Civil service examinations have been a hot topic in recent years. According to online information, the number of applicants for the civil service examination is more than 900,000 every year, although the final admission rate is extremely low, but it still does not affect people's enthusiasm for applying.
After all, "learning and excelling" is a tradition that has existed in China since the time of Confucius. Speaking of which, the selection of civil servants in the form of examinations has not existed since ancient times. The formation of the examination system was in the Sui and Tang dynasties, but our civil service examination system today has a history of only more than one hundred years. So, before the Tang Dynasty, how did the government select civil servants?
During the period of the Three Emperors and Five Emperors, China was still in a primitive society, and various systems had not yet been formed, so the selection of officials was actually a very headache.
According to the Chronicle of History, Yao was a very enlightened monarch who had a son named Danju. According to human nature, after Yao's death, the position of leader should be passed to his son. However, at that time, his son Danju had a bad character, and he had no talent, so if he handed over the world to him, it was really not very reassuring. At this time, someone recommended Shun to him.
Moreover, he said: Shun is a very filial person, when he was at home, his parents and brothers bullied him, but he did not complain in the slightest, and he could still treat his family kindly. When Yao heard this, he asked someone to find Shun and conducted a comprehensive examination of Shun through various means. Through the examination, Yao was very satisfied with Shun, believing that Shun was a person worthy of great responsibility, so he passed the position to him.
When Shun died, according to the previous practice, he did not pass the official position to his son Shang Jun, who was mediocre, but passed this position to Dayu, who was meritorious in controlling water. Later, it was not until Yu's death that he passed the position to his son Qi, which broke the form of "passing on the sages not to the descendants". In the history books, this form of succession is called "Zen concession system".
Shun's son Qi founded the Xia Dynasty, and since then, China's official positions have been passed down from generation to generation, from the Gongqing to the Heavenly Son, and are no longer "the virtuous dwell in it".
The disadvantages of this practice are obvious, the descendants of officials can always be officials, and even if their descendants can be mediocre and lazy, they can still receive rich salaries by virtue of the merits of their fathers. The descendants of civilians, on the other hand, can only be commoners for generations, and the chances of coming out are very small, in today's parlance, "class solidification."
Eventually, this situation did not improve until the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. At that time, China was in a period of social upheaval, and in order to develop and grow, various princely states began to recruit talents through various means. The scope of recruiting talents is no longer limited to the descendants of the gongqing nobles, as long as you have a skill, you have the opportunity to become an official. Like Su Qin, Bai Lixi and others as we know them, they were all born poor and eventually worshiped officials and were enfeoffed.
In the middle of the Warring States period, Qin Xiaogong officially formed this method of selecting people into a system through the Shang Martingale Transformation Law. At that time, in the name of changing the law, he abolished the titles of many hereditary secretaries of state, and stipulated that in the future, if he wanted to become an official in the Qin state, he could only rely on military merit. The title of the greater military merit is larger, and the title of the smaller military merit is small. And people who do not have military merit, even if your father and grandfather are able to endure, then you will not have a knighthood.
Therefore, the Qin state began to become stronger step by step, and eventually, it annexed the six kingdoms and seized the world.
Fast forward to the two Han Dynasties, when the system of electing officials was called the "inspection system", which was further developed on the basis of the previous system of electing officials. According to the rules of the probation system, local officials must find some talented and famous people within their territories and recommend them to the imperial court. The imperial court then conducted a series of assessments of these people, and finally, according to the results of the assessment, these people were selected and hired.
Although this practice seems quite reasonable, there is too much room for fraud. Some people can obtain the right to recommend through bribery, so that in the later period, there are things such as "raising talents and not knowing books; raising filial piety and honesty, and the father is not living; the cold is white as mud, and The Gaudyrian will be timid as a chicken". And the people elected through the inspection system are no longer all people who are useful to the country, but are full of a large number of small scoundrels.
In the Wei and Jin dynasties after the Two Han Dynasties, the inspection system was gradually replaced by the "Nine Pins Zhongzheng System". The Nine-Pin Zhongzheng System, as the name suggests, is divided into nine levels according to the level of official talent, namely "up", "up", "up", "up", "middle", "down", "down", "down", "down". In Stephen Chow's movie "Nine Pin Sesame Officer", "Nine Pin Official" is the lowest grade among officials.
However, this practice also has drawbacks, that is, the upper-grade officials are more proud of the family, while the lower-grade officials are mostly the children of civilians. That is to say, although the children of commoners also have the opportunity to become officials, they can do some relatively low-level officials, and if they want to be high-ranking officials, they must be the descendants of nobles. Later, it was not until the emergence of the imperial examination system in the Sui and Tang dynasties that this situation changed somewhat.
The imperial examination system was formed in the Sui Dynasty and was officially established in the Tang Dynasty, while in the Song Dynasty, it was further developed and applied by subsequent dynasties, and continued until the late Qing Dynasty, before it was abandoned. To put it simply, the examination system is to use the examination as a means to select talents, which is very similar to today's middle school entrance examination. The emergence of the imperial examination system broke down the barriers between classes, making it possible for the commoner class to become high-ranking officials.
At the same time, the country can also gather more talents, and society can run more rationally. Although it still has many irrationalities, it is much better than the previous systems. In the 14th century, European visitors to China introduced in detail and recommended to their own countries the mode of selecting talents through the imperial examination, that is, the unified examination.
Among them, the British were most interested in this, "The Academic and enlightened officials in Britain at that time vigorously advocated imitating the Chinese civilian officials' means of obtaining scholars, equal opportunities, and public examinations." In 1853, the British Crown appointed Two Lords, Charles Trovillian and Stanford Northcott, to be responsible for the reform of the British civil service and the drafting of the plan.
Later, they submitted to Parliament the "Report on the Establishment of the Permanent Civil Service System in Britain", and the main point of the report was to recommend the study and implementation of China's examination system, and the recruitment of officials through open and competitive examinations. The reports of the two sirs were adopted by the British Parliament, and since then, France, the United States and many other European and American countries have "taken the Chinese examination system" out of the past.
Resources:
["History of the Five Emperors", "The Budding of the Imperial Examination System in the Late Southern and Northern Dynasties", "Analysis of the Origin of the Imperial Examination System--On the Initiation of the Jinshi Branch in the Tang Dynasty"]