The Class of 1761

Examinations, State, and Elites in Eighteenth-Century China

Iona Man-Cheong

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780804767132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The Class of 1761 reveals the workings of China's imperial examination system from the unique perspective of a single graduating class. The author follows the students' struggles in negotiating the examination system along with bureaucratic intrigue and intellectual conflict, as well as their careers across the Empire—to the battlefields of imperial expansion in Annam and Tibet, the archives where the glories of the empire were compiled, and back to the chambers where they in turn became examiners for the next generation of aspirants.

The book explores the rigors and flexibilities of the examination system as it disciplined men for political life and shows how the system legitimated both the Manchu throne and the majority non-Manchu elite. In the system's intricately articulated networks, we discern the stability of the Qing empire and the fault lines that would grow to destabilize it.

1 The Meanings of Examination

Yet in some states little heed is given to birth, and every man’s nobility is derived from his own virtue, and what he has done for the state in private and public capacity.

—Pufendorf 1672

Our word “examination” is used in a wide variety of ways to denote everything from the tests given to candidates for civil service appointments and academic degrees to the diagnostic scrutiny that a physician makes of a patient, or the search of luggage made by a customs officer.

—Herrlee Creel 1970¹

Imperial China’s examination system was part of what made it a model meritocratic state. It employed men of demonstrable talent and promoted them according to the merit of their deeds. Excellence was an attribute of exemplary action, conduct, and attitude—not of high birth. But, as sinologist Herrlee Creel notes, the term “examination” encompasses a range of meaning. The constellation of techniques used in eighteenth-century Chinese examination practice ensured that subjects were tested both in their cultural knowledge and in their fortitude, moral and otherwise, to stand the many years of test taking. In fact, the meritocratic ideals of the Chinese imperial examination system joined the repertoire of European enlightenment concepts held by early modern thinkers as aspiring models of rationality.²

In the imperial Chinese examination system, as in modern examination practice, examiners applied a scrutiny as diagnostic as any associated with medical practice; one that determined whether the subject had absorbed and applied the requisite knowledge and distinctions. Thus, besides literally undergoing a body search, the candidate also had his mental “luggage” searched. The most crucial effect of this system was thus the training of loyal, obedient subjects, inculcated with the behaviors, values, and principles of government deemed appropriate for servants of the state. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that this disciplinary process was unilateral in scope. Imperial examinations occurred within and between sets of vibrant state-society relations. Interacting with the more contingent elements of court politics, intellectual fashions, and social ambitions, examinations become a site of collaboration, contestation, and conflict. It is in this context that examinations also become historically specific. When investigated within the contingencies of both imperial policy and, in the eighteenth century, a growing, multicultural, multiethnic empire ruled by a minority group, practice diverges sharply from typically static, descriptive accounts of structures and institutional functions. These sets of concerns shape the main thrust of this book.

The most challenging question about the imperial Chinese examination system is not how the system worked—the several available institutional studies are excellent and provide more than adequate answers—but rather, what the system meant.³ Thirty years ago, Chang Chung-li and Ho Ping-ti both argued that examinations determined membership in the Chinese gentry—a rather anomalous concept, since, unlike in Britain, the gentry was not an exclusively land-based social class, but rather an elite for whom both cultural and other economic capital were significant and for whom, in the final analysis, cultural capital remained decisive.⁴ In fact, subsequent work has shown that the elite controlled a diverse number of resources that it deployed through various strategies to achieve and maintain its preeminent socio-economic position.⁵ Although examination qualification was an important resource, contrary to earlier claims it did not hold any absolute determinative role. Once again, then, the question of the significance of examinations opens up. If cultural capital was an important determinant of Confucian elite membership, and yet academic qualification was only one of a range of resources, why did the examination system remain so well subscribed into the late imperial period and why were the educated elite so dedicated to the acquisition of examination status? Much of the answer, I propose, lies in the structural relationship of the examination system to the state, the access to political power that acquisition of examination degrees gave, and the collective identity the system generated. Three basic points summarize the main argument of this book. First, the Chinese examination system was crucial to the process that helped produce and reproduce a unitary, centralized state. Second, it was also a process that shaped candidates through the necessary disciplinary training as servants of the state. Third, the examination system structurally elaborated a collective identity, one that would eventually become the nation-state for the modern intelligentsia, and arguably in the process would make a material contribution to modern Chinese nationalism. The chapters to follow demonstrate how these effects were achieved and elaborate on both the process and its contingencies.

To frame the investigation, this chapter outlines the meaning of examination for the state, for the bureaucracy, and for the 1761 cohort of metropolitan graduates who are the focus of this study.

The Meaning for the State

Examinations were a site where the Han Chinese educated elite, holding cultural capital derived from their training in Confucian texts, enacted a relationship of reciprocity with the throne. The combination of these two elements—throne and elite—constituted a significant portion of the state’s structure. Rather than being seen as an exchange, the relationship between throne and Confucian elites is better understood as a practice that partially produced (and reproduced) the political legitimacy of rule. In the process, the throne and the social elite became closely bound in a nuanced, asymmetrical power relationship. Examinations were enacted neither as if after some prior agreement of partnership or exchange, nor as if some unspoken contract or even some market exchange mechanism were at play. Instead, the practice of examinations was itself productive of that part of legitimacy that enabled both throne and elite to make joint claims on political power. Examinations generated loyalty toward and partial legitimization of the ruling house—thus contributing to the construction of power that the state wielded over the empire—and, in that same process, generated the elite’s access to direct political power.⁶ I emphasize the partial nature of this dynamic—one particularly involving the throne, the bureaucracy, and Confucian-educated elites—because many other constitutive elements (as others have discussed and as I mention below) contributed to producing the Qing imperial power and its state structure. Each examination contributed to the reproduction of the state’s political legitimacy by reenacting a double and mutually reinforcing authorization. The cultural elite, through its submission to examination, invested the throne with the authority to rule. The throne, in the same act, acceded political authority to the cultural elite while it retained the power of delegation. The educated elite was effectively brought to this arrangement freely and willingly—a crucial condition for the naturalization of the system—in part by its desire to participate in the state’s power and in part as an effect of the very training undergone in the examination system. Thus we are looking at a dynamic of voluntary, unequal, hierarchical relations that produced an asymmetry acceptable to the throne and basic to the structure of the state for the government of China proper. It is this process and relationship that lies at the heart of what has been called the “gentry” stage of China’s imperial history of government.

Jack Dull’s short overview of the development of imperial government in China is useful for understanding the interpenetration of rulership, bureaucratic recruitment, and dominant social groups and examinations.⁷ In Dull’s schematization of the historical construction of state power and legitimation, gentry government—the mode that brought the examination system to prominence—comes as the final stage in a four-part development, following the patrimonial, the meritocratic, and the aristocratic modes of government. In the patrimonial mode of government, during the classical period (1122—256 BC), political power was determined by birth and kinship. A limited form of meritocracy characterized government in the early empire (221 BC—AD 202); performance criteria determined entry into and promotion within government service. Given the very limited sphere of literacy, however, merit could only have applied to an extremely circumscribed service pool.

The early empire ended with the rise of powerful, quasi-aristocratic regional families; the prominence of these clans led to a government service monopoly. The clans treated government service as an inheritance right, and the only opportunity left to the less privileged but talented was to attach themselves and their loyalties to the clans rather than to the central government. During much of the early middle empire (589—907), the throne continually had to make accommodations with this powerful elite, generating a delicate balance of power instead of centralizing it in the person of the emperor. Emperor Wu Zetian (r. 690—705), the only female emperor in China’s history, was the first to use the examination system politically, foreshadowing its later role during the period of gentry government.⁸ As part of her thrust to centralize power and bypass the control of the great families, Emperor Wu supervised the recruitment examinations herself, in order to create a direct and personal claim on the loyalties of those selected. So began the trend toward bringing the growing body of non-aristocratic, lesser provincial families into the political arena. It took time before the aristocracy could be denied automatic access to power and instead be assimilated into a new regimen in which examinations could ensure centralized control over government administration. In a move that seems symbolic of the system’s new legitimating role between throne and elites, examination supervision was transferred in 736 from the Board of Civil Office, where examination was oriented toward employment, to the Board of Rites, where it came within the purview of the productive and symbolic power of ritual practices.

Peter Bol’s work also acknowledges the increasing importance of examinations as part of the transformation of the aristocratic great clans from medieval social elites, dependent on birthright, into a transitional group he calls civil-bureaucrats. Stressing continuity, Bol maps the shifting weight of three defining features of socio-political elites: birth, government, and culture. Further reconstellations of these elements completed the transformation of the civil-bureaucrats—who were still semi-aristocratic but had parlayed their advantages into a tradition of family officeholding—into scholar-officials. This family-based structure still had repercussions in 1761, as indicated by the ongoing law-of-avoidance examinations (see Chapter Four). The final shift was the entry of local or provincial elites onto the historical stage. At this point, neither lineage nor family could rely on inherited privilege for access to government service. Instead, government service was the reward for competition through the examination system, which judged success against a standard of ethically based cultural knowledge, thereby allowing the state to appropriate claims of moral leadership.

In his discussions, however, Bol’s narrative tends to imply a contractual type of exchange.⁹ I would suggest two slight modifications to his nonetheless brilliant formulations. First, centralization of authority required displacing the family as a potential power base and thus shifted the sphere of activity onto a broader nexus of social relations that was ultimately controllable by the throne. Thus, for Confucian educated elites to become “willing subordinates, without independent power, who depended on superior authority for their political position” meant sacrificing a more institutionally cohesive family power. Second, rather than deal with the contract metaphor and its various implications, we might focus instead on the dynamic as a reciprocal, structural relationship enacted or performed between throne and elites. Both sides had continually to reenact the symbiotic relationship that established the foundation of government, and the repetition itself meant both constant flexibility and an inherent instability.

The shift from an aristocratic to a gentry mode of government was achieved gradually, first by instituting a school system that focused ambition on government-accredited education as a necessary criterion for official appointment. As status rank was still an entrance prerequisite, the school system was able to foster the prestige of examination qualification such that even the aristocracy increasingly expected it of themselves. The throne also began centralizing control of the great families, compiling a national ranking of them, subtly changing their nature and undermining their autonomy. Finally, aristocratic families not only lost their dominant position—during the Five Dynasties (907—960) period of disunity—but also began to disappear as a socio-political group, facilitating the rise of the new provincial elite.¹⁰

Gentry government was never absolutely stable. The composition and thus the definition of the state shifted from period to period with changing bureaucratic arrangements and ruling houses, but the general mode of government lasted through the late imperial period. This mode was characterized by a relationship between the throne and a social elite defined by its cultural accomplishments, and mediated by the increasing importance of examinations as the primary method of recruitment.¹¹ Historically, then, the examination system had been found to be most successful in promoting the centralizing impulses of the throne and in controlling the necessary delegation of political power to particular social elites.

The Qing dynasty (1644—1911), ruled by the ethnically non-Chinese Manchu minority, is now recognized as the preeminent empire-builder of China. The Qing very quickly adopted the previous Ming dynasty’s examination system in their efforts to ensure that the conquered area of China proper had a continuous flow of administrators. Their adoption of the Chinese examination system, like their strategic use of other Chinese institutions, exemplifies the conquest rulers’ political acumen, a strength that enabled them to achieve and sustain a spectacular level of administrative control and stability for a period of almost three centuries. Examination recruitment of civil servants was particularly instrumental to the successful, stable governance of China proper. China proper, where the Han majority—subjugated by the Manchus—lived, was governed much like non-Chinese territories such as Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang), using a complex system of direct rule through native proxy. One important problematic arising from these circumstances (see Chapter Five) is the question of what it meant to be a Chinese elite in this period, living within the Qing multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural empire. At any rate, by the mid-eighteenth century, scholar-officials were satisfied to claim the minority-ruled empire as their own. At least as represented in examination discourse, they registered no difference between themselves, as members of the Han-Chinese majority, and their Manchu minority rulers. Evidently, examination practice, within this ethnically mixed environment, was productive and representative of a developing imaginary of collective identity, a mental and textual space of empty time stretching across the country holding Confucian elites in a common understanding of themselves, fostered by imperial ideology.

Examinations allowed the Qing state to control China proper and enact a stable administration. The first Qing emperor, Shunzhi (1644—1661), instituted the first metropolitan examination in 1646; even preconquest, however, the Qing institution of civil service recruitment examinations illustrates the Manchu understanding of their importance. In his use of examinations Kangxi (1662—1722) explicitly recognized the relationship of reciprocity between throne and elites, as he made evident in his assiduous efforts to woo the many disaffected Chinese scholars over to the Qing cause. Although there were probably surveillance and censorship motives at work, the use of examinations also exploited the disciplinary training of test taking that Ming scholars had absorbed.¹² As each of the southern provinces was conquered, examinations were held immediately to give the Confucian-educated elites the opportunity to serve the new regime. Examinations reached a new height under the Yongzheng emperor (1723—1735), whose focus on administrative improvements had the effect of opening wider the gateway into Qing politics. The expansion of examination entrance extended even to bypassing established laws of avoidance, which were essentially conflict-of-interest laws (see Chapter Four) that prevented candidates being examined, and thus favored, by their relatives. By the time of Qianlong (1736—1795), through other...

Table of contents

• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Table of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Meanings of Examination
• 2 Regulating Aspirations
• 3 Rites of Spring
• 4 Fair Fraud and Fraudulent Fairness
• 5 Paths to Glory
• Coda - DEFINITIONS OF FAILURE
• APPENDIX 1 - Grades for the Annual Examination
• APPENDIX 2 - Provincial Examination Quotas
• APPENDIX 3 - Number of Attempts for the Metropolitan Degree
• APPENDIX 4 - Price of Imperial College Studentships
• APPENDIX 5 - 1761 Class List Organized by Class Number
• Character List
• REFERENCE MATTER
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index