In the fifteenth year of Jian'an (210), Cao Cao promulgated the "Order of Seeking Merit", officially implementing the "meritocracy" system of electing officials. There are many reasons why Cao Cao practiced "meritocracy", one of the main reasons was to prevent the rise of the Shi clan door valve, to prevent the Shi clan door valve from controlling the election power, and to ensure the cao family's dominance in the future Cao Wei regime.
However, from the fifteenth year of Jian'an (210) to the twenty-fifth year (220) of Jian'an after Cao Cao's death, the influence of the Shi clan gate valves became increasingly powerful. In the year of Cao Cao's death, Cao Pi replaced "meritocracy" with the "Nine Pins zhongzheng" that favored the warrior clan. In the first ten years (249), Sima Yi, the representative of the Shi clan gate valve, launched the "Gaopingling Rebellion".
The "Gaopingling Rebellion" marked that Cao Wei's supreme power fell into the hands of Sima Shi, the representative of the Shi clan gate valve, and also marked the complete failure of Cao Cao's political plan to use "meritocracy" to prevent the rise of the Shi clan gate valve, and the demise of Cao Wei was inevitable. So why did Emperor Cao Cao's "meritocracy" fail to stop the rise of the Shi clan door valve?
From the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty to the Three Kingdoms was the era when the shi clan gate valves rose and dominated society. There are three main conditions for the rise of the scholar gate valves: one is to control a large number of people and land economically; the second is to monopolize education and public opinion culturally; the third is to control the election of officials by mastering the right to speak in standard setting, and the so-called "four generations and three dukes" have emerged.
Cao Cao's proposal of "meritocracy" is to deprive the scholars of their right to speak on the criteria for selecting officials, and thus prevent the scholars from monopolizing the right to elect officials. However, the basis for the scholars to control the standard discourse power of the elected officials is that they monopolize the public opinion of education and have strong economic strength, and as long as this economic and cultural foundation does not change, it is only a matter of time before the scholars monopolize the right to elect officials.
In particular, the scholars monopolized education, resulting in the "meritocracy" electing officials who also accounted for the vast majority of the scholars. Because of this, the "meritocracy" that only focused on the right to speak in the election of officials was doomed to failure, but the personal ability of the three emperors of Cao Wei postponed the time of complete failure, allowing Sima Yi to launch the "Gaopingling Revolution" at the age of seventy.
In the Southern and Northern Dynasties, hundreds of years after the "Gaopingling Revolution", due to the development of productive forces, wars and the further popularization of paper books, the economic strength of the scholar clan dropped sharply, and the monopoly on educational public opinion was gradually broken. In the early years of the Tang Dynasty, the politics of the shi clan gate valve officially withdrew from the stage of history.