Abstract:

In the over 1,300 years after the Sui and Tang dynasties, the imperial examination system was criticized and questioned for its failure to select talents merely according to the capacity of writing. In the more than 500 years during the Ming and Qing dynasties, it received one more criticism of “restricting the hearing and seeing of people under heaven” for it merely selected men who wrote good Eight-part essays based on the resources of The Four Books. However, as far as historical causes are concerned, the system of “selecting talents according to the capacity of writing” formed in the process of correcting the false practice of “cheating one after another” in the original system of recommendation so as to maintain justice, while writing Eight-part essays based on the resources of The Four Books was to conduct moral education by offering wealth and higher positions, aiming to contain people within “moral principles”. The contradiction of the system itself shows that the long-criticized drawbacks and the historical reasons why the imperial examination system came into being and existed were from the same source. Therefore, as a constant historical phenomenon, the continuation of the imperial examination system and its criticisms coexisted between the rising and declining of one dynasty after another in a thousand years. Since the mid-19^th century, when the conflicts between China and the West broke out under the fierce pressure of the West, Chinese have examined the West in response to the pressure, compared the difference between China and the West and then strengthened China through reform. Western “new learnings and technologies” as well as the doctrine of prosperity introduced in this process shook traditional Chinese philosophy and resulted in the idea that the imperial examination system of selecting talents failed to response to the change of the world. Accordingly, a new kind of criticism of the imperial examination system formed, which went beyond the old doctrines that criticized the imperial examination system in the past thousand years but could correspond to the crisis at that time and became resonance in the court and the commonalty. It promoted the founding of schools and caused the abolishment of the imperial examination system hurriedly. The hasty change to the over 1,300-year history left various sequelae in the later history. There was a saying that “the scholar-officials’ discussion changes the affairs of the times, which caused the 3,000-year history to overturn at the moment”.

Key words: imperial examination system, scholar-official, scholar-officials’ criticism, reform, schools