When we admire Chinese education today, we're admiring essentially the same characteristics that infatuated Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz, for example, the brilliant German Lutheran philosopher and mathematician, had a love for the Chinese polity and philosophy that rivals any expressed today. “Even if we are equal to them in the productive arts, and…in the theoretical sciences,” he wrote, “it is certainly true (I am almost ashamed to admit) that they surpass in practical philosophy, by which I mean the rules of ethics and politics which have been devised for the conduct and benefit of human life.”1
Jesuit missionaries to China shared the same opinion, sending glowing stories back to Europe about the Oriental Empire's superior Confucian philosophy and utopian society. Their observations so challenged Christian orthodoxy that several books on China were ordered burned by the church, including Nouveau mémoire sur l'état présent de la Chine by Father Louis le Comte. The French Jesuit missionary dared to assert that the Chinese system of morality was “on a par with the Christian revelation as a supreme product of the moral aspirations of Man.”2 And the German philosopher Christian Wolff was ordered to leave his position at the University of Halle immediately after delivering a speech expressing his admiration for China: “In the Art of Governing, this Nation has even surpassed all others without exception.”3
Bonfires and dismissals did not prevent China from becoming, in Europe, “better known than some provinces of Europe itself.” Sinophilism swiftly developed into Sinomania.4 The French Enlightenment writer François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, was among the most devoted Sinophiles, along with the French economist François Quesnay, who was dubbed the “Confucius of Europe.”5 Both Voltaire and Quesnay fell in love with Chinese despotism and suggested that it be a model for European nations. China's political system struck Voltaire as ideal: “the combination of a monarch with almost unlimited powers and an official class chosen on a rational, that is on an intellectual, basis, and noteworthy for its freedom from political corruption as well as from religious bias.”6
Westerners were awed by the strengths of China's official class. Sinologist A. R. Davis, of the University of Sydney, writes about “the Chinese scholar-official” and makes “little apology for this somewhat cumbersome term, because, if he were an object of wonder to the Western world, it is hardly surprising that our Western vocabulary should lack a satisfactory equivalent.” The labels “literati,” “bureaucrats,” “mandarins,” and “gentry” are all inaccurate “for it was because scholars were the officials and the officials were scholars that Voltaire admired China's government.”7 The Chinese scholar-officials have been held in high esteem for centuries, praised for making China the prosperous and stable empire it was. First, they occupied government positions, administering the daily business of the government on behalf of the emperor, the Son of Heaven. On retirement, they served as moral examples, teachers, and unofficial judges. They didn't simply carry out the orders of the rulers; they guided the rulers. Kenneth Winston, lecturer in ethics at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, wrote a paper in 2005 suggesting “that only by integrating the technocratic aspects of a Kennedy School of Government education with the ethical orientation of scholar-officials can the Chinese provide for the requisites of public administration in a future democratic society.”8 Winston describes the scholar-officials as
a self-conscious, educated elite who took it as their highest calling to enter government service, typically in the central bureaucracy or in provincial administrations. As humanists steeped in the moral wisdom of the past (i.e. the classic Confucian texts), they devoted themselves to protecting traditional values in the political realm: serving as the conscience of rulers—counseling them through moral suasions, remonstrating with them to rectify defective policies, chastising them for personal failings—sometimes at great personal risk. They offered a moral compass, based on learning and reflection, and acted as critics, moral educators, and disinterested proponents of the public good.9
And how did one come to be a scholar-official? Through the keju system, which administered the imperial exam. While the Chinese were using examinations to select government officials in the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) more than two thousand years ago, keju officially began in AD 605. It became the dominant way to select government officials in the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907), and it gained even more preeminence in the Song dynasty (AD 960–1279). Keju lasted for thirteen hundred years, until it was abolished in 1905 by the emperor of the Qing dynasty (AD 1644–1911). For good or for bad, keju was responsible for the continuity and antiquity of the Chinese civilization.
The format and content of the examinations varied slightly across dynasties, and there were interruptions at times of turmoil and during changes of dynasties. Still, the process and principles remained pretty much the same for the entire thirteen hundred years. The exams consistently probed knowledge of the Confucian classics, and their format was typically memorization and interpretation of the texts, as well as expository writing on current affairs and politics.
Examinations were typically offered at three levels: local, provincial, and national. They were norm referenced, meaning that only a certain number of examinees could succeed and be privileged to move to the next level. Success at each level earned the examinee a title and certain privileges, just as professional degrees do today. Depending on the time, those who succeeded at the most basic level could be excused from certain taxes and corvée (labor for the state) and would have the opportunity to be appointed a government official. The highest “degree” was Jinshi, awarded to winners of the national-level exam. A certain number of Jinshi were allowed to attend another final-level exam, held in the imperial court before the emperor. The winners were ranked based on their exam results, and the highest-ranked examinees climbed to the top of the bureaucracy.
Theoretically the examination was open to all male residents, regardless of family background, age, or years of studying, which meant that every individual had a shot at becoming a member of the ruling elite and thus acquiring wealth, social status, and power. This is why keju has been viewed as such an effective measure for social mobility in an otherwise hierarchical, dictatorial society. From the perspective of the rulers, keju was a tool to identify and recruit the most capable and virtuous individuals into government instead of relying on members of the hereditary noble class, which could become weak and corrupt as time went on.
In terms of its contribution to China and the world, the keju system is said to be the fifth great invention of China, along with gunpowder, the compass, paper, and movable type. As an essential element of the Chinese political system for more than a thousand years, the keju system had an impact on Chinese society and culture that cannot be overstated. Because of its apparent fairness, objectivity, and openness, keju gave birth to the idea of meritocracy, a core value in China and other Eastern Asian countries such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. These countries copied the keju system shortly after its invention in China. Keju also shaped East Asia's most fundamental, enduring educational values. So it is both ironic and understandable that Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Chinese republic, praised keju as the world's best education system and wanted to make sure that its tradition continued—even as he devoted his life to ending imperial rule.
In his proposed Five-Power Constitution, Sun added examination to the traditional legislative, judicial, and executive powers of government as a way to fix the problems of the American-style, three-power democracy. The American democracy, Sun observed, “often makes stupid mistakes,” one of them the inability to elect the most competent leader. In 1921, Sun told the story of a doctor who lost an election to a rickshaw driver because the rickshaw driver was able to communicate with the voters, while the doctor was too knowledgeable to be understood. “Of the two candidates, the doctor certainly is more knowledgeable than the driver but he lost. This is the consequence of a system of popular election without examination.”10 Sun's Five-Power Constitution was successfully implemented by the Republic of China, which now includes executive, legislative, judicial, examination, and control branches of government (or yuan).
“Indeed, with the Chinese system of meritocracy in place, it is inconceivable that people as weak and incompetent as George W. Bush or Yoshihiko Noda of Japan could ever get to the top leadership position,” wrote Zhang Weiwei, a professor at China's Fudan University, in a 2012 op-ed in the New York Times, affirming Sun's view almost a century later. Commenting on the coincidence of the US presidential election with the power transition that takes place in the Chinese Communist Party every ten years, Zhang noted that the Chinese meritocracy just might beat America's popular elections:
Meritocratic governance is deeply-rooted in China's Confucian political tradition, which among other things allowed the country to develop and sustain for well over a millennium the Keju system, the world's first public exam process for selecting officials. China's political and institutional innovations so far have produced a system that has in many ways combined the best option of selecting well-tested leaders and the least bad option of ensuring the exit of bad leaders.11
Voltaire and his fellow Sinophiles would have been startled by the speed of Europe's shift from Sinophilia to Sinophobia. They'd be even more startled to find that their idolized polity not only wasn't emulated by European nations, but instead was shattered by European powers merely a century later. China's great inventions did not stop the Western assault; instead, the Western powers turned those inventions against China. They successfully weakened the Chinese Confucian tradition by spreading Christianity, using copies of the Bible printed, thanks to China, on paper with movable-type technology. They brought powerful warships all the way from Europe to China's doorstep, using the compass the Chinese invented. They delivered many humiliating defeats and garnered tremendous wealth from China using the great Chinese invention of gunpowder.
The fifth great invention, keju, did not help China either. The great Confucian tradition and the rational and intelligent scholar-officials failed to defend the great civilization against “the Western barbarians.” In fact, the keju system has been held responsible for the decline of the Chinese empire.
When the European Jesuit missionaries sent home stories about the glorious Chinese emperor and inspired Sinomania in Europe, China had reached its peak in terms of economy and territory. For the previous millennium, China had been by far the most advanced and most prosperous country in the world. Its technological innovations far outpaced any other nation's until the Industrial Revolution. In the series Science and Civilisation in China, Cambridge University's Sinologist Joseph Needham and his collaborators have shown that China had many more than four great inventions. Since 1954, Cambridge University Press has published twenty-four books in this series.12
Yet all of these great inventions failed to turn China into a modern technological and scientific nation. Unlike modern technological advances, many of China's inventions were never improved to the level necessary to transform society. For example, the Chinese used their compass mainly to help find building locations and burial sites with good fengshui—not to navigate the oceans and expand across the globe as the West did. Gunpowder stopped at a level good enough for fireworks, but not for the modern weaponry that gave the West its military might.
Justin Yifu Lin, a former vice president of the World Bank and well-known professor of economics at Peking University, reviewed the literature about premodern China and concluded: “Most scholars believe that, as early as in the early period of Ming Dynasty (14th century), China had acquired all the major elements that were essential for the British industrial revolution in the 18th century.” In other words, China was almost ready for the Industrial Revolution four hundred years before Great Britain was. “However, industrial revolution occurred in Britain instead of China and Chinese economy was quickly overtaken and lagged behind by western countries,” writes Lin. “Why did the industrial revolution not originate from China, the place that first acquired all the major conditions?” Lin asks the question first posed by Max Weber, and Joseph Needham had puzzled over the same questions: “Why had China been so far in advance of other civilizations” and “Why is not China now ahead of the rest of world?”13
There's no doubt that keju was partly responsible for China's earlier great achievements. According to Lin, China was able to achieve so many technological and scientific innovations because of the size of its population. Rudimentary technological innovations can be made by accident. The probability of such accidents is the same for all societies, and thus the more people in a society, the higher the probability is of accidental inventions. “Before the industrial revolution in the 18th century, technological innovations were mainly realized through accidental discoveries in production process by craftsmen and peasants,” writes Lin. “Because China had a large population, it had a large amount of craftsmen and peasants.”14
People did, however, need a relatively stable society in order to engage in activities that might lead to discovery. They also needed time and certain resources. Keju helped build a unified nation with a large population, so it could have a large pool of accidental discoveries. Keju also provided relative stability and economic prosperity, so people could engage in productive activities pregnant with possibilities of accidental invention.
But keju was also the reason for China's failure to start the Industrial Revolution. After methodically refuting a number of existing hypotheses that attribute the lack of scientific revolution in China to economic reasons (land-people ratio or a repressive political environment), Lin found keju, the imperial exam system, to be the real reason:
Because of this examination system, curious geniuses were diverted from learning mathematics and conducting controllable experiments. Because of this system, the geniuses could not accumulate crucial human capital that was essential for the scientific revolution. As a result, the discoveries of natural phenomena could only be based on sporadic observations, and could not be upgraded into modern science, which was built upon mathematics and controlled experiments.15
The diversion of “curious geniuses” from mathematics and scientific experiment was a design feature of the imperial exam system. The entire population was diverted from pursuing anything that might challenge the Confucian orthodoxy and, hence, the imperial order. By design, the system rewarded obedience, encouraged compliance, and fostered homogeneous thinking.
As a system formally initiated by an emperor who seized the throne from his own boss, keju was first and foremost developed to prevent anyone else from repeating the emperor's coup. Yang Jian, Emperor Wen of the Sui dynasty (AD 581–618), served the Northern Zhou (AD 557–581) court as prime minister and a military general. Through bloody murders and military threat, Yang Jian forced the North Zhou emperor to abdicate the throne. Yang then accepted the position of emperor, “in response to people's wishes,” in AD 581. Numerous victorious military campaigns later, he had unified China, joining a land that had been divided into warring kingdoms for more than three centuries.
The emperor's biggest concern was keeping China unified under his family's rule. Learning from his own example, he realized he needed a way to weaken the hereditary power of certain families and tribes. Thus, he needed to find people who could help govern the country without relying on the existing ruling class. He also needed a way to prevent capable talents from rising against the empire and to reinforce among his subjects the need to obey the rightful rule of the Son of Heaven.
We can't know how much Emperor Wen planned and strategized, but the establishment of keju accomplished every one of his goals. Prior to the Sui dynasty, China's rulers had relied on recommendation and inspection to appoint government officials. In the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), most positions of the bureaucracy were filled with individuals recommended by prominent aristocrats and local officials. Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty did implement a partial exam system in which the candidates for the exam were based on recommendations from local officials but the final selection was based on the results of the exam. However, connections and recommendations from the existing elites weighed much more heavily than the exam results. The next dynasties implemented the nine rank system, in which imperial officials were put in place to assess candidates nominated by local officials. Family lines were explicitly used as a criterion for selection, and connections to existing officials were crucial.
To minimize the influence of hereditary power, Emperor Wen improved on the practices of Emperor Wu. First, the recommendation prerequisite was removed so everyone was eligible to take the exam. Second, selection was based strictly on performance in the exam. To make the process even more resistant to corruption and the influence of the powerful, future emperors began to hide the names of the candidates from the examiners. These changes not only reduced the influence of hereditary power but also enlarged the candidate pool, making it easier for the emperors to find the most talented people.
More important, keju presented itself as an objective, transparent, and universally accessible system for social mobility. It gave hope to the masses. Regardless of a man's family lineage and economic conditions, he could achieve power, wealth, and social status as long as he worked hard and succeeded at the exams. In imperial China, government positions were held in the highest esteem. They stood at the top of the professional hierarchy, which ranked craftsmen and merchants at the bottom. Even the richest merchants wanted their sons to gain recognition and raise the family profile through the imperial exam. Keju became the most attractive option for anyone with the slightest ambition—and it left no incentive to pursue anything else.
The keju exams were intensely competitive, and the success rate was quite low. It could take years of hard work to pass even the first level, and many never did. Still, the rewards were so attractive that the arduous journey rarely deterred anyone from trying. “For ten years no one cares about you when you are studying in a cold room,” the Chinese tell their young people, “but the entire world will know you as soon as you succeed.” That saying, which sums up the hardship and reward of education, originated in the keju era.
The irresistible appeal of keju gave the emperor a powerful and cost-effective tool of social control. Through the exams, he could steer people's thinking because they all devoted their resources to studying his required material: the Confucian texts, which advocate obedience and respect for order and harmony. For thirteen hundred years, Chinese emperors were delivered a homogeneous and obedient citizenry in three ways. First, through the exams, they recruited individuals who demonstrated the greatest commitment to Confucian thinking to help defend the status quo and perpetuate the regime. These fortunate scholar-officials became not only devout defenders but also capable promoters of imperial rule. Skilled writers and speakers of Confucian thinking, they were living examples of the benefits of studying for the exam. Second, even those who failed at the exams became defenders and promoters, because often they were hired as teachers to help prepare future generations for the exams. Third, after decades of studying the Confucian texts, even if a man did not become a believer, he would have little time, energy, and resources left to develop the skills, knowledge, and independent ideas needed for a rebellion.
The outcomes of keju were exactly what the emperors wished. “All heroes under the sun have fallen into my trap,” Emperor Taizong exclaimed with gleeful pride as he watched new successful candidates of keju file into his court. Taizong, was the grandson of Emperor Wen. He had encouraged his father to rise against Sui and helped him established the Tang dynasty in AD 618. Taizong became the second emperor of Tang after killing his brother, the crown prince designated to succeed his father as emperor. He then further improved keju and made it a regular and permanent practice in his court. In the Sui dynasty's thirty-eight years of rule, keju was offered only four or five times and selected only twelve candidates in total. But Taizong offered keju annually, and he also presided over special exams to recruit other talents. However, these special exams, which could have given China a more diverse set of talents, were not continued after his rule. He has been credited with codifying keju for future emperors as a powerful method of recruiting talent and cultivating obedience. “Emperor Taizong had truly a long-term strategy, for it gave white hair to all heroes,” wrote the Tang dynasty poet Zhao Gu.
The obedience keju fostered was so attractive that even the non-Han emperors adopted the system after taking over the reign of China. The Mongols, for example, who defeated the Song dynasty in the thirteenth century, eventually adopted keju. The Manchu rulers, after conquering China and establishing the Qing dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century, continued keju and made it the only way for the Han people to gain social mobility.
Thanks to keju, Taizong and his successors enjoyed generations of citizens who were obedient, compliant, and skilled at literary work. They had similar thoughts, similar skills, and similar talents. As historians John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman observed in their book China: A New History:
Under the empire, men of letters had come to be almost universally examination candidates and therefore classicists and conservatives. Most of the great achievements of Chinese literature had come within this framework of acceptance of the social order and central authority. No monastic sanctuaries, no clash of sectarian faiths, no division between church and state were allowed, as in Europe, to spawn diversity.16
These men were excellent guardians of the existing order, and they helped maintain a unified nation. Their minds were steeped in Confucian philosophy, which forbade them to have any unorthodox thoughts. Their lack of knowledge and skills outside the narrowly defined domains of the imperial exam rendered them incapable of putting up a rebellion, even if the thought had occurred to them. “It takes forever for xiucai to launch a successful revolution” is a popular Chinese saying that captures the inadequacies of traditional intellectuals. Xiucai was one of the titles granted to successful candidates of the imperial exam, and it became a generic reference to educated people in China. This is why, in two thousand years, virtually none of the hundreds of regime changes was started or finished by scholar-officials or anyone else with the highest level of Chinese education.
The scholar-officials had finely trained memories, but they were not independent or critical thinkers, nor were they knowledgeable beyond the Confucian classics and certain forms of literary writing. Although they were excellent at perpetuating the past, they failed at inventing the future. In fact, they were a powerful force resisting the invention of a new future. This conservatism was fine for a closed society with an agrarian economy. In that system, peace, stability, and benevolent rulers were far more productive than revolutionary ideas and different perspectives. If the world had stopped in the seventeenth century, China would still be the most prosperous society and keju the most effective way to create and maintain such a society, just as those Jesuit missionaries and European philosophers had imagined.
But the Industrial Revolution changed everything, ushering in a new era in which change became the constant, innovation the norm, and diversity of talents the source of social development. In this new era, keju, which reinforced conservative thinking and homogeneity, changed from a blessing to a curse.
The year 1840 marked the beginning of China's modern history of defeat, frustration, and humiliation. That's when the British government sent in forces, armed with far superior military technology, to force China to take in more opium and other Western goods. The Chinese launched a futile and costly resistance, but their spears and traditional firearms were no match for the modern muskets and cannons, nor were their junks for the steam-powered warships. In 1842, after two years of military defeats, representatives of the Chinese emperor began negotiations with representatives of Queen Victoria. They climbed aboard the HMS Cornwallis, anchored on the Yangtze River at Nanjing, with British warships poised to attack the city. The resulting Treaty of Nanjing forced China to open five ports for trade, pay $21 million in reparations to Britain over three years, and cede Hong Kong to the British queen. Even worse, the treaty imposed a fixed tariff rate, essentially allowing a foreign country to set the rate in China; gave British subjects extraterritorial privileges at treaty ports; and granted most-favored-nation status to Britain. The Treaty of Nanjing set a precedent for China's foreign relations with other countries, and its effects lasted for almost a century.
Although the Treaty of Nanjing brought the First Opium War to an end, it did not end the export of opium to China or war against China. Quite the contrary. The amount of opium coming into China jumped from thirty thousand chests in the 1830s to seventy thousand chests in 1858—twenty years after the treaty—when the Second Opium War broke out. This time, the French joined the British. The Anglo-French army pushed all the way to Beijing, forced the entire imperial court to flee, and robbed and burned the old Summer Palace. The war ended with the Chinese empire opening more ports to foreign trade, ceding the territories of Kowloon, permitting foreign legations in Beijing, allowing Christian missionary activities, legalizing opium imports, and agreeing to pay 2 million taels of silver in indemnity to Britain and France. (The tael was a commonly used weight and currency measure in China at the time.)
More defeats and treaties would come. By the time the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, China had signed hundreds of “unequal treaties,” always in the wake of military defeat or threat, with virtually all Western powers and Japan. It had ceded vast amounts of land to Russia, Japan, Britain, and other countries; opened almost all major cities as treaty ports; paid hundreds of millions of dollars in reparations; and compromised both its sovereignty and its dignity.
What the First Opium War did end, though, was the idea that China was the world, or at least the most privileged and civilized center of the universe—a view that had been reinforced by emperors and their scholar-officials for thousands of years. The admission in the Treaty of Nanjing that Britain was equal to China was a historical transformation. A mere fifty years before, in 1793, when Lord George Macartney went to Beijing as the first British ambassador, he refused to kowtow to Emperor Qianlong despite the insistence of his host. Macartney was considered a bearer of tribute from Britain rather than a guest. One of his missions was to convey Britain's desire to establish trade with China. But the emperor rejected the suggestion, declaring in a letter to King George III: “Our dynasty's majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures.”17
The Opium War taught the Chinese that the West had something they could use: modern technology. But they still maintained the belief that the Chinese way was superior. As a result, the progressive scholars and government officials began the self-strengthening movement, also known as the Westernization movement. “Chinese learning as the base, Western learning as utility,” they insisted. The idea was to maintain Chinese culture as the core values and adopt Western technology for its utilitarian value only: Westernization the Chinese way.
The movement's most important goal was to improve military technology, which was perhaps the only thing deemed worth learning from the West anyway. The emperor established Western-style shipyards and arsenals and brought in Westerners to teach the Chinese how to manufacture warships, guns, and cannons on the assumption that the superior Chinese wisdom and intelligence, plus the technology they would learn from Western countries, would enable the Chinese to defeat the Westerners with their own technology. But the rifles and ships built in China were more expensive and of lower quality than the ones directly imported from the West. So the Chinese also purchased guns, cannons, and warships. Equipped with a modern fleet purchased from Britain and Germany, China established a powerful modern navy that in 1888 was number one in Asia. This peerless navy was promptly crushed in 1894—not by a Western country this time but by Japan. China was forced to sign yet one more “unequal treaty” that paid Japan 200 million taels of silver in indemnity, ceded the Liaodong Peninsula and Taiwan with its nearby islands to Japan, and opened more treaty ports.
Defeat by Japan made the Chinese realize that superior technology did not guarantee victory and their problem went much deeper than guns and warships. Keju, the imperial examination and system, was the root cause of China's defeat. “The cession of Taiwan and Liaodong was not caused by the imperial court, but by bagu; the two-million taels indemnity should be blamed on the imperial court, but bagu,” a reform-minded scholar, Kang Youwei, told Emperor Guangxu in 1898.18 Bagu or Baguwen (eight-part essay) was the dominant format of keju during the Qing dynasty. Bagu asked the test takers to interpret original sentences from one of the Confucian classics. The interpretation must be either three hundred or five hundred Chinese characters long and contain eight predefined parts.
“Today's sufferings are the consequence of uneducated people in China, which resulted from selecting officials through bagu,” Kang informed the emperor. “Those who study for bagu don't read books written after the Qin and Han Dynasties, let alone attempt to understand happenings in other countries around the world, but they could achieve high positions in the government. Thus despite the large number of officials, we cannot find anyone to be capable of carrying out important tasks.” “You are right,” Emperor Guangxu agreed. “Westerners pursue useful knowledge, but all we Chinese pursue are useless knowledge.”19
At the suggestion of Kang Youwei and other like-minded intellectuals, Emperor Guangxu launched a battery of reform efforts: abolishing keju, establishing Western-style universities, translating Western books into Chinese, and sending students to Japan and Western countries. The reform, however, lasted only 103 days. It ended in a bloody crackdown by Empress Dowager Cixi, Emperor Guangxu's aunt, who had installed him as the emperor at the age of four. Guangxu was put under house arrest, Kang Youwei fled to Japan, and six prominent reform leaders were executed in public.
Keju survived, but not for long. Another military defeat three years later made even Empress Dowager Cixi a reformer. In 1900, military forces of the alliance of eight nations (Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the Untied Kingdom, and the United States) marched into Beijing to rescue the diplomatic legations under siege by the Boxer rebels. Cixi and her court officials fled to Xi'an. After yet one more “unequal treaty” (the Boxer Protocol) that cost China 450 million taels of silver as indemnity to the eight nations, Empress Dowager Cixi launched a set of moderate reforms and stopped using Baguwen as a form of keju.
Her actions did not calm the rising anger toward the imperial court and the people's frustration with the exam. On September 2, 1905, a group of powerful military leaders, governors, and high-level officials—including Yuan Shikai, the second president of the Republic of China, who invited Frank Goodnow to consult on the Chinese constitution—sent a plea to the imperial court. To save China, “we must start to popularize schools; to popularize schools, we must start by ending keju,” reasoned Yuan Shikai and his cosigners. Confronted by such a powerful group, the imperial court did not feel it had a choice. On the same day, Emperor Guangxu sent out a decree to the entire empire: “All keju exams are to end.”20 Six years later, in 1911, the Qing dynasty was replaced by the Republic of China, ending over two thousand years of imperial rule.
For two thousand years, China had remained the same, despite the many changes in dynasties and emperors. The changes brought in new emperors but no new ideas. The new emperors simply repeated what their predecessors did. There were good and bad emperors, periods of war and periods of peace, times of unification and times of division, but the essential social structure, governing principles of human relationships, views of human nature and the natural environment, and moral and ethical code remained the same. There was no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, no Industrial Revolution.
Before the Western powers arrived, the Chinese wanted to keep their way forever because they were sure it was the best way. The humiliation that the West delivered made the Chinese reconsider their position, and ultimately they decided that the Chinese way must be abandoned. It was holding China back from modernization. Borrowing technology was not sufficient to develop a modern nation; China needed people with different capabilities and thinking from what the emperors desired. China ended its imperial rule and exam.
What China decided to abandon a century ago is now being highly praised—and copied by the West—in the most recent wave of Sinomania. What have been identified as the great attributes of the Chinese culture, society, and education that led to China's recent rise as a world power are the very attributes the Enlightenment Sinophiles praised three hundred years ago—suggesting that China, despite its efforts to change, remains the same today as it was three hundred years ago, or two thousand years ago. Yet these traits have been generally agreed on as the cause of China's last decline. Has the world changed so much that what did not work before works now? Or is the recent rise of China also the result of what made ancient China prosperous—and like China's ancient prosperity, will it soon end, unless transformative changes occur?