VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 6
Three Together, and Only Then a Time of Good Rule
Last chapter set out the three things, the examination, the will of the people, and the enlightened ruler. The examination sifts people out, the will of the people lets them hold the seat, the enlightened ruler lets them be used, each governing one stretch. This chapter goes deeper: what the three are together, where this system came from, and why it hardened. Look at the three together and you will see where the examination shines brightest, and also where it cannot reach.
Section One answers a question readers of history often have. Dynasties averaged two or three centuries, so why were true times of good rule so few? The answer is that good rule takes all three at once, the merit selection of the examination, the will of the people running from below, and the enlightened ruler running from above. Any one missing is not enough, and all three wear away with time, so good rule is both rare and short. Across over two thousand years of imperial history in China, the widely acknowledged times of good rule add up to fewer than ten stretches. The ancestor this section calls on is Mencius: the timing of Heaven is worth less than the advantage of the ground, and the advantage of the ground is worth less than the harmony of people. Mencius did not define the harmony of people directly, but read the whole of the Mencius and you find it holds three layers: the ruler has ability, the ministers are worthy and able, the people are of one heart with him. These match exactly the enlightened ruler, the examination, and the will of the people. The samples are the rule of Wen and Jing and the Zhenguan rule. Emperor Wen cut the land tax from one part in fifteen to one part in thirty, the population grew from under twenty million to near forty million, and the cords stringing the coins in the treasury rotted. But all three wear away. Good officials become a bloc of vested interest a few decades on. The people slowly take peace as their due. An enlightened ruler turns muddled in his late years, and whether his son is an enlightened ruler is again a matter of luck.
Section Two is about where the examination came from: the step the ancestors took fourteen hundred years ago in the Sui, out of the trap where great families held everything. It completed only half a dream, reaching down through the middle and lower ranks but never touching the throne. Before the Sui, three ways of choosing people were used: hereditary office and stipend; ranks by military merit plus guest ministers; and the recommendation system plus the nine-rank system. By the Wei and Jin it had come to no poor house in the upper ranks and no great clan in the lower. The Sui put four things together, no bar of origin, a unified examination, admission by score, and a tie to the channel of rising, and the poor-house scholar suddenly had a public road. Nor was this the credit of any one emperor. Mozi taught raise up the able, and Xunzi went a step further: the worthy and able should be raised up without waiting on seniority, and the unfit dismissed without waiting on time. The Tang made it real, and only the Song made it truly universal. But the emperor was of dynastic enfeoffment, and the emperor will not use an examination to decide who the next emperor is. Enfeoffment will not abolish itself. Even as only half a dream, through social mobility, cultural spread, bureaucratic professionalism, and long dynastic life, it has already changed China for over a thousand years.
Section Three asks why the examination hardened: the thirteen hundred years from the Sui to the Qing in five stages, the eight-legged essay of the Ming and Qing, three inner reasons for the hardening, and the internal examination among the princes that long-lived dynasties quietly used in succession to the throne. The Song was the most brilliant time, with the saying, in the morning a lad of the fields, by evening in the hall of the Son of Heaven, and name-sealing, recopying, and sealing the examination hall made the guard against cheating finer than ever before. But the seed was planted in the Song too. Wang Anshi turned the exam from poetry to the meaning of the classics, and step by step this grew into the eight-legged essay of the Ming and Qing, which had to speak for the sages. Many who passed as presented scholars found, once in office, that they could do nothing and could only rely on private secretaries. The hardening has three layers of reason. A large-scale exam must be objective, and objectivity leads to format. The court wants obedient officials, so the content is tested ever narrower. Graders, exam masters, and protégés become vested interest, so even those who want to change it cannot. Most interesting is the throne. None of Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong came to the throne as principal eldest son, and the Qing height of a hundred thirty years was at bottom the fruit of three generations of internal examination among the princes. The Ming, strictly by the principal eldest, declined faster instead.
This chapter shows one thing: the examination is among China's greatest gifts to the political wisdom of humankind, and its glory and its boundary are two faces of one system. Of the three, only the examination can be made into a stable institution, yet it cannot touch the throne, and it hardens on its own. So did it truly die in nineteen oh five? The next chapter walks into today, to see how the examination still runs under a new name and in a new form, and to see a strange thing: why today's government does only half the dream, while it is the enterprise that runs the whole examination.
Chapter contents
Section One. Why good rule is rare, the difficulty of having all three
Section Two. Where the examination came from, the half dream the Sui and Tang made real
Section Three. Why the examination hardened
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section One. Why good rule is rare, the difficulty of having all three