MCLC: the real China model

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rowena He <rowenahe at gmail.com>
Subject: the real China model
*******************************************

Source: NYT (11/13/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/opinion/the-real-china-model.html

The Real China Model
By MARK ELLIOTT

IN the ongoing discussion of so-called Western and Chinese models of
political development, a number of commentators have recently drawn
attention to China’s “meritocratic” practices as deeply rooted political
traditions that remain an effective vehicle for any citizen to rise to the
very top of the country’s leadership structure.

With “princelings” — sons of China’s revolutionary heroes — likely to make
up a big part of the Communist Party’s new Standing Committee, the case
for meritocracy in China’s current political system is tough to make, but
I will leave this question to students of modern Chinese politics.

As a historian, however, I cannot let pass unchallenged the
characterization of premodern Chinese political culture as “meritocratic.”

Zhang Weiwei, a political scientist and best-selling author, suggested in
these pages that “the Communist Party of China may arguably be one of the
world’s most meritocratic institutions” (“Meritocracy versus democracy,”
Nov. 10). Whether in essays by political observers or in remarks by
Communist Party leaders, references to “meritocracy” like Zhang’s
inevitably call upon associations with China’s fabled examination system,
broadly instituted in the 7th century A.D. and liquidated only many
centuries later, in 1905.

The popular perception of the examinations (called keju in Chinese)
maintains that they served as an objective tool whereby all aspirants to
public office were measured according to their ability to prove mastery of
a substantial canon of classical texts, wherein was believed to lie the
knowledge essential to good government.

Since (almost) any male was eligible to take the exams, the idea was that
they regularly elevated top talent from across the country into the elite,
injecting new ideas and new blood into the body politic and ensuring an
avenue upward for clever, ambitious individuals.

In this view, to which proponents of the “China model” like Zhang
evidently subscribe, up until a little more than a century ago, a young
man with no connections could dream of becoming a powerful (and wealthy)
minister if he only studied hard enough.
It’s an admirable ideal. But how meritocratic was the examination system
in its actual practice?

Over the last 20 years, research has shown that the keju was far from the
“ladder of success” it was long widely reputed to be. We know that in the
Ming dynasty (1368-1644), for instance, merchants’ sons were not allowed
to take the examinations at all, and that in the Qing (1644-1911), as
Benjamin Elman, a scholar from Princeton University, has decisively shown,
“the content of the civil service competition clearly excluded over 90
percent of China’s people from even the first step on the ladder to
success.”

In other words, to have any kind of reasonable shot at passing the exams,
you needed to come from a family with an established tradition of
classical literacy, meaning a family with money to buy books or close
connections to another such family. Only 10 percent of the population made
that cut.

Furthermore, as a former student of mine, Lawrence Zhang, persuasively
argues in his dissertation, the number of Qing officials whose path to
glory was facilitated by office purchase has been considerably
underestimated. Not only did families from outside the “power elite” spend
money to advance their sons in the competition, literati families
themselves — long thought to have no need to sink to such tawdry schemes —
used their money freely to game the system. With the odds of making it all
the way to the highest levels of the exams literally one in a million, who
can blame them?

The fact is that a majority of elites in imperial China relied on means
other than “merit” to succeed politically: They depended on family
connections and material resources, much like political elites in Western
societies. Because so few people ever had any hope of passing the exams
and yet so many still took part, the consensus today is that the main
significance of the examination system was the reinforcement and
reproduction of specific modes of elite discourse that served state needs
on social, political and cultural levels. Contrary to the claims of Zhang
and like-minded writers, it had little to do with scouring every village
of the empire in the search for geniuses to recruit to court service.

That is not to say the system was totally ineffective. Then, as now,
people of merit were indeed chosen for official service. It’s just that
most of them were not chosen in an especially meritocratic way, if by
“meritocratic” we mean “judged superior according to an objective standard
of ability” (like an examination of philosophical knowledge and literary
skill).

Writers like Zhang Weiwei may disagree with that understanding of
meritocracy, since in Chinese they use the classical phrase xuanxian
renneng , “selecting the wise and employing the capable” — hardly the same
thing, I would suggest, since it says nothing about how selection happens.
It may well be that we are dealing with very different definitions of what
constitutes “meritocracy” in the first place.

Of course, among much of Chinese society before the 20th century the
belief prevailed that “anyone could make it,” and the state connived at
this; but literary sources make it clear that only the naïve clung to such
a fantasy.

That present-day commentators still promote outmoded thinking regarding
the imperial “meritocracy” demonstrates not only the long half-life of
that ideology, but also the strong hold that the Chinese state continues
to have over much of China’s (and not only China’s) intelligentsia. That
hold, rather than meritocracy, is a much better example of the way in
which the effects of China’s long history continue to be felt today.

Mark Elliott is the Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian
History, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard
University.