2 3 1 3 Social Mobility and the Examination System in Late Imperial China 2025)

So in this lecture, we'll focus on this
feature of Chinese education identified

by Max Weber, the link between social
mobility and the examination system in

late Imperial china.
Because in Imperial China one of the many

gifts of imperial Chinese civilization to
world civilization is not just paper, gun

powder Chinese cuisine, but is a system
of objective testing, of social service

testing.
Which in the, in the Chinese imperial

system provided approximately half of
these spaces for government position.

Approximately half were open to people
with either heredity or wealth, and

approximately half were open to people
based on examination success.

there were let's say three step ladder of
examinations with the bot-, with the

bottom degree being called the the
Shengyuan or Xiucai Degree, so that of

which there are about 500,000 such
licentiates, about 50,000 Juren or

equivalents.
About one-third are juren the other

two-thirds are gongsheng tribute students
and 4,000 jinshi the effigy of the

Chinese examination system.
who's inscriptions, personal inscriptions

still are preserved on stone in Beijing
and the Beijing Confucian Temple and if

you are to visit them you'll see there.
All 51,000 jinshi of the 13th century til

the early 20th century have their names,
their places of origin, their rank

faithfully recorded for the tourists of
today to admire and to acknowledge.

So here you see the pyramid of civil
service exams and degrees Qing China with

a jinshi at the top followed by the juren
we'll skip tribute students then the

licensed, the shengyuan and below them
the literate, the examination literate

students and commoners.
Often they were in a country of maybe 50

million adult males, there were at best 5
million.

So in other words, if there were such 5
million sort of only examination level

educated adults.
What this means is that for the

population as a whole perhaps 1% of all
adult males might become a Shengyuan, a

licentiate.
But 10% of all ex-, examination level

educated adult males could eventually
aspire to becoming a Shengyuan.

perhaps One tenth of a percent of all
adult males might eventually become a

Juren.
But one percent of examination level

educated adult males would eventually
become a Juren.

And perhaps 100th of one percent of all
adult males might become a Jinshi.

But as many as one per thousand of the
examination level educated adult males

would eventually become a Jinshi.
So in other words sort of if we were to

put this, and it's not exactly analogous,
into sort of contemporary higher

education terms.
The University of California admits

approximately 10, 12%.
Of all sort of high school grads so that

would be roughly the level of a
Shengyuan.

the more elite universities would have
proportions of, instead of 10, instead of

10 for 100 we'd be having proportions of
one for 100, or in the case of the most

elite private, one per thousand...
The first systematic, big, historical,

Chinese data collection was not done by
members of the Lee-Campbell research

group but was done by my teacher Ho
Ping-ti, who did this not in the last

sort of decade or two.
But who did this work over 50 years ago

China, The Ladder of Success In late
Imperial China.

And what professor Ho did, he collected
for almost 40,000 suc-, successful degree

holders about the 15,000 Jinshi, about
23,000 Juren He collected systematic

biographical data using either
examination achievement books called

Dengkelu or using sort of government
curricula vita called Yuli.

Or using various other kinds of
biographical compendia.

of these degree holders to get systematic
information on the social background of

the people who pass these various exams.
More recently, just in the last few

years, partly at HKUST, Jian Ching a
graduate student at HKUST, currently an

assistant professor.
Of history at Shanghai University, Shen

Dengmiao, an independent scholar in the
People's Republic of China.

And my co-teacher Byung-ho Lee have
updated Ho's earlier data with additional

information on several thousand Ming
jinshi and an even larger number Qing

juren.
Now, Ho used these data to document that

unlike the west, where most elites
especially political elites, were

hereditary nobles representing at most
one percent of all people.

Half of late imperial Chinese officials
were chosen by an objective test of their

ability as opposed to their birth.
I'll bet for those families privileged

enough to provide at lest their sons an
examination-level education.

In late Imperial China such families
comprises as many as ten percent of all

people.
And moreover since the alternative ladder

of success was through purchase, social
prestige and political authority were as

much the real of the wealthy as the
capable Rather than the noble.

So, rather than one percent, at least say
ten percent of the entire population.

Ten times more people who could rise to
the top.

He divided the population of successful
degree winners into three categories.

To determine whether their family
background was from more exalted families

or more humble families, which he called
categories a, b, and c.

In category a, the most humble, there was
no degree holder in the patrial line for

the last three generations.
In other words, the successful

candidate's father, grandfather, great
grandfather had passed no degree, not

even the ten per hundred.
And in category B one or more had at

least received a Shengyuan degree which
remember was 10% of examination literate

educated adult males.
And in category C, one or more had

achieved a higher degree in the last
three generations.

So, in other words he's asking if we take
the either all adult males or all

examination educated adult males.
Category A is from the bottom 90%.

Category B is from the top 10% of this
pool.

And category C is from the top one or
even more exalted proportions of this

pool.
And so, the question he asks is, of the

people who did, were successful in
getting the Juren or the Jinshi degree,

how many came from families that recently
had experienced this one per a thousand

or one per hundred success rate?
Or 10 per 100 success rate, or really

were from, as defined by his previous
examinations, success by immediate direct

patrilineal relatives, or from relatively
quote humble, backgrounds.

So he did this by taking information from
sources such as this Ming h, examination

record, Dengkulu, of Jinshi candidates.
And by looking at the kind of information

in these, so these data record such
things as their ranking in the exam,

their name whether they specialize in
the, some particular academic specialty.

In this case, the the the five classics
their birth order, the records of family

members, the registered occupational
status, in this case they comes from,

this person comes from a Ryuji, from a
family of teachers.

and then information on their test
results, the test results of their

ancestors and then from this information
Bing De Ho produced his three categories.

So you have examples such, here, as
Category A, people who had no ancestor

who ever held an official position, or
passed one of the official exams, or they

had at least one ancestor who held a in
this case a a, at least a Juren or a

Jinshi exam.
And he finds other information such as

say in this case, the grandfather being
the subdirector of a Confucian school and

so on.
And he uses this information to go to

classify all of his 15,000 Jinshi,
approximately sort of, to classify them

as A, B or C.
So, what he discovered, which at the it

time he came out was quite striking.
Later on it was sort of modified by the

field in terms of the implications of his
findings.

But what he found was, was that if you
take category A, people who had for the

last three generations no one in that top
10% category, combine and say with

category B where they had only one person
or more, but none of a higher degree.

You see that for the, from the 14th
century up through the early 20th

century.
So for about the 550 years or so, what

you'll see is that almost half of the
people who reach the highest degree came

from families.
That had not had such a similar

accomplishment in the last three
generations.

So in other words, this is if we were to
take the students at Harvard, and we were

to say that unlike the contemporary
Harvard, where many of them are legacy

students, that is to say that their
parents.

Their grandparents, their great parents,
all went to Harvard.

in in the past, the majority of students
had no such background.

and while the category C increased over
time.

It only increased from 40 to about 60%.
Looking at the Juren biographies that the

Ho collected.
He has information, their name records of

the family members, their date of birth,
records of distant kin and their place of

residence rank in the provincial exam and
probably again can do a category A, a

category B, a category C, but in this
case, A is people who had no ancestors, B

again is is people who had at least a
Shungyuen degree, and C is

Focusing not so much this time
necessarily on Jinshi's status but even

Juren's status and other kinds of,
Gongshen attribute student status and so

on.
And then again looking at ABC what

Professor Ho shows is that the patterns
for Juren are roughly similar to the

patterns for Gongsheng, in the sense that
here's looking at the 19th century, 1804

to 1910.
And it can show you that the Category A

is usually at least one 5th of the
successful candidates.

In other words there was nobody, even the
late 19th century, which is sort of

represents, as you remember, looking at
the Gongsheng, the most, the more closed

period of Chinese social mobility, even
during this more closed period, 20% of

the Juren degree holders came from
families where there was no previous

degree of any kind.
Another 20 to 30% came from families that

only had a one or, or more people who had
passed to that 10% level.

So, combining again Category A and B, you
find proportions for the Juren and

Juren's students status Gongsheng which
are roughly similar to the Junshen.

So, in every level what you can see is
that, yes it is true that only people

taking the examination literacy could
even potentially take these exams.

So in other words, what we're talking
about is not social mobility for the

population as as whole, we're talking
about social mobility for that top 10 %

before that top 10 %, what we do see is
that.

there is remarkable sort of flow up and
down, within that larger elite group.

And we have to remember that from a
historical context, to have a potentially

sort of a potentially, upwardly mobile
group of people the 10% is remarkably

high compared to say female nobility
which are you know, less than 1% of the

total population in the west.
so what Professor Ho discovered which was

so important is that He was able to
document using this collection of big

data.
Now, in his case it wasn't done by

computer, this was done by hand.
And he was using these so there's a

result his data collection could not be
sort of put on some kind of online

downloadable version.
it was unfortunately subject really only

to for his own use.
but he was able to discover that China in

the past as early as the 14th Century was
indeed far more mobile than any 14th

Century population at the national level
in what is now the developed world.

So over half of all government officials
in late imperial China were chosen by

civil service exams, open to all men
regardless of economic or social status,

and of these people, a significant
proportion,as Professor Ho showed Came

from families, although they may have had
access to elite education, often through

kinship themselves were not elite in
terms of immediate patrilineal

examination success or official position.
Not just that their own generation or

their parent's generation or their
grandparent's generations, but even of

the great grandparent's generation.
And so while many of these officials are

not necessarily from truly humble origins
in it's absolute term, the contrast with

officialdom elsewhere in the world,
especially premodern and early-modern

European states, is quite extreme.
So in China education and test

performance as Weber identified about
almost a century ago, explain why some

rise to the top while others do not.
It took almost 50 years after Professor

Ho for the field to sort of advance.
On his knowledge and that most the most

conspicuous can see an example of such
achievement is actually by a graduate

student at the, the Hong Kong University
of Science and Technology Jiang Qin who

was a PhD just last year in 2012.
The student of one of my colleagues James

Qung.
Now, what Jiang Qin did I was privileged

to sit on his committee was that, he
under James' direction not from us, I'm

ashamed to say.
He collected similar information to

Professor Ho's but did this
systematically.

Did this in a data base which he can in
the future put online and make it

available to the academy at large to
examine.

And using a a collection of examination
essays put together over a long period of

time by the Shanghai library, he was able
to get the the final examinations and the

family background from nearly 12,000
Jinshi which is about half the total

Jinshi during the Qing.
And from these exam essay data he

constructed a representative sample of
4000 Juren from 18 provinces who pass the

provincial exams between 1789 and 1895.
And in this thesis, he does many

calculations, all of which sort of
elaborate on Professor Ho's findings.

I'll just present one here.
He shows you, for example that, again,

contrasting wealth versus ability, that
ability actually effects the success

rate.
in the Jinshi exam, whereas all things

being equal, family wealth does not.
So if you look at the two sort of figures

below he shows you how people who pass
the exam at a younger age so here really

especially below age 20.
People that have passed the exam at a

younger age are far more likely to also
pass the Jinshi exam.

And he also shows that people who scored
high when they passed the provisional

exam are much more likely to be
successful in achieving the next degree,

the Jinshi degree.
So for example, when you look at figure

B, you can see that the,within seven
years which would be there for, in other

words, three attempts at the Jinshi exam,
the top ten percent candidates in the

provincial exam Were almost twice more
likely than the bottom 10% of successful

Juren candidates to achieve the Jinshi
degree.

So one of Jian Qin's important findings
is that to elaborate on Professor Ho's

finding that many of the successful
candidates came from more humble

background and to say that this is
probably because of the importance

actually of cognitive testability on a
the candidate.

So one of the reasons why family
background mattered less, is because

people who were able to, were so smart
that they're in the top 10% of the

distribution or, they are so smart that
they are able to pass the examination at

an especially young age.
These people are much more likely to

become Jinshi as well as Juren.
So that it's partly this objective test

is able to actually identify capture.
And favor those people with better

testing ability.