关键词: 科举制度, 贤人政治, 公平

Abstract: When the feudal system was replaced by the province-country, emperors had to select officials for administration. Guided by the Confucian political ideal, selected officials should be wise men. Therefore, both the previous recommendatory system and imperial examination system afterwards were aimed to select “the wise and the competent”. In the recommendatory system, a small number of people choose another small number of people. By contrast, in the imperial examination system, officials are selected according to their intellectual performance in exams, and a large number of people are allowed to attend the selection by “registering with their own resumes”. The selecting process is so extensive, widespread, communal and public that fairness is essential to it. During over 900 years from the early Song Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty, various measures, including the final imperial examination (presided over by the emperor), locked examination hall, covered names of examinees, transcription, regional differentiation, provincial examination, different examinations for sons of officials and common people, and stereotyped writing with eight parts in the range of the Four Books, are all aimed to eliminate some partial advantages and subjective elements in order to maintain fairness that between the influential and the common, the rich and the poor, regions favoring learning and those indifferent to learning, examiners and examinees. Nevertheless, since the wise and the competent are distinguished from the common, eliminating all partial advantages inevitably results in the fact more and more common and ordinary persons are selected, which is against the original purpose of selecting the wise and the competent. Correspondently, the most open official selecting system coexists with the most severe ideological control, and in the process of maintaining fairness, an anti-knowledge tendency arises in the official selecting system, which originally takes knowledge as measurement.