The exam that broke society
Keju, China’s incredibly difficult civil service test, strengthened the state at the cost of freedom and creativity
Excerpt from the scroll Viewing the Pass Lists, traditionally attributed to Qiu Ying (1494-1552). National Palace Museum, Taipei/Wikipedia
On 7 and 8 June 2023, close to 13 million
high-school students in China sat for the world’s most gruelling
college entrance exam. ‘Imagine,’ wrote a Singapore journalist, ‘the
SAT, ACT, and all of your AP tests rolled into two days. That’s Gao Kao, or “higher education exam”.’ In 2023, almost 2.6 million applied to sit China’s civil service exam to compete for only 37,100 slots.
Gao Kao and China’s civil service exam trace their origin to, and are modelled on, an ancient Chinese institution, Keju,
the imperial civil service exam established by the Sui Dynasty
(581-618). It can be translated as ‘subject recommendation’. Toward the
end of its reign, the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) abolished it in 1905 as
part of its effort to reform and modernise the Chinese system. Until
then, Keju had been the principal recruitment route for imperial bureaucracy. Keju reached its apex during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). All the prime ministers but one came through the Keju route and many of them were ranked at the very top in their exam cohort.
Keju was sheer memorisation. Testing was based primarily on
the Confucian classics. And there was a lot to memorise. There were some
400,000 characters and phrases in the Confucian classics, according to
Benjamin Elman’s book A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (2000). Preparation for the Keju
began early. Boys aged as young as three to five began to practise
their memorisation drills. After the immediate environs of their
families, Keju was their first exposure to the world. Keju, which was open only to the male gender, was fiercely competitive. Using figures provided by Elman, during the Ming dynasty, 1 million regularly took the qualifying tests and, of these, eventually about 400 would make it to the final Jinshi round. Passing the first tier of Keju, known as the provincial exam, was a lot easier – working out to be 4 per cent on average during the Ming. Still, this was more cut-throat than getting into Harvard in most years.
The prestige of Keju
was such that even an emperor coveted its bona fides. According to a
legend, an emperor in the late Tang dynasty (618-907) hung on the wall
of an imperial palace a wooden tablet proudly displaying his Keju
degree – only it was fake. The emperor had it made for himself. This
credentialism pervades officialdom today. Many Chinese government
officials claim PhD degrees – earned or otherwise – on their résumés.
Much of the academic literature focuses on the meritocracy of Keju. The path-breaking book in this genre is Ping-ti Ho’s The Ladder of Success in Imperial China (1962). One of his observations is eye catching: more than half of those who obtained the Juren degree were first generation: ie, none of their ancestors had ever attained a Juren status. (Juren was, at the time, the first degree granted in the three-tiered hierarchy of Keju.) More recent literature demonstrates the political effects of Keju. In 1905, the Qing dynasty abolished Keju, dashing the aspirations of millions and sparking regional rebellions that eventually toppled China’s last imperial regime in 1911.
Keju cultivated and imposed the values of deference to authority and collectivism
The political dimension of Keju goes far beyond its
meritocracy and its connection to the 1911 republican revolution. For an
institution that had such deep penetration, both cross-sectionally in
society and across time in history, Keju was all encompassing,
laying claims to the time, effort and cognitive investment of a
significant swathe of the male Chinese population. It was a state
institution designed to augment the state’s own power and capabilities.
Directly, the state monopolised the very best human capital; indirectly,
the state deprived society of access to talent and pre-empted organised religion, commerce and the intelligentsia. Keju anchored Chinese autocracy.
![Many young Chinese people are pictured in a long line outside an examination centre in a commercial district]()
Candidates
queue for the national civil service examination on 27 March 2021 in
Taiyuan, Shanxi province, China. Photo by Wu Junjie/China News Service
via Getty
The impact of Keju is still felt today, not only in the form and practice of Gao Kao and the civil service exam but also because Keju incubated values and work ethics. Today, Chinese minds still bear its imprint. For one, Keju elevated the value of education and we see this effect today. A 2020 study shows that, for every doubling of successful Keju candidates per 10,000 of the population in the Ming-Qing period, there was a 6.9 per cent increase in years of schooling in 2010. The Keju
exams loom as part of China’s human capital formation today, but they
also cultivated and imposed the values of deference to authority and
collectivism that the Chinese Communist Party has reaped richly for its
rule and legitimacy.
But isn’t it the case that the West – Prussia, then the United
Kingdom and the United States – all had their own civil service exams?
How is it possible that a strong bureaucracy complemented rather than
supplanted political and religious pluralisms in the West?
China and the West bureaucratised
under an entirely different sequential order and under different
contextual conditions, and these differences entail substantial
implications for the subsequent political development. The civil service
in the West was not a single-platform institution in the way that Keju
was. There was a military civil service, a civil service for foreign
affairs, for forestry, etc, etc. Multiple platforms of bureaucratic
recruitment competed with one another and, collectively, they competed
with other channels of mobility, such as the political parties and
commerce. In the US, the Pendleton Act of
1883 removed the power of Congress and the political parties to control
civil service appointments. Before the 1883 Act,
federal appointees returned a portion of their salaries to the party
that had appointed them. Civil service never replaced Congress or
political parties in toto, as witnessed by the fact that
Congress today wields enormous power over the bureaucracy, including the
power of the purse that funds its operation.
Another difference – and this is a big one – is timing. In the 19th
century, the US introduced bureaucracy when ‘[t]he two institutions of
constraint, the rule of law and accountability, were the most highly
developed,’ as Francis Fukuyama writes in Political Order and Political Decay (2014). The state in the US and the UK was already ‘a Shackled Leviathan’, to use the words of Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson in their influential book, The Narrow Corridor
(2020). The sequential order ran from politics to bureaucracy, not as
in China from bureaucracy to politics. In the West, society was vibrant
long before the state ramped up its administrative capacity. The rule of
law, the principle of accountability, and the powers of the legislature
and the political parties were already firmly entrenched. Yes, the
Leviathan was shackled by society, but different parts of the Leviathan
shackled each other. Bureaucracy in the US formed and gained power only
under a myriad of constraints and contending forces, rather than the
socioeconomic tabula rasa that greeted the arrival of Chinese bureaucracy.
Vladimir Putin’s autocracy pales in comparison with that of China’s president Xi Jinping
The civil service in the UK and the US
was ensconced in pluralistic societies that enjoyed a degree of
religious freedom and a modicum of emergent electoral democracy. A world
of competing forces and constraints attended the arrival of
bureaucracy, even helped to create it. Government bureaucracy competed
in some situations or complemented in others with church, universities,
commerce and other social groups for human capital, legitimacy and
resources. For political development, birth order really matters.
In his book Strong Societies and Weak States
(1988), Joel S Migdal identifies a common problem in the developing
world – the struggle of the state to acquire autonomy and capabilities.
China, through history and today, is exactly the opposite. The state
dominates society. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is autocratic but his
autocracy pales in comparison with that of China’s president Xi Jinping.
Harassed and targeted by the state, opposition parties are still legal
and tenuously legitimate in Russia and some of Putin’s critics command a
sizeable following. Even the power to commit violence – war fighting –
was outsourced to a private force, the mercenaries led by Yevgeny
Prigozhin, an arrangement not even remotely conceivable in China.
![An anxious looking young woman and a young man are reading notebooks or textbooks outside an examination hall]()
Last-minute revision before the 2010 civil service examination in Hefei, Anhui province, China. Photo AFP/Getty
Since 2013, against the increasingly dictatorial Xi, there have been
two prominent critics of the president and both were dispensed with
summarily. Unlike Putin who has to rely on extra-legal means to silence
his critics, suggesting some formal constraints on him, Xi directed the
full apparatus of the Chinese state after his critics. The Chinese court
sentenced the businessman Ren Zhiqiang to 18 years
in prison, and Tsinghua University promptly fired Xu Zhangrun, a law
professor who wrote an open letter criticising Xi. Standing forlornly by
themselves, neither Ren nor Xu commanded any formal political
organisations behind them. In 2022, the Chinese regime put almost 400 million people under some sort of COVID-19 lockdown, a feat that is unimaginable in any other country.
An ultimate autocracy is one that reigns without society. Society shackles the state in many ways. One is ex ante: it checks and balances the actions of the state. The other is ex post.
A strong society provides an outside option to those inside the state.
Sometimes, this is derisively described as ‘a revolving door’, but it
may also have the positive function of checking the power of the state.
State functionaries can object to state actions by voting with their
feet, as many US civil servants did during the Donald Trump
administration, and thereby drain the state of the valuable human
capital it needs to function and operate. A strong society raises the
opportunity costs for the state to recruit human capital but such a
receptor function of society has never existed at scale in imperial
China nor today, thanks – in large part, I would argue – to Keju.
Keju was so precocious that it pre-empted and displaced an
emergent society. Meritocracy empowered the Chinese state at a time when
society was still at an embryonic stage. Massive resources and
administrative manpower were poured into Keju such that it
completely eclipsed all other channels of upward mobility that could
have emerged. In that sense, the celebration by many of Keju’s
meritocracy misses the bigger picture of Chinese history. It is a view
of a tree rather than of a forest. The crowding-out effect of Keju is captured succinctly in a book from the late 19th century:
Since the introduction of the examination system … scholars
have forsaken their studies, peasants their ploughs, artisans their
crafts, and merchants their trades; all have turned their attention to
but one thing – government office. This is because the official has all
the combined advantages of the four without requiring their necessary
toil …
This is the larger impact of Keju. Its impressive bureaucratic mobility demolished all other mobility channels and possibilities. Keju
was an anti-mobility mobility channel. It packed all the upward
mobility within one channel – that of the state. Society was crowded
out, and over time, due to its deficient access to quality human
capital, it atrophied. This is the root of the power of Chinese
autocracy and, I would argue, it is a historical development that is
unique to China and explains the awesome power of Chinese autocracy.
China has legions of intellectuals, but it is bereft of an intelligentsia
Take intellectuals as an example. Keju inculcated literacy
and helped create a vibrant book readership. Book ownership was
widespread as early as the Ming dynasty. ‘More books were available,’ writes Timothy Brook in The Troubled Empire
(2010), ‘and more people read and owned more books, in the late Ming
than at any earlier time in history, anywhere in the world.’ Brook sums
up the impressions of Jesuits visiting China: ‘More surprising, perhaps,
is that complete illiterates may well have been a minority in the late
Ming.’
But a striking fact is that no organised intelligentsia of any
significant size and visibility ever emerged in imperial China. There
were no Chinese equivalents of the Royal Society in Britain or the many
learned societies in France. One that left a mark is the Donglin
Academy, a private discussion forum founded in 1111 by intellectuals of
the Song dynasty (960-1279). The academy lasted as long as its founders’
lifespan and vanished into obscurity after their expiry. It was revived
in 1604 during the reign of the Wanli emperor (1573-1620), but it
operated as a political rather than an intellectual force. The
scholar-officials formed a Donglin Faction, later brutally put down by
the powerful eunuchs of the Ming court. The grand total of the second
life of the Donglin Academy is 21 years, from 1604 to 1625.
The term ‘scholar official’ is of Chinese coinage and it is evocative of China’s lacuna of intellectuals as an institutionalised establishment.
Compare that situation with Tsarist Russia, another autocracy. Russians
coined the term ‘intelligentsia’ – intellectuals as a class – and
Russian intellectuals have a long tradition of standing apart from and
defining their identity as separate to the state. China has legions of
intellectuals, but it is bereft of an intelligentsia.
Prior to Keju and even during the early centuries of Keju,
China had a plurality of upward mobility. Within bureaucracy, officials
were appointed through nepotism, family ties, heredity and
recommendations. Commerce, while always curtailed, was a nascent force,
promising to burst forward. The Song dynasty experienced a vibrant
development of commerce and a market economy. Although Confucianism was
always the first among equals, other ideologies, such as Legalism,
Daoism and Buddhism, cohabitated with Confucianism and vied with one
another for the Chinese population’s attention and adherence.
But these societal forces were too nascent and too embryonic by the time Keju
arrived and matured. They had yet to acquire their own unique identity,
significant organisation and autonomous agency. In imperial China,
there never was a level playing field between state and society, and
over nearly 1,500 years, Keju
further deprived the congenitally deficient society of its oxygen –
human capital. Fukuyama is right to assert that the Chinese state was
precocious, but it was precocious in a particular fashion: its precocity
contrasted sharply with the immaturity of Chinese society.
The most direct way Keju decimated Chinese society is through talent monopoly but there were others. Keju also monopolised the time and mental energy of its candidates. Keju was not a one-shot deal. A candidate could take the test multiple times. In a dataset that has information on the 11,706 Keju candidates during the Ming dynasty, the average age passing the final stage of Keju
was 32, approaching middle age at a time when average life expectancy
was much lower than today. The oldest in the dataset was was probably
Gui Youguang (1506-1571). Before passing the provincial examination in
1540 at the youngish age of 34, Gui had already failed it on six
occasions. He then proceeded to toil for more than 24 years of his life
and finally attained his Jinshi degree in 1565, although
ranking near the bottom of his class and at the ripe age of 59.
Unfortunately, he did not bask in his exalted status for long, as he
died aged 65. For him, and many others, Keju was a life-long endeavour.
![A man peers from a long line of cells constructed to ensure privacy during examination conditions. It is an old stereoscope pictur]()
View of the examination cells in Canton. Library of Congress
![A central path is flanked by rows of examination cells]()
Examination hall in Canton. Library of Congress
![Hundreds of examination cells spread before the eye in this aerial view of an old examination centre]()
Jiangnan imperial examination centre, Nanjing, c1913. Courtesy Historical Photos of China
The Keju curriculum was formidable and required memorising
close to 400,000 characters. Is there spare residual energy, capacity
and curiosity left to pursue other mentally taxing activities, such as
ideation of new thoughts, new politics, and discoveries of natural
phenomena? In my book The Rise and Fall of the EAST (2023), I show that Chinese technology began to stagnate as Keju gained dominance. The brain power that ended up in the state did not flow to Chinese society, the economy or human creativity.
Mental energy aside, the values drilled deeply into Keju candidates were pro-autocracy and authoritarian. Keju
legitimates statism. Boys as young as three or four began to practise
writing characters that were meant to instil admiration of, and devotion
to, the ideas and teachings of the master – Confucius – which would
eventually be tested on Keju. By the Ming dynasty, the initial plurality of the Keju
subjects gave way to one subject only, Confucianism – ‘knowledge of
classics, stereotyped theories of administration, and literary
attainments’.
Autocracy and Keju became ever more intimately intertwined
Imagine repeated exposures to the statist values at that tender age,
producing what psychologists call ‘an imprinting effect’. The autocratic
values were incubated in substance but also by the format of Keju; this was standardised testing par excellence. When Keju was first established, candidates were tested on a wide range of subject matters but, after the Song dynasty, the Keju
curriculum became progressively stratified and exceedingly narrow.
Candidates were required to fill in the blanks with missing words or
phrases in excerpted texts from the Confucian classics. The Yuan dynasty
(1271-1368) narrowed the Keju curriculum further. Only a
streamlined version of annotations of Confucian classics was allowed,
the so-called Neo-Confucianism, which was the brainchild of the great
Confucian scholar Zhu Xi (1130-1200) of the Song dynasty.
Neo-Confucianism is a pared-down version of classical Confucianism,
and it strips away some of the moral veneer of its classical
predecessor. Summarising a common view among historians, Peter K Bol observes in Neo-Confucianism in History
(2010) that this version of Confucianism ‘provided a justification for
seeking external authority in the ruler’ and stipulated the
responsibility for transforming the world as that of the emperor alone.
The Neo-Confucianist Keju curriculum was rigid, narrow and
absolutist, and was single-minded in its advocacy of a hierarchical
order – subordination to the ruler, to the elderly, and to the male
gender. No scope for scepticism and ambiguity was allowed. Autocracy and
Keju thus became ever more intimately intertwined.
There was, however, a massive operational advantage to the
Neo-Confucianist curriculum: it standardised everything. Standardisation
abhors nuance and the evaluations became more straightforward as the
baseline comparison was more clearly delineated. There was objectivity,
even if the objectivity was a manufactured artefact. The Chinese
invented the modern state and meritocracy, but above all the Chinese
invented specialised standardised testing – the memorisation, cognitive
inclination and frame of references of an exceedingly narrow ideology.
Ming standardised Keju further: it enforced a highly scripted essay format, known as the ‘eight-legged essay’, or baguwen in Chinese (八股文), to which every Keju candidate had to adhere. A ‘leg’ here refers to each section of an essay, with a Keju essay requiring eight sections: 1) breaking open the topic; 2) receiving the topic; 3) beginning the discussion; 4) the initial leg; 5) the transition leg; 6) the middle leg; 7) the later leg; and 8) conclusion.
The eight-legged essay fixed more than the aggregate structure of
exposition. The specifications were granular and detailed. For example,
the number of phrases was specified in each of the sections and the
entire essay required expressions in paired sentences – a minimum of six
paired sentences, up to a maximum of 12. The key contribution of the
eight-legged essay is that it packed information into a pre-set
presentational format.
Standardisation was designed to scale the Keju system and it
succeeded brilliantly in that regard, but it had a devastating effect
on expositional freedom and human creativity. All elements of
subjectivity and judgment were taken out. In his book Traditional Government in Imperial China (1982), the historian Ch’ien Mu describes the ‘eight-legged essay’ as ‘the greatest destroyer of human talent’.
A bane to human creativity was a boon to autocracy. Standardised testing was conducive to authoritarianism. In his book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?
(2014), Yong Zhao, professor at the School of Education of the
University of Kansas, notes a natural compatibility between
authoritarianism and standardised testing. Authoritarianism, he writes,
‘sees education as a way to instil in all students the same knowledge
and skills deemed valuable by the authority.’ The standardised tests
appeal to an authoritative body for correct answers; as Zhao said in an
interview for the US National Education Policy Center, the tests ‘force
students to comply with the answers or the way of thinking that the
authority wants.’ The direction of deference is automatically
established: ‘Then you hold the students, the teachers and, to a lesser
extent, the parents accountable for being able to get the answers that
the authority wants and to show that they have mastered the skills and
the knowledge and possibly even the beliefs that the authority wants.’
Confucianism, thus, functioned as an equivalent of the abstruse and arcane vocabulary of the SAT
In his book The WEIRDest People in the World (2020), Joseph Henrich posited that the West prospered because of its early lead in literacy. Yet the substantial Keju
literacy produced none of the liberalising effects on Chinese ideas,
economy or society. The literacy that Henrich had in mind was a
particular kind of literacy – Protestant literacy – and the contrast
with Keju literacy could not have been sharper. Keju
literacy was drilled and practised in classical and highly stratified
Chinese, the language of the imperial court rather than the language of
the masses, in sharp contrast to Protestant literacy. Protestant
literacy empowered personal agency by embracing and spreading
vernaculars of the masses. Henrich’s liberalising ‘WEIRD’ effect – Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic – was a byproduct of Protestant literacy. It is no accident that Keju literacy produced an opposite effect.
Why was there such a close affinity between Keju and
Confucianism? The answer is not obvious. Ancient China boasted other
great ideologies and traditions, such as Daoism, Mohism and Legalism,
but they were completely absent in the Keju curriculum. This ideological single-mindedness of Keju
is puzzling and it is puzzling still considering the following: in my
book, I document that several emperors who played an instrumental role
in inventing and developing Keju were not Confucianists themselves.
The answer may lie in an operational imperative of Keju.
Standardised testing is necessary when you want to scale the evaluation.
Subjective evaluations, such as relying on reputation, recommendations
and interviews, are feasible when the number of candidates under
evaluation is small. For example, the Big Three colleges in the US –
Harvard, Yale and Princeton – began to embrace the SAT (the standardised
test for college admissions) when they started recruiting beyond their
traditional, narrow socioeconomic group – the white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants (WASPs) in the elite private schools of the east coast. The
Chinese emperors made the same decision when they expanded bureaucratic
recruitment beyond the nobility and wealthy elites. Standardising and
constricting the Keju curriculum were not an optional luxury; it was a necessity to scale Keju.
Confucianism offered an operational advantage. It is textually rich;
the verbiage is massive, and the pontifications are incredibly involved,
not unlike the verbal portion of the SAT. As noted before, there are
approximately 400,000 characters and phrases in the Confucian classics.
Using a website,
Chinese Text Project, ‘an online open-access digital library that makes
pre-modern Chinese texts available to readers and researchers all
around the world’, I found that among the classical texts created before
the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) Confucianism is paragraphically the
richest, with 11,184 paragraphs. No other ideologies come remotely
close. Legalism has 1,783 paragraphs; Daoism has 1,161 paragraphs, and
Mohism has 915 paragraphs. Confucianism, thus, functioned as an
equivalent of the abstruse and arcane vocabulary of the SAT, and it was
most suited for screening and selecting the desired human capital from a
large pool of candidates.
Is it at all possible that Keju successfully anchored and
shaped the nature of the Chinese autocracy because of this accidental
feature of Confucianism and on account of an operational technicality?
Let’s pause, savour and ponder for a moment the momentous implications
of this proposition.
This essay is adapted from the book The
Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exam, Autocracy, Stability and
Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to its Decline (2023) by Yasheng Huang.