Social mobility in Imperial China

[Xunzian]

In Imperial China one’s position in society was determined through a series of meritocratic exams. Because the nature of the exams themselves changed from dynasty to dynasty, I will focus on the Qing (1644-1911) system. These exams were open to everyone and didn’t even require that great distances be traveled, because the first level of the examination was done at the local (think “county”) level. Passing this first tier conferred a great deal of benefits to the graduate – they became exempt from capital punishment, and more importantly, they could talk to officials without kneeling. While these may seem somewhat trivial in the modern sense, given the concept of guanxi a concept that still vexes many European companies trying to do business in China, such unfettered access to the corridors of power almost universally lead to vastly bettering the graduate’s condition. The higher levels conferred even greater advantages, allowing for very powerful and lucrative positions in the national bureaucracy and because of their tiered nature, passing one more-or-less guaranteed the material ability to progress further along the system.

The system also had many safe-guards against cheating. For example students were assigned numbers rather than names. These numbered examinations would be passed onto scribes who would give the test another number and copy the exam (to ensure that handwriting was not recognized). The national exam in Beijing had a second set of scribes copy the first set!

Yep. As long as you were a male in Imperial China (the tests were gender-restricted, I am afraid), you had only yourself to blame for being unable to climb the social ladder.

There are, however, dissenting opinions on this view. I will quote the blog in part to outline the criticism:

the doors to elite status were thrown open to anybody…anybody, that is, who had the time, means, money, books, and tutors to memorize the complete Confucian canon by rote. Obviously, this was something of a stumbling block for your average poor farmer. In later periods, those with money were even able to ‘buy’ a lower-level degree and thus jump the queue a bit in the examination process, an advantage that would have been prohibitively expensive for most families.

But the myth of public success was ever-present. Down until 1905, when the exams finally ended, one could hear stories of the poor struggling farmer whose whipper-snapper son aced the exams and became a high official and took care of his family forever. Hey, in the US anyone can become president. But for every Lincoln, we’ve had two Bushes. Is the process open to anyone? Sure. Does it really help to have money and connections? Absolutely.

And so it was in Imperial China. One of the most debated topics in the field of Chinese history is just how much social mobility was there in the imperial period? Early PRC historians would have said, “None. It was a feudal society where the landed elite oppressed the masses. Long live Chairman Mao.”

In the 1940s and 1950s, Western historians of China took a different view, arguing that many of the successful exam candidates in the Song came from ‘new families’ without any degree-holders among their direct ancestors. At the root of these arguments is a characterization of imperial Chinese society as socially and politically meritocratic and, in these ways, more ‘modern’ than Europe would become until much later. (A view actually not unknown in early modern Europe. European Sinophiles such as Voltaire praised the system on the basis of its perceived meritocracy and openness.)

More recent research has complicated both the depressing judgments of Marxist/Maoist historians and the starry-eyed romanticism of Voltaire.

Certainly there are cases of non-official families educating their sons for the exam and then benefiting from their successful entrance into the bureaucratic elite. This was particularly true when the restrictions on merchants’ children taking the exam were relaxed. Merchants, theoretically the lowest category in Confucian society, now had a way to transform wealth into power through education.

However, it was hardly a socially fluid ‘early-modern society.’ First of all, Chinese families are large and complex. The early research proved to be too narrow in scope. Just because somebody’s dad or grandfather wasn’t an official didn’t mean that candidates couldn’t receive the benefits of a well-placed uncle or even get some help from Mom’s family. More current studies show the vast array of strategies deployed by the elites to mark and maintain their status in society. Benjamin Elman has argued, for example, that the examinations themselves were a masterpiece for the reproduction of elite status. They persuaded all levels of society to buy-in to a “Confucian Dream” that offered hope for social mobility even as it misrepresented the “objective consequences of the system.” Did some people get in from the outside? Yes. But as John Chaffee (1998) notes, this "myth of opportunity was as important for social stability as its lie was for the elite privileged position.” In fact there have been arguments that this prevented the rise of a European-style urban bourgeoisie. In Europe (and Japan) merchants faced a hereditary aristocracy that was nearly impossible to crack. But in China, the system was open. Merchants had no reason to challenge the system because it could be made to work, if not for them, at least for their children. Think of it as “What’s the matter with Fujian?”

Clearly such opinions are naive. Through hard work, anyone in Imperial China could become a magistrate!

[Carleas]

Fascinating and poignant. Somewhat out of left field, but still a great commentary.

[Mastriani]

I, as Xunzian is already aware, will dissent.

The blog in question does not make a naive point, it makes a very notable point.

Formalised education in Imperial China was not available to everyone. It required that the individual seeking education came from a family that had the financial means to pay for such, as outlined in the blog entry. Books/scrolls were not a mainstay item of the average household in Imperial China.

Poverty was rampant, and financial leverage was dominion of historically aristocratic families. There is also need of mentioning that although the social caste system lost much of its formal holding in open Imperial society quite early on, the stigmas attached due to the caste system, were noticeable even to the early decades of the twentieth century, (they were in some fashions destroyed by Mao Tse Dung, in others, they were reinforced by his own social model).

Although the safeguards were in place, there is also known historical information on the fact that “money talks” even in guanxi, as those of the Imperial social infrastructure were, by default, power brokers. Corruption, espionage, and strategies of personal gain are all well known traits of Imperial China, up to and including, intrafamilial assassinations.

That Kung Fuxi was a product of this era of China, speaks to his modelling of both a different human archetype, and a different model human society, for use within his homeland.

The concept of guanxi is noble, diginified and effective up until one individual decides that there is room for interpretation or gain. The most notable problem for its use outside of China, is the cultural determinations that are not defined within the scope of the system, as it is typically Chinese, and so being, beautifully and horridly ethnocentric at the same moment.

[Xunzian]

Well I would say that depended upon where they choose to live and what type of education they thought they needed. One income paid for everything. Of course some chose to spend their money on books which had been available to do a long-standing tradition of printing. Others opted to move to cities and live the much disrespected lifestyle of a merchant to pay for their children’s education. They would barter for things, they would save, and they could live comfortably enough to provide an education for their children.

Why worry about the elite? why dwell on them? Oh boo hooh they had it so easy. well thats a wonderful way to have wasted one’s life. Screw having thought about what they had had, the peasants should have gotten their own education! They did not have any more brains or personality or will or drive or hands or feet.

So maybe a handful were born into luxury. so what. if people had wanted to make a real difference for the uneducated, they should have removed some taboos on being a merchant so they could buy themselves out of it! Teach them to fish not just give them someone elses catch. they could have made all the laws you could have wanted but, if you don’t change a persons attitude then you are not helping you are hurting. You handicap them.

The uneducated should have been helped by people helping them see that they don’t have to accept defeat, poverty, and ignorance. But if you give them laws that take from me just to even out. you and I will butt heads. I can’t even let you make laws that would take from just the wealthiest/most educated. I would fight to protect them too.

Enrich not compensate if you want real lasting change.

On your note that I am confused; It is the parents I was talking about specifically. If they don’t get their butts out of that chair and stop the entertainment, they are educating their kids to fail.

The Gov’t should only interfere so much in lives. When it begins to overstep then you weaken the people. The Gov’t does the thinking and controlling, which is what is happening. The powerful would love to make compenstating laws. It means more control. Yet people want more laws.
Why else would they have embraced the legalistic and anti-intellectual attitude of the Maoists? More control. I would rather see people free to succeed or fail on their own. It makes for a better society.

Mastriani is right and wrong. Those assertions just tell a part.

[Mastriani]

So maybe a handful were born into luxury. so what. if people had wanted to make a real difference for the uneducated, they should have removed some taboos on being a merchant so they could buy themselves out of it! Teach them to fish not just give them someone elses catch. they could have made all the laws you could have wanted but, if you don’t change a persons attitude then you are not helping you are hurting. You handicap them.

No society is free from the expressions of power, although sometimes that isn’t acknowledged. You are also speaking quite “factually” about the societal mindset of a period of time when we have nothing but hindsight, and assuming that the mentality you prefer was prevalent enough in that society to be available.

To my point:

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Thomas Jefferson

Humans are habitual, what one is given to, is what one is predisposed to continuing. Change, especially societal level changes, are adversarial.

So maybe a handful were born into luxury. so what. if people had wanted to make a real difference for the uneducated, they should have removed some taboos on being a merchant so they could buy themselves out of it! Teach them to fish not just give them someone elses catch. they could have made all the laws you could have wanted but, if you don’t change a persons attitude then you are not helping you are hurting. You handicap them.

This is a wholesale assumption that cannot be supported by observation in a modern context, let alone a historical one. Nothing is determined to the point that one social individual feels compelled to edify another. Most often what is observable is that one social individual will, in a manner of utility, use another to edify themself, even if doing so is to the detriment of the latter.

The uneducated should have been helped by people helping them see that they don’t have to accept defeat, poverty, and ignorance. But if you give them laws that take from me just to even out. you and I will butt heads. I can’t even let you make laws that would take from just the wealthiest/most educated. I would fight to protect them too.

Enrich not compensate if you want real lasting change.

Again, humans are habitual in behaviors both individually and socially, and change is adversarial to the status quo of knowing what to expect.

On your note that I am confused; It is the parents I was talking about specifically. If they don’t get their butts out of that chair and stop the entertainment, they are educating their kids to fail.

Overwhelming influence of the hyper-reality created by technological advancement and the “promise of a better tomorrow” from such. As was noted by Zhuangzi, PtahHotep, Machiavelli and many others, idleness is a favorite human habituation. I believe in the Daoist tenet, you are asking “people to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps” … bordering, essentially, on the implausible or impossible.

The Gov’t should only interfere so much in lives. When it begins to overstep then you weaken the people. The Gov’t does the thinking and controlling, which is what is happening. The powerful would love to make compenstating laws. It means more control. Yet people want more laws.
Why else would they have embraced the legalistic and anti-intellectual attitude of the Maoists? More control. I would rather see people free to succeed or fail on their own. It makes for a better society.

This requires active citizenry, which is in direct opposition to what I just stated above, humans cherish idleness, even to their detriment and destruction.

We both are only telling a part, because that is all we have to offer, especially considering the historical context of your essay.