The civil service examination system, a
method of recruiting civil officials based on
merit rather than family or political connections, played an especially central role in
Chinese social and intellectual life from 650
to 1905. Passing the rigorous exams, which
were based on classical literature and philosophy, conferred a highly sought-after status,
and a rich literati culture in imperial China
ensued.
Civil service examinations connected various aspects of premodern politics, society, economy,
and intellectual life in imperial China. Local
elites and the imperial court continually influenced the
dynastic government to reexamine and adjust the classical curriculum and to entertain new ways to improve
the institutional system for selecting civil officials. As a
result, civil examinations, as a test of educational merit,
also served to tie the dynasty and literati culture together
bureaucratically.
Premodern civil service examinations, viewed by
some as an obstacle to modern Chinese state- building,
did in fact make a positive contribution to China’s emergence in the modern world. A classical education based
on nontechnical moral and political theory was as suitable
for selection of elites to serve the imperial state at its highest echelons as were humanism and a classical education
that served elites in the burgeoning nation-states of early
modern Europe. Moreover, classical examinations were
Explanation:
an effective cultural, social, political, and educational
construction that met the needs of the dynastic bureaucracy while simultaneously supporting late imperial social structure. Elite gentry and merchant status groups
were defined in part by examination degree credentials.
Civil service examinations by themselves were not an
avenue for considerable social mobility, that is, they were
not an opportunity for the vast majority of peasants and
artisans to move from the lower classes into elite circles.
The archives recording data from the years 1500 to 1900
indicate that peasants, traders, and artisans, who made
up 90 percent of the population, were not a significant
part of the 2 to 3 million candidates who usually took the
local biennial licensing tests . Despite this fact, a social
byproduct of the examinations was the limited circulation in the government of lower-level elites from gentry,
military, and merchant backgrounds.
One of the unintended consequences of the examinations was the large pool of examination failures who used
their linguistic and literary talents in a variety of nonofficial roles: One must look beyond the official meritocracy
to see the larger place of the millions of failures in the
civil service examinations. One of the unintended consequences of the examinations was the creation of legions
of classically literate men who used their linguistic talents
for a variety of nonofficial purposes: from physicians to
pettifoggers, from fiction writers to examination essay
teachers, and from ritual specialists to lineage agents.
Although women were barred from taking the exams,
they followed their own educational pursuits if only to
compete in ancillary roles, either as girls competing for
spouses or as mothers educating their sons.
