Abstract
China was the first in the world to have developed a meritocratic bureaucracy in the form of keju, a civil exam system through which top government officials were selected on a competitive basis. As an institution, keju provided room for social mobility as evidence shows, although “family background” also mattered. More interestingly, keju nurtured a culture of valuing learning and educational achievements that persists to this day in terms of higher human capital and entrepreneurial outcomes as proxied by years of schooling and occupational choice. However, a potentially worrying sign of this persistence is local elite entrenchment, as keju culture is transmitted via the channels of educational infrastructure, social capital, and political elites alongside human capital, suggesting meritocracy may have cast a “long shadow”.
I would like to thank Ting Chen for helpful suggestions and Sein and Isaac Souede for generous financial support. The remaining errors are mine.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael Young recently clarified in The Guardian (2001) that when he wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy nearly half a century ago (1958), it was meant to be a satire—“a warning against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033” (June 29, 2001).
- 2.
In the social hierarchy that existed back then, officials (shi) were ranked at the very top, followed by farmers (nong), craftsmen (gong), and merchants (shang) in that order.
- 3.
Only 1439 jinshi were qualified in the few civil exams that were held during the 97-year Mongolian invasion (Chen and Kung 2020).
- 4.
This section borrows heavily from Jiang and Kung (2020).
- 5.
After the 1850s, however, in an attempt to encourage the local (provincial) governments to help suppress the Taiping rebels (c. 1850–1864), Emperor Xianfeng increased the quota for those provinces that contributed (Chang 1955).
- 6.
As with shengyuan, both juren and jinshi were also regulated by a quota system but at the provincial level.
- 7.
This part is based on Chen et al. (2020).
- 8.
It was only at the final stage of the jinshi exam—the palace exam—that the candidates would be tested by the emperor himself on their knowledge beyond the Confucius classics, for example, with questions pertaining to statecraft.
- 9.
Data on landed wealth, which would have been more appropriate, are missing.
- 10.
We construct an instrumental variable using a prefecture’s shortest river distance to its nearest sites of pine and bamboo—the two key ingredients required for producing ink and paper in woodblock printing at the time. Distance to these two raw ingredients is considered important because textbooks and exam aids (reference books) were crucial to keju exam success.
- 11.
One of these survey instruments, for 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).
- 12.
Let us give a simple example. Suppose there were 90 jinshi with the surname Kung in Suzhou prefecture in the Ming-Qing period. Given the population in this prefecture with the surname Kung today is 34,000, the normalized jinshi density for patrilineal ancestors having the surname Kung in Suzhou prefecture is thus 0.00264.
- 13.
Specifically, we use the number of genealogies compiled in a prefecture in the Ming-Qing period as measure. Genealogy is an appropriate proxy because resourceful clans tend to revise their genealogies more frequently in order to strengthen the sense of belonging and honor (Watson, 1982).
- 14.
Interestingly the more expensive houses tend to be owned by females (column (3)), who back in the imperial times were not even eligible for a formal education.
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Kung, J.KS. (2021). The World’s First Meritocracy Through the Lens of Institutions and Cultural Persistence. In: Douarin, E., Havrylyshyn, O. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50888-3_7
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