Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [90]
Nowadays in appointing people it can be observed that they are advanced in office mainly on the basis of their literary skills. The highest office-holders are literary men; those attending the throne are literary men; those managing fiscal matters are literary men; the chief commanders of the border defences are literary men; all the Regional Transport Commissioners are literary men; all the Prefects in the provinces are literary men.38
Accounts of the examination system are full of caveats about the distance between its meritocratic theory and its aristocratic and plutocratic reality. It could hardly have been otherwise in an institution that lasted for over two thousand years, every so often dropped or reconstituted. Nevertheless, however unsatisfactory it may often have been for the vast number of bright individuals whom it failed to favour (all women, for example, were excluded), it was never a dead letter: it always existed as a potential means which could be resurrected or reformed to bring new talent into power and influence, a built-in agitator of the sediments of the Chinese establishment, a perpetual grain of sand in the government oyster.
Just as invasion by Altaic hordes kept northern China’s populace on the boil, so the examination system, and appointments based on it, kept the power structures open. It therefore promoted the cohesion of the body politic as a whole, with a common language whose standards were clearly defined by the examination syllabus.
The paradoxical result was the fact that although China was ultimately unable to stem the pressure from militarised pastoral nomads, and had to yield its throne to the Mongols and the Manchus, China remained Chinese. The struggle with the barbarians was, in the last analysis, lost—yet it did not matter for the future of the language, or of the culture that it conveyed. In a way, Chinese showed that it could transcend the most fundamental defeat.
Strategically, this may be characterised—in Chinese terms—as:
—tōu liáng huàn zhù
Steal the beams, change the pillars.39
This maxim from the Chinese ‘36 Strategems’ refers to a technique whereby an opponent is gradually lulled into a false sense of confidence, thinking the structures he relies on are still sound, although in fact they have been undermined or suborned. Evidently to do this the strategist must be on close terms with the enemy’s organisation, as he may well be, after suffering apparent total defeat and accepting surrender. In the case of the Mongols—who never, incidentally, accepted serious use of the examination system, and so were vulnerable to the growth of local lordships—it proved possible within a century to build up sufficient regional power bases to unseat the central government. With the Manchu, it was more difficult, since they themselves, conscious of their small numbers, made effective use of Chinese institutions such as the examinations to recruit loyal cadres. They also concentrated themselves in the military. Still, making up no more than 2 per cent of the population, it proved impossible for them to live with the Chinese and not be absorbed by them. In vain were they forbidden by law from intermarrying with Chinese or adopting Chinese customs, in vain compulsorily educated in Manchu, a language that continued in government papers until the fall of the dynasty in 1911: nevertheless, within 150 years of their successful conquest of China, all those of Manchu ancestry were speaking Chinese.40
It also leads us to the current Chinese response to the challenge from the Western world. Bizarrely, but revealingly, China is again adopting this traditional strategy.
After its traumatic experiences at the hands of Western powers in the nineteenth century, China abolished the examination system in 1905 and the imperial monarchy itself in 1911. A general air prevailed of bringing the country up to date, European-style.