The Chinese Civil Service Examination

The distinction of producing the world's first system of qualifying testing unquestionably belongs to imperial China, which predated the West in this area by a thousand years or more. As early as the Chou dynasty (ca. 1122–256 B.C. ) some form of tests existed for identifying the talented among the common people, and during the T'ang dynasty (A.D. 618–907) these were developed into a formal system of examinations.^[1] But it was from around A.D. 1000, when imperial power rose to near absolutism in the Sung dynasty (960–1279), that the civil service examination was opened to nearly everyone and became the most important avenue to position, power, and prestige in China.^[2] The system took its final form during the Ming dynasty (1368–1662) and remained in force until

the first decade of the twentieth century.^[3] It attracted Western attention as early as the sixteenth century, and the British civil service examinations both in India and at home were influenced by the Chinese examination system.^[4]

In a history radically different from the West, the power of hereditary aristocracy in China was largely finished by the time of the Sung dynasty. Thenceforth, the class holding power, wealth, and prestige was composed mainly of administrators and bureaucrats in the emperor's civil service. Membership in this class depended more on passing the civil service examination than on parentage. Persons from certain occupations (and their immediate descendants) were excluded from the examinations: "watchmen, executioners, yamen torturers, labourers, detectives, jailors, coroners, play actors, slaves, beggars, boatpeople, scavengers, musicians and a few others."^[5] Still, the great majority of the population was eligible, and the examinations effectively prevented the formation of a hereditary ruling class. For example, the lists of those who passed the highest-level examinations in 1148 and 1256 show that only 40 percent were sons, grandsons, or great-grandsons of civil servants, while the rest came from families with no history in the bureaucracy.^[6] Thus, for nearly a thousand years, beneath the overall control of an emperor, China was governed by a meritocratic elite.

It was an elite with distinct privileges. Those who passed the examinations given in the prefectural capitals were designated sheng-yuan , or government students. This entitled them to wear a distinctive dress and to courteous treatment from government officials. They were exempted from government labor service and, should they run afoul of the law, from the demeaning punishment of lashing. These perquisites were not perennial, however. Shengyuan had to pass the examination each time it was given (every three years) to retain their status.^[7] Those who went on to pass higher-level examinations became government officials and enjoyed great privilege, power, and wealth.

Because they constituted the gateways to exalted position, people reputedly spared no exertion to achieve success in examinations. According to C. T. Hu,^[8] families with high aspirations for their sons would even commence their education before birth by

"requiring expectant mothers to be exposed to books and cultural objects" (a waste of time in this male-dominated system, it would seem, if the baby turned out to be a girl). Aspiring scholars brooked no distractions in their quest for knowledge. When he was young and poor, one famous eighteenth-century poet, scholar, and official "confined himself and two younger brothers in a second floor room without stairs for more than a year at a time, in order not to interrupt their studies."^[9] Another is said to have carried his reading into the night by the light of fireflies he kept in a gauze bag. (Some of these stories, however, may have become embellished with retelling. Dubious about the efficacy of fireflies, for example, the K'ang Hsi emperor had his retainers collect hundreds of them and found that he could not read a single character by their light.)^[10]

The prefectural examinations were the beginning of a multistage process. The number who passed varied with the region, historical period, and needs of the bureaucracy, but the range seems to have been from 1 to 10 percent. Those who passed the prefectural examination were eligible for a further preparatory examination that, if they passed (about half did), qualified them for an examination held every three years in the provincial capital. Successful candidates at the provincial level (again, 1 to 10%) were admitted to the metropolitan examination, also held each three years, in the national capital. Those who passed this examination were summoned to the palace for a final examination conducted by the emperor himself, on the basis of which their final rank on the list of successful candidates was determined. Those who passed all of these examinations were appointed to administrative posts or to the prestigious Hanlin Academy. (Its name translatable as "The Forest of Pencils," or "Brushes," scholars of the Hanlin Academy compiled books and drafted decrees for the emperor.) Lower-level official appointments were often also given to many who qualified for the metropolitan examination but did not pass it.^[11]

Masses of candidates would present themselves for examinations—up to 10,000 for prefectural examinations and 20,000 for the provincial examinations in, for example, the southern provincial capital of Chiang-ning-fu. Examinees were crowded into

huge, walled compounds that contained thousands of tiny cells. Huddled in his cubicle for three days and two nights, under the scrutiny of guards who prowled the lanes and watched from towers, the candidate would write commentaries on the Confucian classics, compose poetry, and write essays on subjects pertaining to history, politics, and current affairs.^[12] No one could enter or leave the compound during an examination, a rule so strictly enforced as to cause certain inconveniences on occasion:

If a candidate died in the middle of an examination, the officials were presented with an annoying problem. The latch bar on the Great Gate was tightly closed and sealed, and since it was absolutely never opened ahead of the schedule, the beleaguered administrators had no alternative but to wrap the body in straw matting and throw it over the wall.^[13]

Numerous stories circulated of candidates going insane during the examination, or being visited by ghosts who would confuse and attack them in retaliation for evildoing, or assist them as a reward for some previous act of kindness.^[14] Accounts of miraculous events in examinations dramatized the Buddhist principle of preserving all living things: an examiner finally passed a paper he had twice rejected when, each time he discarded it, three rats brought it back to his desk. It was later ascertained that the candidate's family had not kept cats for three generations. Another candidate received the highest pass after an ant whose life he had saved posed as a missing dot in one of the characters in his essay—a flaw that would have been sufficient for disqualification.^[15]

Elaborate measures were taken to safeguard fairness and honesty in the examinations. Candidates were thoroughly scrutinized and searched on entering the examination compound and forbidden to leave while the test was in progress. These precautions were intended to prevent impostors from taking the test in someone's place, smuggling cribs into the examination, or consulting outside materials after the questions were known. Precautions also guarded against collusion or bias by graders. They were cloistered in the compound until all the tests had been evaluated.

Each paper was identified only by number and reproduced by professional copyists to prevent identification of the author by name or distinctive calligraphy. Each one was read independently by two evaluators, their sealed grades being opened and, if necessary, reconciled by a third.^[16]

Ingenious strategies were devised to defeat the safeguards and to enlist dishonest means to enhance one's chances of passing the test. Impostors did succeed in taking the examination for their friends or clients, and some clerks and officials were not above accepting bribes. Bookstores did brisk business in tiny printed books of the classics, with characters no larger than a fly's head, that were designed to be smuggled into the examinations.^[17] One form of collusion was for a candidate to arrange beforehand with a bribed or friendly grader that a certain character would appear in a specified space and line on the examination paper. This technique enabled the grader to identify his protégé's paper despite precautions of copying papers and identifying them only by number.^[18] Such tactics enabled numerous unqualified candidates to pass unscathed through the "thorny gates of learning" that constituted the examination system, such as eight who passed the metropolitan examination in 1156 although they were virtually illiterate.^[19]

One reason that crib books and answers smuggled into the examinations could be used with good effect is that the tests placed minimal stress on creativity. By the Ming dynasty, official dogma on the Confucian classics was fixed and allowed no room for individual interpretation. Topics were severely limited, and essays were constrained to such a rigid form that they became "no more than stylistic frippery and literary gyrations."^[20] The whole system atrophied. As Miyazaki points out, "Since officials were content as long as there were no serious errors and their fairness was not challenged, and since candidates feared that they would fail if they wrote something too different from the run-of-the-mill sorts of answers, both groups stifled any tendencies toward originality."^[21]

As early as the eleventh century (Sung dynasty), the problems attendant on this orientation of the system were recognized. Critics observed that the examination system awarded administrative

posts to those who demonstrated an ability to write poetry and to memorize classical texts. They questioned the relevance of these academic skills to the good character and ability to govern that ought to be requisite for civil servants.^[22] The weakness of China's bureaucratic system became painfully apparent as China was increasingly exposed to foreign ideas and powers. As Otto Franke wrote in 1905, "Instead of wise and morally outstanding representatives of government authority the system supplied incompetent officials ignorant of the ways of the world; instead of an intellectual aristocracy [it supplied] a class of arrogant and narrow-minded literati."^[23] Humiliated by the Boxer Rebellion and the foreign intervention it brought in 1900, the government of the Ch'ing dynasty determined that China must modernize. A new educational system was announced for the entire country in 1901, and the traditional examination system proved to be incompatible with this innovation. The final metropolitan examination was held in 1904, and the system was formally abolished by edict of the empress dowager on September 2, 1905.^[24]

When compared with the history of Western institutions, the period of time over which the Chinese civil service examination system functioned is almost unbelievable. Despite its many critics and flaws, it underwent very little change for 500 years prior to its abolition, and it served for nearly 1,000 years as the major device for recruiting civil servants for China's powerful bureaucracy. Given this amazing persistence, together with the central role it played in imperial Chinese society, the Chinese civil service examination must certainly be credited as the most successful system of testing the world has ever known.