Civil Service Examination In Late Imperial China

Began to function as the major way for the imperial court to select officers in the late Tang Dynasty, the Civil Service Examination system had been deemed as the official method to recruit government officers for the state bureaucracy in the imperial China. Differentiated from the previous selection methods used by the court which was based on the recommendation from currently serving officials and simply “clone” the bloodline, the setting for the Civil Service Examination seemingly had provided an equal chance for everyone without considering their heritage and backgrounds. As William Rowe introduces in his book China’s Last Empire, The Qing dynasty had payed large amount of efforts and attentions in the sense of creating an integrated

Within the exam system, though those degree winners did not have direct paternal relationship with the officers in court like previous dynasties; nevertheless as revealed by Rowe, a large percentage of them had a degree winner as a fairly close relatives. Additionally, when we focus on ordinary civilians in the Qing, in order to prepare a qualified candidate for the Civil Service Examination, a family needed to sacrifice its most precious labor force—the adult male. It also costs extra expenses on books, schools, and examination commute costs, do not need to mention a large majority of candidates would eventually get rejected by this apparatus and further impoverish their families. In this way, there was definitely a social floor that resist all the upward mobility beneath it, which made the candidates of the officers an already screened and selected groups of

According to the Draft History of Qing, at the beginning of the Qing dynasty, Bannermen were exempt from the ordinary Civil Service Examination and could be selected directly as a candidate for future officers by the court. Later, in order to frame this direct discrimination towards civilians, Bannermen who sought to be a government officer should also attend the civil service exam. Different from the one that ordinary civilians attended, the exam designed for Bannerman was not only easier in the sense of the depth of its contents, but it was also shorter: Bannermen were only required to attend one local and provincial exam compared to at least two for each for ordinary citizens. Furthermore, divergences can even be examined among the bannerman according to their different ethnicities. There were quota allowrances for the amount of students to take the special designed exam every year: 6o students for each Manchu Banner and 20 students for each Mongolian and Chinese