In this thoughtfully researched and densely argued monograph, Shioon Chu takes on one of the hoariest of subjects for China historians: open civil service examinations and their relationship to the state. The time frame he covers is unusually broad: the Republic of China before and after 1949, as well as a chapter on examinations in the People’s Republic of China. Even more unusually, he considers not only civil service examinations but also the state’s efforts to link them to secondary school performance and entrance to universities. The argument that runs throughout suggests that, under the stresses of a weak but modernizing Republican state, both examination and education systems were riven with internal tensions and mutually exclusive desiderata. Chu claims that despite legitimating language and symbolism stressing institutional and ideational continuity with the late imperial era, the Republican state’s examination regime fundamentally differed from its Ming-Qing predecessor. The fledgling Guomindang regime could hold open civil service examinations, but examinees—even successful ones—never commanded the social status that was de rigueur for keju examinees. Indeed, the key figures who established and ran the Examination Yuan faced cross-cutting imperatives—notably holding the open civil service examinations mandated by Sun Yat-sen’s vision of a modern Republic while also legitimating Guomindang cadres and holdover bureaucrats from the Beiyang regime. A great deal of policy seems to have been made up on the hoof.

The first part of the monograph, entitled “Legitimation and Marginalization of Civil Servants by Examinations,” comprises three chapters. Chapter One, “Juggling Expectations in Modern Civil Service,” focuses on the Examination Yuan in the Nanjing Decade. This chapter considers the foundational establishment of the Examination Yuan as the arbiter of the zhengtu (orthodox path to civil service appointment), the multiple streams of discourse that fed into it (as varied as Sun Yat-sen, the US Pendleton Act, and the British civil service), and the ways in which the very notion of civil service by examination collided headlong with the principle of Party tutelage (yidang zhiguo). As Chu notes, there was “little consensus on what constituted the ideal public servant” (p. 57). The result was a set of compromises. Civil service exams included both generalist and specialist topics; at the same time, Guomindang party members already in office were awarded commensurate civil service ranks based on their length of service to the revolution.

Chapter Two, “Qualified but Weak Examinees: Constructing the Authority of the Examination Yuan (1930–1947),” points to the institutional weakness of the Examination Yuan, which was unable to provide positions for the individuals who passed or even award honorary official titles as useful social capital. The Yuan was also vulnerable to attacks from Guomindang Party ideologues. Instead of a robust defense of an impartial civil service, the Yuan stressed individuals’ preexamination qualifications, frequently admitting the “poor administrative quality” and “lack of experience” of those who passed, and even promoting all manner of post-exam “learning” (xuexi) and “training” (xunlian).

Chapter Three, “The 1947 Constitution and the Power of Examination in post-1949 Taiwan,” moves across the 1949 divide. It first concentrates on the 1947 Constitution’s Article 85, which laid down two norms for the Examination Yuan. The first was to define the good through open and competitive examination; the second was to specify provincial quotas to create presumptive fairness through regional allocation of official positions. In practice, especially on Taiwan after 1949, these two norms were significantly compromised through a proliferation of “special” civil service exams. The largest were for masses of demobilized soldiers. More controversially, a Grade A exam credential was extended to those with advanced degrees to “bleach dirty [non-examination passing]” civil servants already in office and, until 1958, there was as well a special exam for Taiwanese candidates.

The second half of the book, “Suppressing, Creating, and Managing Educational Desire” moves away from civil service examinations to what the author deems the “Bankruptcy of Education and Centralized Graduation Examinations in the 1920s and 1930s” (Chapter Four), “From Gatekeeping to Mobilization: Graduation Examinations and Admission Examinations in the Republic of China (1932–1958)” (Chapter Five), and “The Creation of a Selection System Under Socialism” College Entrance Examination in the People’s Republic (1949–1977)” (Chapter Six), before tying things up with a thoughtful conclusion. Chapter Four focuses on the state’s attempt to discipline modern schools of uneven quality through a graduation exam called the huikao. This exercise, while opening schools to scrutiny and competition, ended up punishing individual students who did not pass without conferring any particular benefit to those who did. The huikao gradually became largely outsourced to local schools themselves. Chapter Five concentrates on the Guomindang government’s disjointed policies in tertiary education, which repeatedly sought indirect regulation rather than direct control over admissions and graduation. Under wartime conditions, the government attempted to institute a unified university entrance examination (tongkao). However, the tongkao was never integrated with the older huikao, and the ill-conceived examination failed so many candidates that it was forced to lower its passing grades. Unsurprisingly, it was discarded after just 3 years. Only after the government’s relocation to the much more contained area of Taiwan, which had fewer universities, did a centralized system of university admission become possible in 1954.

The final substantive chapter on college entrance examinations in the People’s Republic of China offers a study in contrast. It posits that the revolutionary PRC was conflicted about the role of education. The Party-state at first nurtured (young) intellectuals with a massive expansion of higher education, with a corresponding decline in selectiveness, in the early to mid-1950s. However, selectiveness returned with a vengeance in the late 1950s, as higher education contracted in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. The “political ingredients” of candidates became increasingly important, and a murderously competitive gaokao was instituted. During the Cultural Revolution, the gaokao was suspended, and universities closed. When they reopened, candidates were chosen by “alternate” kinds of assessment. Chu sees the restoration of the gaokao in 1977 as inevitable. He further suggests that at this juncture the gaokao became a way to use fairness and merit to justify “an examination system with such a high rejection rate” (p. 211). The conclusion compares the keju and the modern Chinese civil service and university entrance examination systems along three dimensions: how participation was increased, the relationship between examiner and examinee, and examination performance and the authority of assessment.

Chu offers a subtle and nuanced analysis of examination systems in the Republican and post-1949 periods. He has plowed through more twentieth-century educational and examination debates and controversies across multiple regimes and over a longer time span than any scholar has yet attempted. His core contention that modern Chinese examinations did not automatically descend from the late imperial keju without debate or modification certainly rings true. However, Chu’s effort to demonstrate change in examinations and higher education amid rhetorical and symbolic continuity glosses over many of the genuine continuities between late imperial and Republican examination-and-qualification regimes. First, it overlooks the complexity of generations of reforms and contention over the civil service examinations in the late imperial era, when the classical curriculum forced examinees to “study things they will never use and later use what they never have studied (suoxi fei suoyong, suoyong fei suoxi).”Footnote ¹ As Benjamin Elman demonstrates, this led to multiple attempts to reform the format of the civil service examinations. In 1901, the Qing removed the infamous “eight-legged” essay from the keju and asked examinees to answer questions that dealt with “Western learning.”Footnote ² Almost immediately after the abrogation of the keju in 1905, the central government held open but specialized civil service examinations geared toward “Western learning.”Footnote ³ Similarly, the way in which the Guomindang government’s initially clumsy efforts to discipline modern schools via the huikao became a de facto delegation of authority to the schools themselves can be understood as a compromise made due to state weakness, but it may also reflect the continuation of a late imperial preference for ruling through intermediary bodies.

Finally, while Chu interprets the proliferation of examinations on special subjects as a dilution of the principle of the “career open to talent” that often served as an ex post facto “bleaching” of political appointees, Guomindang officials, or those with high academic credentials, there is another way to understand these special examinations. Often, the Examination Yuan held special examinations at the request of the employing ministry or commission when vacancies arose. Until the late 1960s, this was one of the few ways in which the Examination Yuan could place its examinees in actual civil service positions. Even in the most “regular” and institutionalized civil service systems (historically, the United Kingdom and the United States were the exemplars to which the Examination Yuan turned), it has not been unusual to hold special examinations when a new division or body is created. The US Foreign Service exam is not only notoriously difficult, but it requires generalist knowledge and a specialization in either administration, politics, or economics. The United Kingdom has a special “fast track” civil service stream for pre-identified and already mentored Bright Young Things. All systems involve months, if not years, of interminable waiting between the time an examinee passes and the offer of an actual post. Before taking up that post, there is also invariably some period of training. Thus, it is not surprising that the weak Guomindang state’s Examination Yuan in the 1930s had to make all sorts of compromises and accommodations. It is also unsurprising that the post-1949 Guomindang on Taiwan had to bend itself into even more contortions to publicly stand by its principles of open civil service examination and the career open to talent while somehow credentialing the Mainlander refugees who were its mainstay and alternately placating or repressing the Taiwanese. Chu demonstrates repeatedly the imbrication of civil service examinations and university access with contemporary political and social realities. In so doing, he reminds us that, despite claims to the openness, talent, and neutrality of civil service and university entrance examinations, the very criteria that this “openness” selects for are profoundly political.