Book Review

Asia

This is an important book on a major institution of late imperial China: the civil service examination system in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods. Its strengths lie in its meticulous presentation of information on change in the curriculum, grading practice, and results of examinations based on metropolitan and provincial examination records. It documents clearly that the civil service examination was not a monolithic instrument of late imperial governments. The book successfully conveys a sense of the complexity of the civil examination in terms of its linguistic, social, political, and intellectual aspects. In response to criticism leveled at the structuralist approach of his earlier article on the same topic, Benjamin A. Elman has made an effort to include discussion of the tension and struggle between the imperial state and the literate elites in their control over this "cultural arena" (p. xxiv). He also argues convincingly that topics on astronomy, mathematics, and music were not unimportant in the training of literati in the late imperial period.

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What is less successful and convincing is his construction of the "cultural history" of the examinations and his conclusions about their impact on social stratification and intellectual change in these periods. His "cultural history" approach is meant to go beyond studies that focus only on the question of whether the examinations produced a more fluid society in the late imperial period. But he takes the side of those who argue that they did not increase social mobility. His argument is built on the idea that acquisition of "classical literacy" required an extended period of linguistic and literary training. This is a valid point, but he overstates his case by insisting that the "unequal social distribution of linguistic and cultural resources" "culturally excluded" common people like artisans, peasants, and traders (p. 372). It can be argued that Elman's position is undermined in two ways by the evidence he provides. First, in the beginning of the book he uses terms like "gentry-official," "gentry literati," "elite degree-holding gentry" to characterize the elite groups that monopolized success at the examinations. Increasingly, he prefers terms like "gentry-merchants" and, finally, "gentry, military, and merchant elites" (pp. xvii, 12, 141, 126, 376, 422, 625). Elman's logic, placing a premium on resources, does allow expansion of the literate elites to include merchant and military families. If the merchants could use their resources to acquire classical literacy for their sons, so could military families (pp. 253–56). But why would commoners not take advantage of the examinations that provided the most coveted access to wealth and power in this period? In fact, Elman does provide evidence for the possibility of sons of poor commoner families to acquire classical literacy. He mentions support from lineage schools. Despite the dominance of gentry and merchants in lineage leadership, sons from peasant and artisan families were allowed to attend lineage schools, sometimes with grants from lineage trusts. One cannot understand why the fact that more than sixty percent of the over 22,000 metropolitan graduates were from commoner families is considered insufficient evidence for a fluid society in the Ming and Qing. The explanation is that they were already members of local literati elites. The denial of mobility to these graduates is based on the idea that the unit of mobility is not the individual but the lineage and even cluster of lineages created through marriage ties. Since the lineages were already local elites with officials among its membership, the success of the individual graduate is not reckoned as a movement up the social ladder. By this "unique" method of registering mobility, there would be little mobility for the individual in the lineages as long as he had a remote relative—agnatic or affinal—who had earned the highest degree. Never mind that his lineage/s had hundreds and even thousands of members who had not. This strange notion of mobility or "social mobility of lineages," as Elman aptly calls them, however, is fundamentally flawed and analytically useless (p. 246). How do we classify lineages and measure their movement up and down the social hierarchy, if there was one, when lineages included families with members in different occupational and economic conditions?

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