Abstract
Meritocracy embraces the value of social mobility based on ability and effort, and, conversely, despises entrenched elites. I demonstrate that the civil service examination system of Song dynasty China (c. 960–1279CE) was the world’s earliest meritocratic bureaucracy. First, the examination, known as keju in Chinese, was open to all males regardless of age and family background, including those from the families of merchants and artisans, who in the preceding (Tang) dynasty were forbidden to take the exam. Second, unlike the Tang dynasty, political selection in Song was entirely based on exam success; candidates were no longer allowed to “signal” to the examiners their portfolio of work before the exam, which previously formed an important part of the selection process. Third, to ensure social mobility the highest qualification of jinshi was not heritable. Fourth, to ensure a level playing field mass education was provided by the merchants in the form of private academies. The genesis of this meritocratic institution was however “accidental.” It came about as a consequence of the combination of (1) the rise of a merchant class whose foremost interest was to fight for their children’s inclusion in the imperial Chinese bureaucracy; (2) the Song emperor’s preference to reduce the military’s influence; and (3) the need for more officials to manage the growing number of market towns that flourished in the wake of commercialization. All of these ensured a vast expansion of the civil service examination. Finally, I show that this meritocratic institution had persistent effects. Using data on the Ming-Qing dynasties as example, I find that historical prefectures with the highest jinshi density still have higher years of schooling today.
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Source: Adapted from Kung (2021)
Data Source: The Twenty-Five Histories of China (Ershi wushi)
Source: Adapted from Kracke (1947)
Source: Plotted based on Chen and Kung (2022)
Source: Adapted from Chen and Kung (2022)
Source: Adapted from Chen and Kung (2022)
Source: Adapted from Chen et al. (2020)
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Notes
The relevant literature is now voluminous and diverse, ranging from attempts to delineate the boundaries between firms and markets as alternative means of resource allocation (Coase 1937), to understanding the contractual nature of the firm (Cheung 1969, 1983) and the dynamics of its internal organization (Williamson, 1975, 1985), and not least to appreciating the role of property rights as an incentive mechanism through the lens of history (North 1981, 1990).
They do so by using the mortality rate of colonial settlers as instrumental variable to exogenously identify the effects of institutions—both past and present—on long-term economic growth.
The volume on the Handbook of Historical Economics coedited by Bisin and Giovanni (2021) is a testimony to this endeavor.
They include the American Revolution; the French Revolution; the Industrial Revolution; and the liberal revolution, which originated in Britain but spread across Europe.
Indeed the Tang had distinctly more ministers than the Song did. On the aristocratic nature of the Tang see Tackett (2014).
The civil service exam was administered by the Ministry of Rites on the other hand.
The seventy-two years of the Five Dynasties sandwiched between Tang and Song produced another 661 jinshi.
The number of jinshi scholars in Song is comparable to that produced in the Ming and Qing dynasties combined which jointly spanned nearly six centuries (c. 1368–1911).
An exception was junior government officials at the seventh rank (out of a total of nine)—an appointment which an influential father-official could still confer on his sons. In a practice known as “legacy” or yinbu, sons of prime ministers who did not have civil service exam qualifications were eligible to be placed on the waiting list for such employment (You 2001). Only sons of the most reputable ministers could be appointed as county magistrates—the highest level of official appointment through this pathway. By comparison with the Tang dynasty, the vastly fewer prime ministers in Song probably rendered the effect of this practice negligible, not to mention that descendants of prime ministers tended to have considerably higher ambitions.
A detailed narrative and analysis of the Song commercial revolution can be found in Chen and Kung (2022).
A historian of Song China, Liu (2015), spoke admirably of the Song for being the only “fiscal state” in China that ever existed before the nineteenth century.
Huang and Yang (2022) indeed argue that, by fending off interference from aristocrats, the Chinese civil service exam contributed to the longevity of Chinese Emperors vis-à-vis their European counterparts.
It is certainly possible to make a case that a downside of meritocracy was the allocation of a huge amount of time and effort to exam preparation, especially when what was being examined — the Confucian classics — arguably contributed little to economic growth. This forms the basis of Needham (1969) question of why modern science (and as a corollary economic growth) developed only in Europe but not China. Among the many attempts to answer this question, Mokyr (2002) concept of “useful knowledge” to account for the genesis of the Industrial Revolution provides a useful vantage point from which to appreciate China’s failure to experience a breakthrough in economic growth as Europe and Japan did (see also Brandt et al. 2014).
The authors have controlled for a range of variables that might be correlated with the years of schooling today, the most notable ones being economic prosperity and geography. Moreover, they have also identified the exogenous variation in jinshi density across 278 Chinese prefectures by constructing an instrumental variable using a prefecture’s shortest river distance to its nearest sites of pine and bamboo, which are the two key ingredients required to produce ink and paper for woodblock printing at the time. The distance to these two raw ingredients is considered important because textbooks and exam aids (reference books) were crucial to keju exam success. For further details see Chen et al. (2020).
A prominent example is the 2010 Chinese Family Panel Survey (CFPS), a nationally representative survey conducted by the Institute of Social Science Survey of Peking University covering 14,960 households in 25 provinces (refer to the center’s website http://www.isss.edu.cn/cfps/ for further details).
For example, suppose there were 90 jinshi with the surname Gong in Suzhou prefecture in the Ming-Qing period. Given that the population in this prefecture with the surname Gong today is 34,000, the normalized jinshi density for patrilineal ancestors having the surname Gong in Suzhou prefecture is thus 0.00264.
For example, excluding ethnic minorities the Chinese have only 4,100 surnames compared to 270,000 for England and Wales (Clark and Cummins, 2015).
The use of this particular measure as a proxy is premised on the assumption that genealogy is ‘essential to the existence of a lineage’ (Bol, 2008, p. 241). Hence, the more resourceful clans tend to revise their genealogies more frequently in order to strengthen the sense of belonging and honor (Watson, 1982)
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Prepared based on the Presidential Speech given at the Association of Comparative Economic Studies Session, ASSA Annual Meetings, January 2022. I would like to dedicate this essay to Robin Matthews, my mentor at Cambridge who introduced me to the economics of institutions when I was a graduate student, and for sending me to study with Douglass North at Washington University in St. Louis, who opened my eyes to the fascinating world of economic history. I thank the quick but helpful comments and suggestions from Ting Chen, Ruixue Jia, Tuan Hwee Sng, and Noam Yuchtman on an earlier draft. Last, but not least, I thank Sein and Isaac Souede Endowment for generous financial support. All remaining errors are mine.
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Kung, J.Ks. On the Origins and Persistent Effects of the World’s First Meritocratic Institution. Comp Econ Stud 64, 563–581 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41294-022-00201-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41294-022-00201-7