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. 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. Three sections. The first is about the examination of today, running worldwide in the form of college-entrance exams, civil-service exams, 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. The second is about a two-track puzzle, why government can complete only half the dream while an enterprise must run the whole, in a single line, a CEO cannot staff by kinship, or the firm perishes, and behind it lies the root difference between the logic of the work and the logic of enfeoffment. The third walks into the West to see something strikingly at odds with the usual story: 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 goes straight back to the invention of Chinese ancestors thirteen centuries ago. This chapter shows one thing clearly: the examination system is not a Chinese story, it is a shared human floor, but its boundary is the same East and West, the highest position never passes through the examination, because enfeoffment will not abolish itself.
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.