VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 5, SECTION 1
The Child Sits Down in the Classroom, and the Examination Begins
Part One finished with enfeoffment and made clear how a position comes to be. But enfeoffment settles only half of it. The position exists, so who fills it? The same governor's seat, filled by an able hand or by a poor one, makes all the difference. This Part is about the examination system, a thing one layer above enfeoffment: how the people in the positions get chosen. This section lays down a judgment that may surprise you: the examination system is not a thing in history, it is running this very moment, and it began the instant a child first sat down in a classroom.
A child walks into a classroom for the first time. The teacher tells everyone to take out a notebook and a pencil, and they do. The teacher writes a character on the board, and everyone reads it aloud. The teacher has one child stand and read, the child reads it right, the teacher smiles, and the other children watch. At that moment the examination has begun. Not the Sui, not the Tang, not the Qing, but this moment, in some classroom right now, the moment a child is assessed for the first time. Read this and you may ask, how is that the examination system, that is only a class. Look slowly. The teacher has the child read, praises the one who reads right, corrects the one who reads wrong, and that is assessment. The end-of-term test gives the child a score, and that is merit selection. The entrance exam sends some children to a key middle school and some to an ordinary one, and that is streaming. The college-entrance exam sends some into a top university, some into an ordinary one, and some to no university at all, and that is the channel of rising. After graduation, to be a civil servant you sit the civil-service exam, to be a lawyer you sit the bar, to be an engineer you sit for the engineer's license, one examination after another. From the first time a child sits down in a classroom to the day he retires at sixty, his whole life is inside the examination, never absent for a second.
Say one more thing here and see it through. The examination system, like enfeoffment, is life-level. It was not invented by any one person, it is what grows of itself wherever there is a group. In a group the good positions are always limited, while the people who could fill them are many, so the group must do one thing: hand these limited positions to the relatively fitting people. How to hand them? First assess, to see what each person can do. Then select by merit, to pick out the ones who can. Then stream, to send different people down different roads. Then give a channel of rising, to let those who do well move up. Assess, select, stream, rise, these four motions are not something the Sui alone had, they are what there must be wherever there is a group and a limited number of good positions. What the ancestors of the Sui did that was so remarkable was not to invent these four motions, it was to make these four, for the first time, into a public, open-to-all-regardless-of-birth, workable institution. So the examination and enfeoffment are a pair. Enfeoffment governs how a position comes to be, the examination governs who fills it, the two together the underlying skeleton of how a group runs.
Set one distinction here. Many people, speaking of the examination, speak of parents supporting a child's schooling, of the parents' provision, the parents' anxiety. But that is out of place. The one who truly bears the examination is the child. The child is reading, the child is being tested, the child is being assessed and streamed, the child passes or does not pass, and every core motion of the examination happens in the child. The parents are only supporters, the environing condition of the examination. The child is the bearer, the true subject. This distinction matters, because it sets the universality of the examination firm. Not every child has parents to support them. Some children lose their parents early, some are raised in an orphanage, some live on a scholarship, some are supported by the state, some teach themselves, and all these children, so long as they survive and receive some education, are inside the examination. The examination does not depend on whether the parents support, it depends on whether the child is receiving an education. Every child who is educated has already entered the examination system. This is the true starting point of the examination, from the moment a child is educated, unrelated to family circumstance, unrelated to the age, related only to the fact of the child being educated.
The examination of the Chinese ancestors was narrow in content, testing mainly the Confucian classics, the Four Books and Five Classics plus poetry and policy essays, with a little law and mathematics. The examination of today is broader by more than a hundredfold. In subjects, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, language, foreign languages, history, geography, computing, economics, management, law, medicine, engineering, design, literature, each with its own examination system, each sifting people. In professional qualifications, the physician's license, the bar, the teaching credential, the certified public accountant, the licensed architect, the licensed engineer, every profession with its own license, every license an examination. More than twenty-four hundred years ago, Mozi taught, in the chapter Exalting the Worthy, that even a person laboring in farming or in the workshops, if he has the ability, should be raised up. This is one of the earliest complete statements of merit selection. In Mozi's age officials were chosen by aristocratic heredity, and the common people had almost no channel of rising, so Mozi teaching raise up the able was a root challenge to that age. More than twenty-four hundred years later, this line of Mozi's now runs, through the examination system of today, across the whole of humankind. A farmer's child can enter a university through the college-entrance exam, a worker's child can become a professional through a licensing exam, the child of an ordinary family can change their fate through one exam or another. Mozi's words of twenty-four hundred years ago are only now truly realized on a large scale.
Many people, speaking of the examination, speak of it as a Chinese tradition. This is not accurate. In the world today the examination is no longer a Chinese matter, it is the shared underlying infrastructure of all humankind. In America the SAT and the ACT decide college admission, the LSAT law-school admission, the MCAT medical-school admission, and professional licenses decide the right to a profession. In Britain the A-Levels decide university admission. In Germany the Abitur plus the apprenticeship decide the path. In Japan the unified university-entrance exam plus the civil-service exam. In India the entrance exams in science and engineering are far fiercer than China's college-entrance exam, and the civil-service exam admits under one percent. In Brazil the national secondary exam plus every kind of public-service exam. Every country, once it enters a modern educational and professional system, uses some form of the examination. This is the invention of Chinese ancestors fourteen hundred years ago, run for thirteen centuries in China, revised and carried abroad in modern times, become the shared underlying infrastructure of all humankind, and no modern society can run without it. See this clearly: the examination is not a thing of traditional China, it is one of China's greatest gifts to the political wisdom of humankind, and one of the core mechanisms by which the world runs today. Together with enfeoffment, it is one of two life-level underlying structures of modern society, enfeoffment settling that a position exists, the examination settling who fills it. But this line must be set here for now, and the next section will come back to it: the examination has not, in fact, fully settled who fills it, because the person the examination sifts out still has to rely on enfeoffment to truly take the seat.
Return to the opening of this section. A child walks into a classroom for the first time, and what he bears is not only learning knowledge, he has at the same moment entered a life-level mechanism. First, he is being assessed, selected, streamed. Second, he is being drawn into a mechanism fourteen hundred years old that covers all humankind. The child may not know it, the parents may not have noticed, but from that moment the child is no longer only a little one in a class, he is a bearer inside this mechanism, and will walk decades inside it, all the way to the day he leaves his post. You might look back at yourself too. From your childhood to now, how did you walk this mechanism? Were you selected out by it, or streamed at some checkpoint onto another road? The position you hold today, did the examination give it to you, or enfeoffment, or both? These are not rhetorical questions, they are real ones worth a careful thought.
So here is the position this section lays down. We set one layer firm: the examination system is not history, it is a law running from the moment each child is educated. This mechanism begins when a child first sits down in a classroom, runs through schooling, testing, graduation, employment, and professional qualification, on through every assessment and every promotion across decades of a working life, all the way to retirement, running through nearly the whole working life of a modern person, never absent for a second. And it is not one country's local product or one age's phenomenon, it is the invention of Chinese ancestors fourteen hundred years ago, carried abroad and revised, become the shared underlying infrastructure of all humankind.
Enfeoffment settled that a position exists, the examination sifts out the person nominated to a position. But one joint is still unfinished, and this joint is the other face of enfeoffment, the last step by which the position is truly held, called the will of the people. A person may test brilliantly, and without the will of the people the position still does not hold. The next section is about that most easily overlooked, most important step.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section Two. The will of the people, enfeoffment runs from below