9 ms·

Keju, China’s difficult civil service test

146 points by laurex 3y ago

FrankWilhoit 3y ago
The headline is misleading; it might better say "...that broke Chinese society...", but then the article asserts that the Ching regime imploded after and because the exams were stopped in 1905.
- latexr 3y ago
 You can surround text in asterisks for emphasis, *like so*. Use a backslash and an asterisk or two asterisks together to output a * literally, **like so**.
 - foobarian 3y ago
 Your mastery of HN comment meta-character rendering is impressive! :-)
 - CSSer 3y ago
 The name checks out. Anyone who can understand LaTEX must have a natural disposition for markup mastery.
 - philsnow 3y ago
 (or markup masochism) I love the output that you can get with LaTeX, but I just can't wrap my head around the syntax. For some things you run a \command just inline with whatever you're doing (and if you want that command to only apply for a small part, you can surround it in an implicit environment with {\command whatever you were going to type}, for others you create an \environment{and write things inside it}. I guess in general it's weird to me that something like \Large can affect everything that comes after it, it feels vaguely like overuse of global variables in C. Parameters/options to commands and environment directives... I guess sometimes use square brackets and sometimes use curly brackets? I could never figure this out.
 - digitalsushi 3y ago
 CSSer, a passing master, subtly bows his head to latexr, a passing master, in the opposite direction. An oak creaks in the slightest breeze and a woodpecker bores for a beetle.
- canjobear 3y ago
 Yasheng Huang’s broader thesis is that keju broke Chinese society in the sense that all intellectual energy was focused on the single hierarchy established by the test, instead of being focused on multiple endeavors and new ideas. He explains it better in his Tyler Cowen interview than in this article: https://youtu.be/KcbwBqIyusc?si=6aiG8-qPyPPxa0Fv https://youtu.be/KcbwBqIyusc?si=6aiG8-qPyPPxa0Fv
 - deleted 3y ago
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 - ssnistfajen 3y ago
 This is going into alt history territory TBH. Keju was an improvement over the previous system which largely consisted of staffing the civil service based on ancestry from large aristocratic families who nominated each other to strengthen their political power. Imperial China's hegemony over its surrounding regions was not thoroughly challenged until the 19th century, and once it began to be challenged by nations with more advanced ideas and technologies, Keju did enter terminal decline along with the rest of the imperial system. Even without Keju, Early Modern China didn't have the recipes for scientific or industrial revolution to start there.
- deleted 3y ago
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henry2023 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
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- cingraa 3y ago
  [flagged]
gnicholas 3y ago
> Passing the first tier of Keju, known as the provincial exam, was a lot easier – working out to be 4 per cent on average during the Ming. Still, this was more cut-throat than getting into Harvard in most years. While Harvard’s admit rate might be above 4% in some years, there is more selection bias in the applicant pool, it would seem. The vast majority of people don’t bother to apply.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  Women could not participate, so it was definitely more cut-throat than Harvard for half the population. The article gives a figure of ~1M taking the provincial exam annually during the Ming dynasty, with the later Ming empire having a population in the range 160-200M. You are probably right about self-selection being greater for Harvard, then, given that just about anyone can, in principle, apply there.
- CSSer 3y ago
  Right. Without an outright scholarship or wealthy background, how would you pay? I never bothered because I was an upper quartile student, not an outstanding one (I was distracted by the usual things). I needed in-state benefits and grants to afford college. This leads me to suspect there is no “academic middle class” at Harvard. Ironically, I also suspect that despite that, the quality distribution of accepted candidates is roughly similar to most other universities too. Much of this personal suspicion stems from empirically utilizing online courses of theirs when I was in undergrad and observing students ask questions in recordings of course lectures. Of course they got into Harvard, but I was surprised how often many of them struck me as very normal in terms of ability to grasp material. I suppose the rest of it comes from some of the silly stuff I occasionally read in HBR. Heh.
  - jibe 3y ago
    Without an outright scholarship or wealthy background, how would you pay Harvard and most top private schools are generous in financial support if you can’t afford it. Harvard is free for families making less the 85k. But you are right that might leave an empty middle where you don’t get much aid, and don’t have personal wealth. https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordability https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordabi...
CSSer 3y ago
This was an interesting, if not somewhat exhausting, read. The premise of this article can be succinctly summarized by one of its references to a 19th century text: “Since the introduction of the examination system … scholars have forsaken their studies, peasants their ploughs, artisans their crafts, and merchants their trades; all have turned their attention to but one thing – government office. This is because the official has all the combined advantages of the four without requiring their necessary toil …” It refers to a very difficult exam that existed for a time in Chinese society that the author feels is analogous to systems re-emerging in Xi’s modern China. I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong. To be honest, I normally dislike comments like this that just paraphrase the article, but I read most of it and he repeats himself a lot. He could really use an editor to help him be more succinct.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  The article is ostensibly an advertisement for his book, and the idea of reading the book seems tedious after reading this article. I understand not wanting to spend the time detailing your research showing that China's technological growth lagged after introduction of the Keju in a teaser article. Repeating "I found this data, it supports my conclusion, and China's doing the same thing today" isn't a good alternative. Maybe the book has a better editor.
  - CSSer 3y ago
    Yeah, I think similarly the most difficult aspect for me was its lack of focused instrumentation for its points. He mentions Gao Kao briefly but never revisits it again. Towards the end of the article, he mentions the U.S. systems. Most of the article just harps on Keju to the point that I felt it would’ve been better served if it were just a historical summary rather than a piece with an unclear agenda. I’m not crying propaganda either. I just mean I’m not sure there’s enough here to even know what he’s really trying to say. Perhaps he’s afraid of openly criticising these systems too?
    - boomboomsubban 3y ago
      He's pushing his book. It's "buy now for the full picture!" Only his way of displaying a partial picture makes me hesitant to labor through the full picture.
paulpauper 3y ago
In the US still, the path to success is a highly optimized one: start early, max out the extracurriculars, become an outlier among outliers. GitHub has become the new resume. No one cares that you worked at Petco at 17; they want to see your repos, your pull requests. Today's elite and top earners are not born, like under the aristocracy or nobility, but rather forged, of course assuming the potential is there, like IQ.
- pc86 3y ago
  You seem to be conflating two mutually exclusive paths to success. Nobody in the world of banking, or politics, or manufacturing, give a shit about repos and pull requests. And nobody in the tech world gives a shit about your extracurriculars. And "become and outlier among outliers" doesn't give anyone any actual idea how to become successful and could be applied to literally any field or organization in any society at any point in history.
  - paulpauper 3y ago
    thanks for your constructive feedback
    - tintedfireglass 3y ago
      um., is this sarcasm?
  - oefrha 3y ago
    > And nobody in the tech world gives a shit about your extracurriculars People in the (American, and I dare say elsewhere too) tech world do give a shit about the college you went to, and the elite colleges do give a shit about extracurriculars, especially if you’re Asian or something, unfortunate as it is.
    - pc86 3y ago
      Maybe for your first job or two, but there are plenty of self-taught FAANG developers with completely unrelated degrees from completely unknown colleges. I'm really curious what the "or something" in your race statement means though.
esafak 3y ago
How useful is the stuff they memorize? Forcing people to study so much with no benefit other than being able to rank them in an exam would be a horrendous waste. And for what, becoming an appendage of the Leviathan?
- deleted 3y ago
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- canjobear 3y ago
  It was useful in that a lot of the texts they were studying purported to describe ideal government. Government officials often communicated with each other using obscure references to these texts, and their expectations about appropriate behavior were set by these texts. Anyone who got to the top of the tests could be guaranteed to be a good reader and writer with a huge body of shared literary knowledge with other government officials, not to mention being diligent and verbally intelligent. It was useless in that the texts were vague and fictionalized, and people weren't asked to offer new interpretations of the texts or to apply them to modern circumstances. The tests were graded based on how elegantly students could reproduce the standard orthodox interpretations in elaborate essays.
- ssnistfajen 3y ago
  These are the core study materials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Books_and_Five_Classics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Books_and_Five_Classics They have some philosophical values that were progressive for the time they were written (before 300BC), but by the 1800's they were as useless for adapting to an industrialized modern world as Abrahamic scripture. The disconnect between Keju study materials and realistic administrative responsibilities of bureaucrats have existed for as long as Keju itself.
bane 3y ago
Nearby Korea, being strongly influenced by Chinese bureaucratic concepts and Confucianism, also used this system in antiquity and flavors of it have carried over into the modern age. There were some differences, the Chinese exam created a kind of possible path for social mobility if you could find a way to study for it. Lots of families would pool their resources to send one son to an academy to learn how to pass the exam on hopes that, if they passed it, would help pull the entire family out of poverty and potentially support sending other sons. In ancient Korea it had a different effect and tended to fix certain classes into the "classes from which the bureaucracy could be reliably drawn from". They still had the academies, but it tended to be the same class/castes who attended and passed the exam. In theory it was open, but in practice it worked this way [1]. Some of the preserved academies still exist and are major UNESCO sights. [2] Modern South Korea still uses an examination system for civil servants [3], but has lost the caste system so in an interesting way has ended up more like the ancient Chinese concept. It tests civics, history, data analysis, etc. and I believe there are different tests for different levels of seniority and are required for promotion. It's common for test takers to have spent several years in dedicated study after university to prepare for the exam [4]. A semi-equivalent might be like a bar exam in other countries. 1 - https://www.amazon.com/History-Korea-Antiquity-Present/dp/0742567168 https://www.amazon.com/History-Korea-Antiquity-Present/dp/07... 2 - https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1498/ https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1498/ 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Korea_public_service_examinations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Korea_public_servi... 4 - https://youtu.be/zt4d_jGLXMY https://youtu.be/zt4d_jGLXMY
- mc32 3y ago
  Did this lead people to buy surnames? I know buying (into a) surname happened —which is why like 80% of the pop has one of half a dozen surnames, rather than there being a longer tail of distribution.
  - bozhark 3y ago
    Kim Lee Son This explains a lot, neat
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
whoevercares 3y ago
For years, Gao Kao has been the only route for tens of thousands Chinese people in poverty to change their fate. It’s interesting if we can run an metaverse simulation one day to see whether the system in US will produce better or more fair results for poor people
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  India also has a similar tough civil service test called UPSC. I have a cousin married to one dude in India who passed the test and is some sort of high official there. Apparently people study for this and another stem exam called IIT which are for some OKish colleges but the entrance rate seem to be crazy because of how many people sit for these exams, not that the colleges are any good.
  - pietro72ohboy 3y ago
    IITs are prestigious institutions. They’re not OKish institutions in the slightest.
    - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
      The are not even top 100 in the world. They are OKish.
      - phist_mcgee 3y ago
        Not even top 100? Total waste of time then.
        p1esk 3y ago
        I’d say if it’s not top-10 no one cares if you went there. I went to a top-20 school and it does not look impressive on my resume.
      - magnio 3y ago
        Those university rankings are rubbish. Sure, they tell you MIT and Stanford are one of the best schools in the world; like anyone would need a ranking for that. Those rankings not only consider teaching quality to be the sole factor, but also infrastructure, research output, financial status, and degree of internationalization. It is as gameable as gacha game rankings. For more sobering examples: Universiti Malaya (UM) and City University of Hong Kong ranks higher than Brown University. University of Copenhagen, University of Waterloo, and Rice University are all outside of top 100, so I guess we can call them OKish (all according to QS 2024).
tgv 3y ago
How do you take these statements from the article? [1] More recent literature demonstrates the political effects of Keju. In 1905, the Qing dynasty abolished Keju, dashing the aspirations of millions and sparking regional rebellions that eventually toppled China’s last imperial regime in 1911. [2] A 2020 study shows that, for every doubling of successful Keju candidates per 10,000 of the population in the Ming-Qing period, there was a 6.9 per cent increase in years of schooling in 2010. [comparison shows a logarithm relation between Keju success and current schooling between regions.] Wrt to [2]: there were only 260 regions, that period ranged over more than 500 years, and the correlation is not particularly good. It seems extremely improbable that all other factors have been excluded (it's just linear relations for a handful of numbers they could find). The logarithmic nature is counter-intuitive: since the exam was very, very selective, you would expect the reverse: a small increase in candidates passing requires many more students below that level, and thus a super-linear increase in schooling. [1] sounds very far-fetched. The linked article is paywalled, but the jump from reducing fairly small hopes of fortune to revolution is too big to accept from statistics that sound similar to those in [2]. The author seems to use it as support for his argument, but in my view, it just turns it into a house of cards. I stopped reading after the second article. Do these things bother you?
- rawgabbit 3y ago
  I will assume this is a bad English translation of a Chinese article. Nevertheless [1] appears to claim that ending the civil service test caused the fall of the Qing dynasty which is complete nonsense. I assume this is just an inept translation. [2] The claim (in English) is incomprehensible; I assume the author's intention is that when more civil service jobs were awarded more Chinese studied in an attempt to pass the exam. Overall, I believe the English text of the article is poor. I believe he is arguing the civil service test was all pervasive because over a million people took the test annually in an effort to get a very small number of civil jobs. The test itself could be considered an intelligence test because it required intelligence to memorize and elegantly recite the orthodox answers based on Confucian classics. If we want to argue what is deficient about Chinese government or culture during the Ming/Qing period, there are an infinite number of other topics. I would argue overall the Civil Service exam is a net positive for China, not a negative. As an aside, I watch some modern Chinese melodramas. These TV shows seem to argue China's past was marked by corruption, infighting among officials, and poison poison poison. According to these TV shows, ancient Chinese politics consists of everyone trying to poison everyone else. There are TV plots that involve multi-factor poisons. By itself the poisons are benign, but when they are mixed via food & incense & medical prescriptions, they are deadly. That is they blame endless in-fighting for China's predicament. The TV shows often feature characters spouting Confucian euphemisms but have no qualms poisoning or killing women/children for political gain. In short, modern Chinese people think past Chinese politicians were unethical and downright evil.
resolutebat 3y ago
> In 2022, the Chinese regime put almost 400 million people under some sort of COVID-19 lockdown, a feat that is unimaginable in any other country. India did the same. But, India being India, implementation and enforcement were quite haphazard and chaotic compared to China. Still, China is not quite as unique as the author thinks: India too has massive competition for civil service jobs, heavy emphasis on rote learning and passing incredibly difficult exams, and an increasingly authoritarian leader.
- deleted 3y ago
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- Sai_ 3y ago
  > authoritarian leader So, let’s go out, vote, and get others to vote.
ssnistfajen 3y ago
Yet Keju directly influenced civil service examinations in the West: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination#In_the_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination#In_the_We... The thing about socio-political systems is that their innovativeness doesn't last forever. Keju was innovative in the pre-industrial age because it provided a path to social mobility for those not born into hereditary nobility. Meanwhile European monarchs in the Early Modern era relied on nobility, landed gentry, and the clergy in administering their realms, none of which had academic competency as a requirement to entry. Of course, by the 19th century this has fallen dreafully behind as Keju curriculums were never updated to fit an evolving world. Confucian Classics were no better than the Bible or the Quran at guiding the development of elecrical generators, excavating coal, synthesizing chemicals, or smelting steel. At some point in the future, our current model of measuring academic competency will be seen as rigid and obsolete too. Standardized examinations aren't unique to China. The cut-throatness is a byproduct of China's large population base combined with limited possibilities of upward mobility due to its status as a developing economy not aligned with the most advanced economic bloc on the planet. >Keju was so precocious that it pre-empted and displaced an emergent society. Meritocracy empowered the Chinese state at a time when society was still at an embryonic stage. Massive resources and administrative manpower were poured into Keju such that it completely eclipsed all other channels of upward mobility that could have emerged. What pre-empted and displaced an emergent society was the creation and re-creation of unified imperial dynasties where emeperors were despots who were occasionally enlightened at best. Wealthy merchants existed in every Chinese Dynasty and "Ten Great Merchant Guilds" dominated the economic landscape of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The upper bound of society was not limited by Keju, but by China's position as an unchallenged hegemon in its sphere of influence until the industrial revolution.
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  "Of course, by the 19th century this has fallen dreafully behind as Keju curriculums were never updated to fit an evolving world." This represents a misunderstanding of objective of the test. The subject matter of the test is sort of irrelevant (other than cementing a common cultural foundation for the educated classes). The test functions primarily as an IQ test of sorts. Talented individuals end up rising while lazy/stupid ones do not. It's not about building skills In the modern world it's not really all that different. Children in China study crazy hard for the gaokao, but if you speak to anyone who's gone through the system they've virtually all forgotten the history and multivariable calculus they had to study. People primarily learn relevant skills "on the job" The UK didn't have the industrial revolution because they started to teach children algebra
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Animats 3y ago
New York City jobs still have competitive examinations. "The map below is a scheme of subway lines in the city. Each line is marked by a different color and is associated with a different letter. Stations are numbered by their location on the line(s). The numbering of the stations progresses from the beginning of the line to its end. Lines always begin at the northernmost station, except for lines G and M which begin at the westernmost station. Codes associated with some of the stations have been written below them. A station can have more than one code associated with it, as some stations have more than one line passing through them. Which of the following routes would be the least efficient (passes through the most stations)?"[1] If only someone could devise a workable sociopath filter... [1] https://www.jobtestprep.com/civil-service-exam-nyc-free-practice https://www.jobtestprep.com/civil-service-exam-nyc-free-prac...
est 3y ago
on one hand, Keju serves as a social mobility mechanism. One the other hand, it's hides an overall bigger problem: monarchism with too much centralized power.
andy_ppp 3y ago
Being as close to government as possible is good for a) social credit scores b) financially c) corruption opportunities d) general status e) finding a partner in a very competitive dating market (fewer women [1]). So yeah, of course the exam is difficult! [1] I’m pretty shocked about how bad the women situation is, especially in the 15-19 age group here https://www.statista.com/statistics/282119/china-sex-ratio-by-age-group/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/282119/china-sex-ratio-b... :-/
steve76 3y ago
[dead]
simne 3y ago
I wonder, when Chinese will train AI on Confucianism texts and what it will say them ;D
- novolunt 3y ago
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146 points by laurex 3y ago

The headline is misleading; it might better say "...that broke Chinese society...", but then the article asserts that the Ching regime imploded after and because the exams were stopped in 1905.

latexr 3y ago
You can surround text in asterisks for emphasis, *like so*. Use a backslash and an asterisk or two asterisks together to output a * literally, **like so**.
- foobarian 3y ago
  Your mastery of HN comment meta-character rendering is impressive! :-)
  - CSSer 3y ago
    The name checks out. Anyone who can understand LaTEX must have a natural disposition for markup mastery.
    - philsnow 3y ago
      (or markup masochism) I love the output that you can get with LaTeX, but I just can't wrap my head around the syntax. For some things you run a \command just inline with whatever you're doing (and if you want that command to only apply for a small part, you can surround it in an implicit environment with {\command whatever you were going to type}, for others you create an \environment{and write things inside it}. I guess in general it's weird to me that something like \Large can affect everything that comes after it, it feels vaguely like overuse of global variables in C. Parameters/options to commands and environment directives... I guess sometimes use square brackets and sometimes use curly brackets? I could never figure this out.
    - digitalsushi 3y ago
      CSSer, a passing master, subtly bows his head to latexr, a passing master, in the opposite direction. An oak creaks in the slightest breeze and a woodpecker bores for a beetle.
canjobear 3y ago
Yasheng Huang’s broader thesis is that keju broke Chinese society in the sense that all intellectual energy was focused on the single hierarchy established by the test, instead of being focused on multiple endeavors and new ideas. He explains it better in his Tyler Cowen interview than in this article: https://youtu.be/KcbwBqIyusc?si=6aiG8-qPyPPxa0Fv https://youtu.be/KcbwBqIyusc?si=6aiG8-qPyPPxa0Fv
- deleted 3y ago
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- ssnistfajen 3y ago
  This is going into alt history territory TBH. Keju was an improvement over the previous system which largely consisted of staffing the civil service based on ancestry from large aristocratic families who nominated each other to strengthen their political power. Imperial China's hegemony over its surrounding regions was not thoroughly challenged until the 19th century, and once it began to be challenged by nations with more advanced ideas and technologies, Keju did enter terminal decline along with the rest of the imperial system. Even without Keju, Early Modern China didn't have the recipes for scientific or industrial revolution to start there.
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henry2023 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
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cingraa 3y ago
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gnicholas 3y ago

> Passing the first tier of Keju, known as the provincial exam, was a lot easier – working out to be 4 per cent on average during the Ming. Still, this was more cut-throat than getting into Harvard in most years. While Harvard’s admit rate might be above 4% in some years, there is more selection bias in the applicant pool, it would seem. The vast majority of people don’t bother to apply.

mannykannot 3y ago
Women could not participate, so it was definitely more cut-throat than Harvard for half the population. The article gives a figure of ~1M taking the provincial exam annually during the Ming dynasty, with the later Ming empire having a population in the range 160-200M. You are probably right about self-selection being greater for Harvard, then, given that just about anyone can, in principle, apply there.
CSSer 3y ago
Right. Without an outright scholarship or wealthy background, how would you pay? I never bothered because I was an upper quartile student, not an outstanding one (I was distracted by the usual things). I needed in-state benefits and grants to afford college. This leads me to suspect there is no “academic middle class” at Harvard. Ironically, I also suspect that despite that, the quality distribution of accepted candidates is roughly similar to most other universities too. Much of this personal suspicion stems from empirically utilizing online courses of theirs when I was in undergrad and observing students ask questions in recordings of course lectures. Of course they got into Harvard, but I was surprised how often many of them struck me as very normal in terms of ability to grasp material. I suppose the rest of it comes from some of the silly stuff I occasionally read in HBR. Heh.
- jibe 3y ago
  Without an outright scholarship or wealthy background, how would you pay Harvard and most top private schools are generous in financial support if you can’t afford it. Harvard is free for families making less the 85k. But you are right that might leave an empty middle where you don’t get much aid, and don’t have personal wealth. https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordability https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordabi...

CSSer 3y ago

This was an interesting, if not somewhat exhausting, read. The premise of this article can be succinctly summarized by one of its references to a 19th century text: “Since the introduction of the examination system … scholars have forsaken their studies, peasants their ploughs, artisans their crafts, and merchants their trades; all have turned their attention to but one thing – government office. This is because the official has all the combined advantages of the four without requiring their necessary toil …” It refers to a very difficult exam that existed for a time in Chinese society that the author feels is analogous to systems re-emerging in Xi’s modern China. I hope someone will correct me if I’m wrong. To be honest, I normally dislike comments like this that just paraphrase the article, but I read most of it and he repeats himself a lot. He could really use an editor to help him be more succinct.

boomboomsubban 3y ago
The article is ostensibly an advertisement for his book, and the idea of reading the book seems tedious after reading this article. I understand not wanting to spend the time detailing your research showing that China's technological growth lagged after introduction of the Keju in a teaser article. Repeating "I found this data, it supports my conclusion, and China's doing the same thing today" isn't a good alternative. Maybe the book has a better editor.
- CSSer 3y ago
  Yeah, I think similarly the most difficult aspect for me was its lack of focused instrumentation for its points. He mentions Gao Kao briefly but never revisits it again. Towards the end of the article, he mentions the U.S. systems. Most of the article just harps on Keju to the point that I felt it would’ve been better served if it were just a historical summary rather than a piece with an unclear agenda. I’m not crying propaganda either. I just mean I’m not sure there’s enough here to even know what he’s really trying to say. Perhaps he’s afraid of openly criticising these systems too?
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    He's pushing his book. It's "buy now for the full picture!" Only his way of displaying a partial picture makes me hesitant to labor through the full picture.

paulpauper 3y ago

In the US still, the path to success is a highly optimized one: start early, max out the extracurriculars, become an outlier among outliers. GitHub has become the new resume. No one cares that you worked at Petco at 17; they want to see your repos, your pull requests. Today's elite and top earners are not born, like under the aristocracy or nobility, but rather forged, of course assuming the potential is there, like IQ.

pc86 3y ago
You seem to be conflating two mutually exclusive paths to success. Nobody in the world of banking, or politics, or manufacturing, give a shit about repos and pull requests. And nobody in the tech world gives a shit about your extracurriculars. And "become and outlier among outliers" doesn't give anyone any actual idea how to become successful and could be applied to literally any field or organization in any society at any point in history.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  thanks for your constructive feedback
  - tintedfireglass 3y ago
    um., is this sarcasm?
- oefrha 3y ago
  > And nobody in the tech world gives a shit about your extracurriculars People in the (American, and I dare say elsewhere too) tech world do give a shit about the college you went to, and the elite colleges do give a shit about extracurriculars, especially if you’re Asian or something, unfortunate as it is.
  - pc86 3y ago
    Maybe for your first job or two, but there are plenty of self-taught FAANG developers with completely unrelated degrees from completely unknown colleges. I'm really curious what the "or something" in your race statement means though.

esafak 3y ago

How useful is the stuff they memorize? Forcing people to study so much with no benefit other than being able to rank them in an exam would be a horrendous waste. And for what, becoming an appendage of the Leviathan?

deleted 3y ago
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canjobear 3y ago
It was useful in that a lot of the texts they were studying purported to describe ideal government. Government officials often communicated with each other using obscure references to these texts, and their expectations about appropriate behavior were set by these texts. Anyone who got to the top of the tests could be guaranteed to be a good reader and writer with a huge body of shared literary knowledge with other government officials, not to mention being diligent and verbally intelligent. It was useless in that the texts were vague and fictionalized, and people weren't asked to offer new interpretations of the texts or to apply them to modern circumstances. The tests were graded based on how elegantly students could reproduce the standard orthodox interpretations in elaborate essays.
ssnistfajen 3y ago
These are the core study materials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Books_and_Five_Classics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Books_and_Five_Classics They have some philosophical values that were progressive for the time they were written (before 300BC), but by the 1800's they were as useless for adapting to an industrialized modern world as Abrahamic scripture. The disconnect between Keju study materials and realistic administrative responsibilities of bureaucrats have existed for as long as Keju itself.

bane 3y ago

Nearby Korea, being strongly influenced by Chinese bureaucratic concepts and Confucianism, also used this system in antiquity and flavors of it have carried over into the modern age. There were some differences, the Chinese exam created a kind of possible path for social mobility if you could find a way to study for it. Lots of families would pool their resources to send one son to an academy to learn how to pass the exam on hopes that, if they passed it, would help pull the entire family out of poverty and potentially support sending other sons. In ancient Korea it had a different effect and tended to fix certain classes into the "classes from which the bureaucracy could be reliably drawn from". They still had the academies, but it tended to be the same class/castes who attended and passed the exam. In theory it was open, but in practice it worked this way [1]. Some of the preserved academies still exist and are major UNESCO sights. [2] Modern South Korea still uses an examination system for civil servants [3], but has lost the caste system so in an interesting way has ended up more like the ancient Chinese concept. It tests civics, history, data analysis, etc. and I believe there are different tests for different levels of seniority and are required for promotion. It's common for test takers to have spent several years in dedicated study after university to prepare for the exam [4]. A semi-equivalent might be like a bar exam in other countries. 1 - https://www.amazon.com/History-Korea-Antiquity-Present/dp/0742567168 https://www.amazon.com/History-Korea-Antiquity-Present/dp/07... 2 - https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1498/ https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1498/ 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Korea_public_service_examinations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Korea_public_servi... 4 - https://youtu.be/zt4d_jGLXMY https://youtu.be/zt4d_jGLXMY

mc32 3y ago
Did this lead people to buy surnames? I know buying (into a) surname happened —which is why like 80% of the pop has one of half a dozen surnames, rather than there being a longer tail of distribution.
- bozhark 3y ago
  Kim Lee Son This explains a lot, neat
- thaumasiotes 3y ago

whoevercares 3y ago

For years, Gao Kao has been the only route for tens of thousands Chinese people in poverty to change their fate. It’s interesting if we can run an metaverse simulation one day to see whether the system in US will produce better or more fair results for poor people

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
India also has a similar tough civil service test called UPSC. I have a cousin married to one dude in India who passed the test and is some sort of high official there. Apparently people study for this and another stem exam called IIT which are for some OKish colleges but the entrance rate seem to be crazy because of how many people sit for these exams, not that the colleges are any good.
- pietro72ohboy 3y ago
  IITs are prestigious institutions. They’re not OKish institutions in the slightest.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    The are not even top 100 in the world. They are OKish.
    - phist_mcgee 3y ago
      Not even top 100? Total waste of time then.
      - p1esk 3y ago
        I’d say if it’s not top-10 no one cares if you went there. I went to a top-20 school and it does not look impressive on my resume.
    - magnio 3y ago
      Those university rankings are rubbish. Sure, they tell you MIT and Stanford are one of the best schools in the world; like anyone would need a ranking for that. Those rankings not only consider teaching quality to be the sole factor, but also infrastructure, research output, financial status, and degree of internationalization. It is as gameable as gacha game rankings. For more sobering examples: Universiti Malaya (UM) and City University of Hong Kong ranks higher than Brown University. University of Copenhagen, University of Waterloo, and Rice University are all outside of top 100, so I guess we can call them OKish (all according to QS 2024).

tgv 3y ago

How do you take these statements from the article? [1] More recent literature demonstrates the political effects of Keju. In 1905, the Qing dynasty abolished Keju, dashing the aspirations of millions and sparking regional rebellions that eventually toppled China’s last imperial regime in 1911. [2] A 2020 study shows that, for every doubling of successful Keju candidates per 10,000 of the population in the Ming-Qing period, there was a 6.9 per cent increase in years of schooling in 2010. [comparison shows a logarithm relation between Keju success and current schooling between regions.] Wrt to [2]: there were only 260 regions, that period ranged over more than 500 years, and the correlation is not particularly good. It seems extremely improbable that all other factors have been excluded (it's just linear relations for a handful of numbers they could find). The logarithmic nature is counter-intuitive: since the exam was very, very selective, you would expect the reverse: a small increase in candidates passing requires many more students below that level, and thus a super-linear increase in schooling. [1] sounds very far-fetched. The linked article is paywalled, but the jump from reducing fairly small hopes of fortune to revolution is too big to accept from statistics that sound similar to those in [2]. The author seems to use it as support for his argument, but in my view, it just turns it into a house of cards. I stopped reading after the second article. Do these things bother you?

rawgabbit 3y ago
I will assume this is a bad English translation of a Chinese article. Nevertheless [1] appears to claim that ending the civil service test caused the fall of the Qing dynasty which is complete nonsense. I assume this is just an inept translation. [2] The claim (in English) is incomprehensible; I assume the author's intention is that when more civil service jobs were awarded more Chinese studied in an attempt to pass the exam. Overall, I believe the English text of the article is poor. I believe he is arguing the civil service test was all pervasive because over a million people took the test annually in an effort to get a very small number of civil jobs. The test itself could be considered an intelligence test because it required intelligence to memorize and elegantly recite the orthodox answers based on Confucian classics. If we want to argue what is deficient about Chinese government or culture during the Ming/Qing period, there are an infinite number of other topics. I would argue overall the Civil Service exam is a net positive for China, not a negative. As an aside, I watch some modern Chinese melodramas. These TV shows seem to argue China's past was marked by corruption, infighting among officials, and poison poison poison. According to these TV shows, ancient Chinese politics consists of everyone trying to poison everyone else. There are TV plots that involve multi-factor poisons. By itself the poisons are benign, but when they are mixed via food & incense & medical prescriptions, they are deadly. That is they blame endless in-fighting for China's predicament. The TV shows often feature characters spouting Confucian euphemisms but have no qualms poisoning or killing women/children for political gain. In short, modern Chinese people think past Chinese politicians were unethical and downright evil.

resolutebat 3y ago

> In 2022, the Chinese regime put almost 400 million people under some sort of COVID-19 lockdown, a feat that is unimaginable in any other country. India did the same. But, India being India, implementation and enforcement were quite haphazard and chaotic compared to China. Still, China is not quite as unique as the author thinks: India too has massive competition for civil service jobs, heavy emphasis on rote learning and passing incredibly difficult exams, and an increasingly authoritarian leader.

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Sai_ 3y ago
> authoritarian leader So, let’s go out, vote, and get others to vote.

ssnistfajen 3y ago

Yet Keju directly influenced civil service examinations in the West: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination#In_the_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination#In_the_We... The thing about socio-political systems is that their innovativeness doesn't last forever. Keju was innovative in the pre-industrial age because it provided a path to social mobility for those not born into hereditary nobility. Meanwhile European monarchs in the Early Modern era relied on nobility, landed gentry, and the clergy in administering their realms, none of which had academic competency as a requirement to entry. Of course, by the 19th century this has fallen dreafully behind as Keju curriculums were never updated to fit an evolving world. Confucian Classics were no better than the Bible or the Quran at guiding the development of elecrical generators, excavating coal, synthesizing chemicals, or smelting steel. At some point in the future, our current model of measuring academic competency will be seen as rigid and obsolete too. Standardized examinations aren't unique to China. The cut-throatness is a byproduct of China's large population base combined with limited possibilities of upward mobility due to its status as a developing economy not aligned with the most advanced economic bloc on the planet. >Keju was so precocious that it pre-empted and displaced an emergent society. Meritocracy empowered the Chinese state at a time when society was still at an embryonic stage. Massive resources and administrative manpower were poured into Keju such that it completely eclipsed all other channels of upward mobility that could have emerged. What pre-empted and displaced an emergent society was the creation and re-creation of unified imperial dynasties where emeperors were despots who were occasionally enlightened at best. Wealthy merchants existed in every Chinese Dynasty and "Ten Great Merchant Guilds" dominated the economic landscape of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The upper bound of society was not limited by Keju, but by China's position as an unchallenged hegemon in its sphere of influence until the industrial revolution.

contrarian1234 3y ago
"Of course, by the 19th century this has fallen dreafully behind as Keju curriculums were never updated to fit an evolving world." This represents a misunderstanding of objective of the test. The subject matter of the test is sort of irrelevant (other than cementing a common cultural foundation for the educated classes). The test functions primarily as an IQ test of sorts. Talented individuals end up rising while lazy/stupid ones do not. It's not about building skills In the modern world it's not really all that different. Children in China study crazy hard for the gaokao, but if you speak to anyone who's gone through the system they've virtually all forgotten the history and multivariable calculus they had to study. People primarily learn relevant skills "on the job" The UK didn't have the industrial revolution because they started to teach children algebra

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Animats 3y ago

New York City jobs still have competitive examinations. "The map below is a scheme of subway lines in the city. Each line is marked by a different color and is associated with a different letter. Stations are numbered by their location on the line(s). The numbering of the stations progresses from the beginning of the line to its end. Lines always begin at the northernmost station, except for lines G and M which begin at the westernmost station. Codes associated with some of the stations have been written below them. A station can have more than one code associated with it, as some stations have more than one line passing through them. Which of the following routes would be the least efficient (passes through the most stations)?"[1] If only someone could devise a workable sociopath filter... [1] https://www.jobtestprep.com/civil-service-exam-nyc-free-practice https://www.jobtestprep.com/civil-service-exam-nyc-free-prac...

est 3y ago

on one hand, Keju serves as a social mobility mechanism. One the other hand, it's hides an overall bigger problem: monarchism with too much centralized power.

andy_ppp 3y ago

Being as close to government as possible is good for a) social credit scores b) financially c) corruption opportunities d) general status e) finding a partner in a very competitive dating market (fewer women [1]). So yeah, of course the exam is difficult! [1] I’m pretty shocked about how bad the women situation is, especially in the 15-19 age group here https://www.statista.com/statistics/282119/china-sex-ratio-by-age-group/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/282119/china-sex-ratio-b... :-/

steve76 3y ago

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simne 3y ago

I wonder, when Chinese will train AI on Confucianism texts and what it will say them ;D

novolunt 3y ago
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