We should be careful not to extol the virtues of the imperial examination system too much. I also used to believe this but when I did my research to write on the history of China I had to face the fact that it was a deeply flawed system back in the imperial times, though in its time it had a reason to exist and remain an institution, it’s not quite meritocracy as we understand it to be today.
There is first of all a problem with pure meritocracy - not everyone comes from the same background. This is why in China today (but they’re not the only country doing it), ethnic minorities have easier access to universities among. A poor farmer coming from a rural village will simply not have the same outcomes available to them than a coastal business owner’s son. Over generations, these starting positions do get equalized, but it’s a long process with unequal development of course.
This was also the case historically with the examination system. At its core this system, which had different levels for every promotion, allowed anyone to take it. But not many families could not only afford to pay a tutor for their son, but also let their son study for several years instead of helping on the farm. For some “not too well-off” families, this could be a way into money, so you would see it at the landowning level (feudalism in China was different from European feudalism and while I don’t know too much about it to say definitively, there definitely were landowners who were not nobles, and land was openly traded between families and the state, and this is how there came to be these landlords that got purged during the revolution.)
In fact, even at its largest in history, comparatively few officials came from the imperial examination compared to aristocratic families that just got a job because of their background. I don’t have the numbers right now but it was much lower than you’d expect from how much this system is said to be important. The third mechanism for recruitment was receiving a recommendation from someone already in the administration.
Materially speaking, the system got started in the early Han but saw widespread use in the Song dynasty. This was because when the Tang came to an end following countless rebellions and wars, many of the aristocratic families that had a place in government died off or vanished, so there needed to be a new ‘strata’ of advisors trained for the needs of this new state. They had unified China through conquest and urgently needed civil servants to now administrate this territory.
And even during the Song expansion of the system, only about 50% of the population was eligible for the exams in the first place, and far fewer could even afford to study for it. Women were excluded by default, as well as merchants (because confucianism considered merchants to be a low class as they did not produce anything themselves lol). In the end, only about 100 people were allowed to pass the exam each year, which is certainly a choice, but also seems very low for a large country such as China - not only geographically, but also economically and demographically, with an estimated 175 million people. And 100 was just for the “entry-level” exam, there were further ones you could take to be promoted further up with even lower passing rates.
We should be careful not to extol the virtues of the imperial examination system too much. I also used to believe this but when I did my research to write on the history of China I had to face the fact that it was a deeply flawed system back in the imperial times, though in its time it had a reason to exist and remain an institution, it’s not quite meritocracy as we understand it to be today.
There is first of all a problem with pure meritocracy - not everyone comes from the same background. This is why in China today (but they’re not the only country doing it), ethnic minorities have easier access to universities among. A poor farmer coming from a rural village will simply not have the same outcomes available to them than a coastal business owner’s son. Over generations, these starting positions do get equalized, but it’s a long process with unequal development of course.
This was also the case historically with the examination system. At its core this system, which had different levels for every promotion, allowed anyone to take it. But not many families could not only afford to pay a tutor for their son, but also let their son study for several years instead of helping on the farm. For some “not too well-off” families, this could be a way into money, so you would see it at the landowning level (feudalism in China was different from European feudalism and while I don’t know too much about it to say definitively, there definitely were landowners who were not nobles, and land was openly traded between families and the state, and this is how there came to be these landlords that got purged during the revolution.)
In fact, even at its largest in history, comparatively few officials came from the imperial examination compared to aristocratic families that just got a job because of their background. I don’t have the numbers right now but it was much lower than you’d expect from how much this system is said to be important. The third mechanism for recruitment was receiving a recommendation from someone already in the administration.
Materially speaking, the system got started in the early Han but saw widespread use in the Song dynasty. This was because when the Tang came to an end following countless rebellions and wars, many of the aristocratic families that had a place in government died off or vanished, so there needed to be a new ‘strata’ of advisors trained for the needs of this new state. They had unified China through conquest and urgently needed civil servants to now administrate this territory.
And even during the Song expansion of the system, only about 50% of the population was eligible for the exams in the first place, and far fewer could even afford to study for it. Women were excluded by default, as well as merchants (because confucianism considered merchants to be a low class as they did not produce anything themselves lol). In the end, only about 100 people were allowed to pass the exam each year, which is certainly a choice, but also seems very low for a large country such as China - not only geographically, but also economically and demographically, with an estimated 175 million people. And 100 was just for the “entry-level” exam, there were further ones you could take to be promoted further up with even lower passing rates.