Abstract
Scholars often contend that civil examinations were an important part of what made imperial China a political meritocracy. They point to the examination system to show that the selection process served more as a common training program for literati than as a gate-keeper to keep non-elites out. Despite the symbiotic relations between the court and its literati, the emperor played the final card in the selection process. The asymmetrical relations between the throne and its elites nevertheless empowered elites to seek upward mobility as scholar-officials through the system. But true social mobility, peasants becoming officials, was never the goal of state policy in late imperial China; a modest level of social circulation was an unexpected consequence of the meritocratic civil service. Moreover, the merit-based bureaucracy never broke free of its dependence on an authoritarian imperial system. A modern political system might be more compatible with meritocracy, however.
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Notes
- 1.
Elman 2000.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Tillman 1992.
- 6.
Elman 2005.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
See Ho 1964.
- 11.
Bai 1995.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
See Brokaw and Chow 2005.
- 15.
Elman 1990.
- 16.
See Shang 2003.
- 17.
See Elman 2001.
- 18.
- 19.
See Chaffee 1995.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
Elman 2000, 299–326.
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
Elman 2000, chapter 11.
- 27.
Elman 2003.
- 28.
Elman 2000, chapter 11.
- 29.
Elman 2002.
- 30.
Elman 2000, chapter 11.
- 31.
Strauss 1994.
- 32.
Depierre 1987.
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Elman, B.A. (2014). Late Traditional Chinese Civilization in Motion, 1400–1900. In: Gal, O., Zheng, Y. (eds) Motion and Knowledge in the Changing Early Modern World. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 30. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7383-7_9
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