It's funny you invoke some trad/conservative appeal to tradition, and meanwhile China's imperial history of bureaucratic machinery is never pointed to as an example of "look, technocratic meritocracy works".
> Under Charles Grant, the East India Company established the East India Company College at Haileybury near London, to train administrators, in 1806. The college was established on recommendation of officials in China who had seen the imperial examination system. In government, a civil service, replacing patronage with examination, similar to the Chinese system, was advocated a number of times over the next several decades.[10]
> William Ewart Gladstone, in 1850, an opposition member, sought a more efficient system based on expertise rather than favouritism. The East India Company provided a model for Stafford Northcote, private Secretary to Gladstone who, with Charles Trevelyan, drafted the key report in 1854.[11]
And western countries accepted it as part of the base assumption how government should work, then nobody points to its origin since now it's so obvious (from modern perspective).
Although it is worth recognizing that although the Imperial Chinese did have an examination-based civil service, it wasn't examinations on anything actually relevant to their jobs as in modern merit-based civil services. Instead, people wanting to enter the Imperial Chinese Civil Service were tested on their ability to recall trivia from classic Chinese literature. Great if the job was Jeopardy! contestant, less so for anything practical.
Parkinson's Law contains a nice (tongue in cheek) summary of the influence of the Chinese system on the British Civil Service:
> The Chinese system was studied by Europeans between
1815 and i830 and adopted by the English East India
Company in 1832. The effectiveness of this method was
investigated by a committee in 1854, with Macaulay as
chairman. The result was that the system of competitive
examination was introduced into the British Civil Service
in 1855. An essential feature of the Chinese examinations
had been their literary character. The test was in a knowledge of the classics, in an ability to write elegantly (both
prose and verse) and in the stamina necessary to complete
the course. All these features were faithfully incorporated in
the Trevelyan-Northcote Report, and thereafter in the
system it did so much to create. It was assumed that classical
learning and literary ability would fit any candidate for
any administrative post. It was assumed (no doubt rightly)
that a scientific education would fit a candidate for nothing
- except, possibly, science. It was known, finally, that
it is virtually impossible to find an order of merit among
people who have been examined in different subjects.
Since it is impracticable to decide whether one man is better in geology than another man in physics, it is at least
convenient to be able to rule them both out as useless.
When all candidates alike have to write Greek or Latin
verse, it is relatively easy to decide which verse is the best.
Men thus selected on their classical performance were then
sent forth to govern India. Those with lower marks were
retained to govern England. Those with still lower marks
were rejected altogether or sent to the colonies. While it
would be totally wrong to describe this system as a failure,
no one could claim for it the success that had attended the
systems hitherto in use. There was no guarantee, to begin
with, that the man with the highest marks might not tum
out to be off his head; as was sometimes found to be the
case. Then again the writing of Greek verse might prove to
be the sole accomplishment that some candidates had or
would ever have. On occasion, a successful applicant may
even have been impersonated at the examination by some-
one else, subsequently proving unable to write Greek verse
when the occasion arose. Selection by competitive examination was never therefore more than a moderate success.
I didn't know this and have always wondered why in the UK we didn't have something like the Chinese system for civil service.
Ironically the civil service is full of intelligent people and it's a competitive grad programme, but it's also wholly undesirable as a career path for many.
I know plenty of smart driven people who want to make a difference who won't go anywhere near the civil service for fear or bureaucracy or salary sacrifice or both. I also know plenty of people who left the civil service jaded by the whole experience.
I don't know what the solution is but I'm always a bit saddened that people end up moving money around or optimising clicks because there's no alternative if you don't want to get left behind
In ancient China, power and social status were gained through official positions, and merchants were considered the lowest of respectable occupations. This led to the exams attracting many of the "best and brightest" to government service. In modern western countries, being wealthy is the best way to get respect and adulation. The "best and brightest" spend their education learning how to extract value from the rest.
China isn't really that different these days. Everyone is thinking about being wealthy, but especially the Chinese. Hopefully the official class evolves to something like what Singapore has, or its going to be a constant brain drain on the government as smart kids continue to prefer the private sector.
