged under Jurchen and Mongol governance, Zhu Yuanzhang invited literati in 1368 to recommend local talents for appointments. An early adept of the millenarian White Lotus Buddhist sects that had revolted against Mongol rule, the emperor was persuaded by literati elites from southern Zhejiang province, where his forces had sojourned for a time between 1355 and 1360, to don the ideological garb of a classical sage-king and reunify the literati of the empire and rekindle the orthodox “Way learning” legacy of the Song dynasties.¹⁴

Anxious to gain the support of Han literati, he officially acknowledged in 1369 the classical vision whereby “the educational transformation of the people was the prerequisite for the ordering of the dynasty and … schools were the basis for such transformation.” He ordered prefectures and counties to establish official schools, where, according to the literati ideal, officials would be trained and provide governance via education. They would in turn nourish the people’s needs and help them form healthy customs.¹⁵

To fill the bureaucracy with new officials, provincial civil examinations were held yearly for all pacified provinces between 1370 and 1372. The first metropolitan civil examination was in Nanjing in 1371.¹⁶ Following but going beyond the Yuan model, the first Ming emperor reconstituted a selection and appointment process that effectively replaced Mongol rule and established bureaucratic channels beyond the capital and provinces. For the first time, the selection process regularly penetrated down to counties and prefectures in the search for classically literate men to enter officialdom. In addition, Zhu enlarged the local scope of the Song and Yuan civil examination selection process by instituting for the first time regular county and prefectural licensing examinati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Conventions
• Introduction
• Part I: Becoming Mainstream: “Way Learning” during the Late Empire
• Part II: Unintended Consequences of Civil Examinations
• Part III: Retooling Civil Examinations to Suit Changing Times
• Appendixes
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index