VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 7
The Examination System Today, East and West Both Testing
The last two chapters covered the three joints of the examination, its road, and its hardening. Last chapter closed in nineteen oh five, when the Qing government abolished the examination that had run for nearly thirteen centuries. This chapter pulls the camera to today and shows something many people never notice: the examination never vanished in nineteen oh five, it is covering the whole of humankind at this very moment. The name changed, the form changed, the skeleton is of one line. Three sections. The first is about the examination of today, running worldwide in the form of the college-entrance exam, the civil-service exam, and every kind of qualifying exam, with five shared features, and yet, just as thirteen hundred years ago, it still does not reach the highest position in politics.
Section One first looks at what came after nineteen oh five. After the abolition, China first turned to a school system, the Republic built systems of higher examinations and ordinary examinations, and later came the college-entrance exam and the national civil-service exam. Britain built a modern civil-service exam system in the mid-nineteenth century, directly inspired by the Chinese examination, and America added the SAT, the GRE, the LSAT, and the MCAT. The five features are no bar of origin, a unified exam, admission by score, a tie to the channel of rising, and global mobility: an Indian student can test into an American university, and a Brazilian student can pass a qualifying exam into a financial firm in London. But presidents, premiers, and prime ministers are not tested in, nor are ministers and cabinet members, and judgments like war and peace do not rest on an exam. Why? It is of one line with thirteen hundred years ago: enfeoffment will not abolish itself.
Section Two is about two tracks: why government can complete only half the dream while an enterprise must run the whole. In a single line, a CEO who staffs by kinship will perish, and behind it lies the root difference between the logic of the work and the logic of enfeoffment. An enterprise is a working venture, and the market cares only whether it can keep getting work done, so ability is the highest standard. Government must keep order, so stability is the highest standard. The family enterprise where wealth does not pass three generations, the faction infighting of a startup grown large, and the decline of a great company that begins with heavy use of its own people are three kinds of sample. Once an enterprise lets the logic of enfeoffment in, turning to family, to factions, to nepotism, to corruption, it enters the cycle of enfeoffment of Part One. This section lays out both sides too. The enterprise is strong in vitality but unstable, even good companies living only a few decades on average. Government is stable but lacks vitality. Japan's Kongo Gumi has lived over fourteen hundred years, and what it hands down is craft, culture, and reputation, not bloodline.
Section Three walks into the West and shows something of the sharpest contrast: Westerners today have been inside the examination all their lives, from the SAT to the German apprenticeship, from France's national school of administration to America's Pendleton Act, and the root of the modern Western civil service lies in the invention of the Chinese ancestors fourteen hundred years ago. A present-day ordinary American may sit down in a formal exam room twenty to thirty times across a life. A Qing presented scholar generally sat no more than ten. About two million American high-school students take the SAT each year, and top universities admit between three and five percent. German students who do not go to university take three or four years of apprenticeship and must pass a strict national exam at the end, a position of equal dignity left for the one who does hands-on work. France's national school of administration came closest to running through to the top and produced four French presidents, but a graduate who would be president still had to pass an election. Until the late nineteenth century America appointed its civil servants by political spoils. After a president was assassinated by a disappointed office-seeker, Congress passed the Pendleton Act, formally building an exam-based federal civil service.
This chapter shows one thing clearly: the examination is not a Chinese story, it is the shared underlying floor of all humankind, but its boundary is the same East and West. The highest position never passes through the examination, because enfeoffment will not abolish itself. This is also the close of the whole examination Part. Having covered enfeoffment and the examination, we have still spoken only of the matter of one position, but a real group is a whole structure of thousands of positions. The next chapter enters Part Three, on centralized authority: any organized group, from a classroom, a kitchen, and an army to a country, must have a decision-center, or the group scatters.
Chapter contents
Section One. The examination of the twenty-first century, five shared features
Section Two. Two tracks, why selection in business and in government differ
Section Three. The West is in the examination too, from the SAT to the Pendleton Act
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section One. The examination of the twenty-first century, five shared features