Keen to position itself as the custodian of “excellent traditional Chinese culture,” the Communist regime in Beijing today celebrates written examinations as China’s “fifth great invention.” The intensely “meritocratic” competition that pervades Chinese society is legitimated by a narrative portraying the gaokao, or national college entrance examination, as the lineal descendant of the imperial-era keju civil service examinations. The Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976, when the gaokao was suspended, is depicted as merely a chaotic hiatus in the Chinese state’s otherwise continuous reliance on examinations as a means of selecting talented personnel.
However, Shiuon Chu argues that this standard view is mistaken, or at least overly simplistic. Seeing the post-Mao resumption of the gaokao as a matter of “eliminating chaos and restoring normality” (bo luan fan zhen), he argues, downplays significant ruptures in China’s 20th-century examinations history. He demonstrates that the relationship between examinations and the Chinese state – whether Republican or Communist – was in fact fluctuating and hotly contested.
The first rupture in this story is the 1905 abolition of the keju, typically interpreted as a rejection not of selective examinations in general, but of the hide-bound imperial curriculum in particular. Sun Yat-sen continued to praise examinations as a tool of clean, efficient, modern governance, and Republican intellectuals looked to the West for guidance in updating them to serve 20th-century demands. Enduring faith in exams was reflected in the creation of the Examination Yuan (kaoshi yuan), notionally one of the five core institutions of the Republic of China (ROC) state.
The “examination orthodoxy” of Sun and his followers seemed to suggest that examinations would become central to ROC state governance. However, at least at first, this was far from the case. The apparent neglect of examinations during the ROC’s early decades has long been interpreted as a symptom of state weakness; a more powerful state, the argument goes, would have moved more decisively to reinstate centralized examinations as an instrument for recruiting “talent” to promote modernization, as the Communists did after 1949.
Chu does not entirely dismiss the significance of state “weakness” but stresses other reasons for Republican administrators’ ambivalence. More revolutionary members of the Kuomintang (KMT) were suspicious of staid, bureaucratic routine. In the late imperial period, many thrusting young modernizers saw keju graduates as entitled, parasitical bookworms. Anti-bureaucratic thinking, suspicion of educated elites, and, importantly, pressure to find administrative positions for men of practical experience (or political connections) all conspired to dilute the emphasis on examinations as a tool of recruitment into government service.
During the ROC’s “Nanking Decade” (1927–1937), examinations were nonetheless important to the governance of modern secondary schools and their students. Crucial here was the huikao, or high school graduation examination. ROC officials were concerned to improve and standardize a largely privately-operated secondary schooling system, and they saw the huikao as a means of regulating schools over which state control was otherwise weak. The huikao qualified graduates for participation in the Examination Yuan’s examinations, but these accounted for only a small proportion of civil service recruits. Far from seeking to boost the supply of qualified high school graduates, officials sought to restrict it and constantly disparaged the quality of examination candidates. At the same time, schools themselves were required to help administer the huikao. This arrangement, Chu argues, enabled the ROC regime to secure the cooperation from schools essential for maintaining order amongst the growing student population and for “buffering” the state “from the increasingly popular desire for higher education” (p. 182).
Full-blown war with Japan from the late 1930s prompted heightened official sensitivity to the potential dangers of failing large numbers of high school leavers. The more urgent need to maintain control over the youth population, “prevent them from becoming Japanese collaborators or ‘Communist bandits’” and mobilize them for state service (military or otherwise), led to an expansion of placements in high schools and universities (p. 160). The ROC state briefly experimented with a unified college entrance examination, the tongkao, but rapidly withdrew this when tensions with the established huikao system emerged.
Nevertheless, both the KMT and its Communist Party (CCP) rivals increasingly saw examinations as a means of mobilizing human resources. For the KMT, especially after its retreat to Taiwan, pressure to compete with the CCP, Chu contends, helped spur an expansion of higher education to generate “human capital” for economic development (p. 170). In 1954, the ROC authorities introduced the liankao to select applicants for university places. In accounting for this, Chu perhaps underplays the significance of Taiwan’s distinct political context. During the Martial Law era (1947–1987), largely KMT-aligned “mainlander” elites initially benefited disproportionately from a centrally administered regime of college entrance exams offered solely in Mandarin. While promising social mobility to all Taiwan residents, the liankao reinforced state control over higher education and baked in the advantages of Mandarin-literate mainlanders.
In Communist China, meanwhile, the push for “high-level” human capital meant that, in its early years, the gaokao system was anything but competitive. As the state sought recruits for the rapidly expanding higher education system, it initially faced a dearth of qualified applicants. This changed by the early 1960s, when the gap between numbers of gaokao candidates and available college places rapidly widened. Chu argues that intensifying competition for higher education and concerns of political disorder among disappointed applicants help explain the 1966 suspension of the gaokao and diversion of youthful energies into “Cultural Revolution.”
Perhaps the most contentious aspect of Chu’s argument is his claim that “education policies during the Cultural Revolution … constituted an ongoing process of constructing a selective educational system” (p. 209). In challenging the standard portrayal of this period as a hiatus in China’s educational history, he argues that the principle of selection was retained; it was just that the selective criteria shifted from academic merit to political fitness. However, this claim seems rather a stretch. Since some form of selection into higher education is inevitable, the argument for continuity of the “principle of selection” is simultaneously banal and unconvincing. It also downplays the incredible violence and social dislocation that the shift in the selective principle entailed.
That violent attack on their status explains the alacrity with which China’s educated elites embraced the gaokao’s restoration. Chu emphasizes that the justification of intensifying examination competition required significant “ideological work.” Public intellectuals such as Yang Xuewei thus assiduously constructed the bo luan fan zheng narrative, arguing – misleadingly, in Chu’s view – that post-Mao examination reforms merely restored the pre-1966 status quo ante. But it is not hard to see why post-Mao elites were receptive to arguments dismissing egalitarianism as a “leftist error” and promoting an extreme form of meritocratic competition.
Chu provides an important reminder of the discontinuities between the keju and contemporary Chinese examinations. In technical terms, examinations today rely on a quantitative, ostensibly objective testing model that owes more to modern American precedents than imperial Chinese ones. The keju united examiners and examinees within a learned “community” shaped by shared ethical concerns – a community definitively broken after 1905. And whereas the keju directly bestowed official positions or stipends on successful candidates, public exams today valorize intense competitive credentialism as an inevitability all citizens must dutifully accept without any definite prospect of reward.
This is a provocative and highly original study of the politics of educational assessment in 20th-century Chinese societies. The dense prose and sometimes highly technical analysis make for a difficult read, but this book should become an essential reference not just for China specialists but for scholars of comparative education and political science more broadly.
