S9 Ep57: Merit, masters and China's imperial exam

For more than 1,300 years, China chose its top officials by written exam. Its top officials were chosen meritocratic ally -- or were they? When the results came out, each successful candidate went to pay his respects to the men who had marked his exam. He called the examiner master, and the bond lasted for life. Ruixue Jia (UC San Diego, CEPR) and her co-author Ying Bai followed 24,269 graduates of the Qing dynasty's imperial examination, from 1644 to 1905, to see who reached the top of the imperial state. A high mark in the examination was important, but so did an examiner who later rose to power. Jia tells Tim Phillips how merit and patronage worked together. The research behind this episode Bai, Ying, and Ruixue Jia. 2026. "Meritocracy and the Networks It Forged: China's Imperial Examination." CEPR Discussion Paper 21814. Prepared for The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. To cite this episode Phillips, Tim, and Ruixue Jia. 2026. "Merit, masters and China's imperial exam." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).  About the guest Ruixue Jia is Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego, where she co-directs the China Data Lab. She is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong, a Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in its Political Economy and Economic History programmes, and co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics. Her research spans elite formation, the politics of education and science, and the historical roots of China's development. She is co-author, with Hongbin Li and Claire Cousineau, of The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China (Belknap Press, 2025). Research cited in this episode The imperial examination. China's system for recruiting officials through competitive written exams on the Confucian classics and literary composition. It began around 605 CE, expanded under the Song dynasty around 1000 CE, and was abolished in 1905. In the Qing dynasty it had three levels. The entry (prefectural) exam was held twice every three years; the provincial and national exams once every three years. About 240 candidates passed each national exam, earning the title of jinshi. Bai and Jia study all 112 national exams held between 1644 and 1905. How many took part. Every man could sit the exam in principle, but preparation cost years of study and lost income. Jia says that in the 18th century about two million men registered for the entry-level exam, roughly 2% to 3% of men aged 15 to 50, and that families often pooled resources to put one son forward. By her calculation, even a man who tried five times had less than a 1% chance of passing the entry level. These are her figures from the conversation. Fan Zhongyan. The Northern Song statesman and poet (989 to 1052) whose story Jia uses to show how the exam sold itself. He lost his father as an infant and grew up in modest circumstances, passed the national exam in 1015, and rose to become one of the empire's most senior officials. Stories like his, Jia argues, sustained belief in the system. What mattered was perceived mobility, not the realised rate. The high and low categories. Successful national candidates were ranked and divided at a cutoff. The top two groups received the jinshi degree; the third and largest group received the lesser tong jinshi ("similar to jinshi") degree. Bai and Jia compare the cutoff to the admission thresholds of elite universities today. Candidates just above it started their careers in better positions. Top office. Bai and Jia define top office as rank three or above in the nine-rank system, which covered ministers, governors general and provincial governors. Only about 12.6% of jinshi reached it, on average 16 years after passing the exam. In practice, appointments were shaped by a handful of Grand Secretaries and Grand Ministers of State; on average seven people held these posts in any year. The master and disciple relationship. Each national exam was overseen by one or two chief examiners and two or three vice examiners, all serving officials. After the results, graduates visited their examiners, called them "master teacher" and called each other "classmates". The historian Ichisada Miyazaki describes it as "a pledge between them to assist each other to weather the storms of political life" (Miyazaki, Ichisada. 1981. China's Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China. Yale University Press, p. 56). Philip Kuhn called the system "a veritable faction factory" (Kuhn, Philip A. 2003. Origins of the Modern Chinese State. Stanford University Press). Because papers were anonymous, the link between a candidate and his examiners was set by chance, which lets Bai and Jia treat it as a natural experiment. Power or mentoring. Bai and Jia measure ties to powerful examiners by counting how many years a candidate's examiners held key central posts in the decade after the exam. To separate a good teacher from a well-placed patron, they compare an examiner's power before and after the exam. Power that came later mattered more, which points to patronage rather than instruction alone. Merit and connections in modern China. Jia found a similar pattern in an earlier study of provincial leaders after 1993, in which neither strong economic performance nor links to the top leadership was enough for promotion on its own. Jia, Ruixue, Masayuki Kudamatsu, and David Seim. 2015. "Political Selection in China: Complementary Roles of Connections and Performance." Journal of the European Economic Association 13 (4): 631-668. More VoxTalks Economics episodes The Success of the Embedded State. James Robinson on how unpaid local elites ran British government two centuries ago, and why they were more efficient than salaried officials. Related reading on VoxEU Who becomes a top politician in China? Ruixue Jia, Masayuki Kudamatsu and David Seim on why Communist Party leaders need both connections and a strong record to reach the top. Institutions and power structure: Imperial China and feudal Europe compared. Gérard Roland, Yang Xie and Ruixue Jia on why Chinese emperors had reason to keep the route into the elite open to ordinary people. It's not what you know, but who you know: The role of connections in academic promotions. Manuel Bagues and Natalia Zinovyeva on randomly assigned evaluators in Spanish academic promotions, and how much a link to the committee was worth.