VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 6, SECTION 2

VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 6, SECTION 2

Where the Examination Came From, the Half Dream the Sui and Tang Made Real

Last section covered that good rule takes all three present, and that of the three, only the examination can be made into a stable institution. This section looks back at where that institution came from: the step the ancestors took fourteen hundred years ago in the Sui, out of what kind of trap did it walk? What did it achieve, and what did it leave unfinished? We will come to one important line: the examination completed only half a dream.

To speak of the examination's starting point, we first speak of what came before the Sui. Not knowing what the world was like before the examination, one cannot know what its breakthrough broke through. From Xia, Shang, and Zhou to before the Sui, some two thousand years and more, China used three main ways of choosing talent. The first, hereditary office and stipend, the way of the Western Zhou through the Spring and Autumn. The position passed through a bloodline, the son taking the rank the father held, all the important positions held by a few great families generation after generation, and the ordinary person had almost no chance of entering a governing position. Its problem was that a bloodline cannot guarantee ability, the one in the position weakening after a few generations. The second, the system of ranks by military merit plus the use of guest ministers, appearing in the Warring States. Shang Yang's reforms pushed rank by military merit to the extreme, conferring rank by merit on the battlefield regardless of origin, so a commoner could come up by military merit, and the states also made great use of guest ministers, Shang Yang, Zhang Yi, and Li Si all guest ministers who rose on real ability. But rank by military merit worked only in wartime, and the guest-minister system depended on the ruler's personal eye, working under an enlightened ruler and failing under a muddled one. The third, the recommendation system plus the nine-rank system. The Han recommendation had local officials each year recommend the worthy and the filial to the center, and many poor-house talents entered the governing system this way. But the power to recommend was in the hands of local officials, easily swayed by pedigree and connection. From the late Han through the Wei and Jin, recommendation slowly turned into an inner circle of the local powerful families, their sons recommending each other, the poor house ever harder to enter. The Cao Wei set up the nine-rank system, meaning to regularize recommendation, but in practice it became wholly a continuation of pedigree, no poor house in the upper ranks and no great clan in the lower, the positions monopolized by a few great gates of power. Across the several centuries of the Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties, the governing positions circulated basically within a few dozen great families, the several centuries in Chinese political history where heredity was heaviest and the poor house most held down. By the time before the Sui founded the examination, the channel of rising for talent was nearly blocked shut. Had that state not been broken, China might have entered the kind of long arrangement of family heredity that Europe had in the Middle Ages.

Emperor Wen founded the Sui and made a series of rectifications, of which the most far-reaching was the founding of the examination system. It is generally held that in Emperor Wen's time there was already the beginning of selecting officials by subject, and that in the Daye years of Emperor Yang the presented-scholar subject was formally established, the landmark starting point of the examination. The examination has four core motions. First, no bar of origin, that in principle anyone not a slave or of the base ranks could take part, the sons of farmers, craftsmen, and small traders all able to sign up. Second, a unified examination, the topics, content, and standard fixed by the center, no longer decided by a local official or a rating officer personally. Third, admission by score, those who pass ranked by score and entered on a list of candidates. Fourth, tied to the channel of rising, that those who pass could enter the bureaucracy, become a county magistrate, a capital official, a higher position. These four together were a great political transformation. Every way of choosing people before had depended on some origin or recommendation, and only the examination took that layer away, making the exam score the main standard. The poor-house scholar suddenly had a channel of rising that was, in principle, wholly open.

Set one distinction here: the examination was not the personal invention of Emperor Wen or Emperor Yang, it was the result of several centuries of accumulated thought by Chinese ancestors. Confucius taught that to raise up the straight and set them over the crooked makes the people submit, that the direction of selection must be right. Mozi taught, regardless of origin, raise up the able, that even a person laboring in farming or the workshops, if he has the ability, should be raised up. This is the ideal of merit selection Mozi left more than twenty-four hundred years ago. That ideal was not realized in Mozi's age, was partly realized in the Han, and nearly failed in the Wei and Jin, until the Sui founded the examination and it truly had an institutional carrier. Xunzi taught a step further, that the worthy and able should be raised up without waiting on seniority, and the unfit dismissed without waiting on time. This is one of the most complete statements of merit selection of the pre-Qin age. The spirit at the core of the Sui founding of the examination is exactly this layer Xunzi taught, only that the Sui made it concrete into a workable institution, judging the worthy and able through an exam, raising them up through an admission list. The ideal of the ancestors, through several centuries of accumulated thought, became an institution in the Sui.

The Sui founded the examination, but the Sui was too short, under forty years, and the examination was only a beginning, not yet truly running. After the Tang was founded it inherited and made it more complete. The exam subjects were gradually regularized, mainly the classics subject, the presented-scholar subject, the law subject, the mathematics subject, the calligraphy subject. The exam procedure was gradually fixed, the prefectural preliminary, the departmental exam, the palace exam. The admission quota was gradually made institutional, several dozen to one or two hundred admitted each year. And the social view gradually changed, study and the examination becoming the mainstream value of society. By the middle Tang the examination had become an important channel for selecting talent, Wei Zheng, Yao Chong, Zhang Jiuling, Bai Juyi, and Han Yu all of examination origin, and the poor-house scholar changing his fate through study became the norm. But note that the Tang examination was still not the only road into office, the great clans still had the protection of birth, the royal kin still had special treatment, and military merit was still one way in too. The Tang was an age of the examination and dynastic enfeoffment side by side. The Song was the age the examination truly became universal, almost every important civil position passing through it, the weight of the protection of birth greatly lowered, Fan Zhongyan, Ouyang Xiu, Wang Anshi, Su Shi, and Sima Guang all of examination origin. The Ming and Qing carried it on and refined it, but also moved toward hardening, the eight-legged essay replacing the flexible poetry and policy essays, which the next section takes up.

Here we set the core claim of this section: the examination breakthrough of the ancestors fourteen hundred years ago was very far-reaching, but it completed only half a dream. Why half? Because the examination never ran through to the highest position in politics. The emperor was of dynastic enfeoffment, inheriting by bloodline, nothing to do with the examination. The princes and princesses were of dynastic enfeoffment, nothing to do with the examination. And though many of the highest ministers were of examination origin, they took the highest positions by the emperor's appointment, and that step was of enfeoffment, not of the examination. The examination completed only the selection of middle and lower officials, county magistrates, prefects, the department directors at the capital, these positions mainly decided by the examination, but the true political summit, the emperor and the few highest ministers he directly appointed, did not pass through the examination. This is the half dream of the examination, bringing merit selection into the middle and lower ranks but not into the highest. Why not? Because if the complete examination were realized, running from the lowest ninth-rank clerk all the way through to the emperor, then dynastic enfeoffment would be abolished, the emperor no longer hereditary but selected by some examination, which would be to abolish the very core of the institutions of enfeoffment. Enfeoffment will not abolish itself, and the emperor will not use an examination to decide who the next emperor is. So the examination of China's thirteen centuries, from the Sui to the Qing, stayed always in the state of a half dream, opening the poor-house scholar's channel of rising to a fairly high position, but never letting the examination touch the highest enfeoffment, the throne.

Though only a half dream, this half already changed China for over a thousand years. Social mobility: the poor-house scholar could change his fate through study, which the other civilizations of that age rarely had, medieval Europe of the same period a strictly ranked society where the commoner had almost no chance of entering the noble class, while China was one of the highest in social mobility of its day. Cultural spread: the examination made study a matter every household prized, the Confucian classics spreading through the broad common people, the scholar respected, knowledge handed down. Bureaucratic professionalism: the officials selected through the examination were mostly fairly educated, able to read, write, analyze, and decide, forming a professional governing corps, which medieval Europe, staffing office mainly by hereditary nobles, did not have. Long dynastic life: Chinese dynasties averaged a longer life than contemporary Europe, one reason being that the examination fed fresh blood continuously into the dynasty, letting the able enter the governing system without break, slowing the problem of ability wearing down. Global influence: as early as the seventh and eighth centuries, the Korean peninsula and Japan drew on the Chinese examination to build their own official-selection systems, and in modern times, after Europe came to know the Chinese examination, it was deeply inspired, the modern civil-service exam systems built by Britain, France, Germany, and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries all directly or indirectly inspired by the Chinese examination. The Chinese examination is the source of the modern global civil-service exam system.

But the half dream has its limits too. First, the highest position does not pass through the examination, so the enlightened ruler is a matter of luck, dynastic enfeoffment making the emperor's appearance a matter of bloodline, a generation of a brilliant ruler possibly followed by a generation of a muddled one, the flourishing short, a problem the examination itself cannot solve. Second, the person the examination selects still faces the two gates of the will of the people and the enlightened ruler, the examination only an entry ticket, not a guarantee of truly holding the seat. Third, the examination itself hardens, its content turning into the eight-legged essay, its process manipulable by corruption, the person it produces possibly only able to read books and not to do work, these the inner problems of the examination, opened out in the next section. Fourth, the examination can only improve governing, not change the cycle of enfeoffment, lengthening a dynasty's average life by decades or even a century, but unable to let any one dynasty truly last ten thousand generations, because the law of the cycle of enfeoffment still runs. These four limits together make clear why the examination of China's thirteen centuries was both brilliant and limited, both changing China for over a thousand years and unable to let any dynasty leap out of the cycle of the institutions of enfeoffment. The breakthrough of the ancestors fourteen hundred years ago is a real thing, but this breakthrough has its boundary.

So here is the position this section lays down. We set one layer firm: the founding of the examination by the ancestors in the Sui fourteen hundred years ago is one of the most important institutional breakthroughs in Chinese political history, turning merit selection from thought into institution, giving the poor-house scholar a channel of rising, ending several centuries of monopoly by the great clans. But this breakthrough completed only half a dream, the examination running through only to the middle and lower officials, the highest positions still in the hand of dynastic enfeoffment, and enfeoffment will not abolish itself, so the complete examination was never realized, the inner boundary of the examination. Even a half dream already changed China for over a thousand years, social mobility, cultural spread, bureaucratic professionalism, long dynastic life, all real things the examination left, and one of China's greatest gifts to the political wisdom of humankind.

But this brilliant institution, across thirteen centuries, was not all bright. It hardens too, turns into the eight-legged essay, turns living people into bookworms. The next section looks at the other face of the examination, how it slowly went from a living merit selection toward hardening.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.