The Class of 1761: Examinations, State, and Elites in Eighteenth-Century China

By Iona Man-Cheong

The Class of 1761 reveals the workings of China's imperial examination system from the unique perspective of a single graduating class. The author follows the students' struggles in negotiating the examination system along with bureaucratic intrigue and intellectual conflict, as well as their careers across the Empire—to the battlefields of imperial expansion in Annam and Tibet, the archives where the glories of the empire were compiled, and back to the chambers where they in turn became examiners for the next generation of aspirants.

The book explores the rigors and flexibilities of the examination system as it disciplined men for political life and shows how the system legitimated both the Manchu throne and the majority non-Manchu elite. In the system's intricately articulated networks, we discern the stability of the Qing empire and the fault lines that would grow to destabilize it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Aug 12, 2004
• ISBN: 9780804767132

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Man-Cheong, Iona, 1950—

The class of 1761 : examinations, state, and elites in eighteenth-century

China / Iona D. Man-Cheong.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

9780804767132

1. Civil service examinations—China—History—18th century. I. Title.

JQ1512.M36 2004

351’.076—dc22

2004005499

Original Printing 2004

Last figure below indicates year of this printing:

13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04

Typeset by Classic Typography in 10/12.5 Sabon

TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER

Man Cheong (1910—1976)

AND

Su See-hong (1905—1953)

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Dedication

List of Tables

Table of Figures

Acknowledgments

1 The Meanings of Examination

2 Regulating Aspirations

3 Rites of Spring

4 Fair Fraud and Fraudulent Fairness

5 Paths to Glory

Coda - DEFINITIONS OF FAILURE

APPENDIX 1 - Grades for the Annual Examination

APPENDIX 2 - Provincial Examination Quotas

APPENDIX 3 - Number of Attempts for the Metropolitan Degree

APPENDIX 4 - Price of Imperial College Studentships

APPENDIX 5 - 1761 Class List Organized by Class Number

Character List

REFERENCE MATTER

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Tables

TABLE 1.1

TABLE 1.2

TABLE 3.1

TABLE 3.2

TABLE 3.3

TABLE 5.1

TABLE 5.2

TABLE 5.3

TABLE 5.4

TABLE 5.5

TABLE 5.6

TABLE 5.7

TABLE 5.8

TABLE 5.9

TABLE 5.10

Table of Figures

FIGURE 2.1

FIGURE 2.2

Acknowledgments

Several institutions have contributed generous financial support for the research and writing of this project. I would like to thank the National Academy of Education for awarding me the Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, which funded two years of research leave. The Nuala, McGann, Drescher Fellowship (under the auspices of the State University of New York) funded an earlier year of research leave. Both the National Endowment of the Humanities and a SUNY Stony Brook Social Science Division research grant provided funds for summer research. The Department of History at SUNY Stony Brook kindly allowed me to take research leave.

I would like to thank the staff of the following libraries and archives: the Qing Archives of the Number One Historical Archives in Beijing; the National Palace Museum in Taipei; the Missions Étrangères, Paris; the Family History Library in Salt Lake City; the Harvard-Yenching Library; the East Asian Collection of Yale University; the Columbia University East Asian Collection; and the Library at SUNY Stony Brook, especially the Interlibrary Loan staff.

This book would not have been possible but for the support over the years of many colleagues, friends, and family. I would like to give special mention to the following colleagues in the China field: Jonathan Spence (without whose advice the project would never have begun); Beatrice Bartlett, John Chaffee, Jerry Dennerline, Kent Guy, Jim Hevia, Rui Magone, Peter Perdue, Evelyn Rawski, William Rowe, David Strand, Joanna Waley-Cohen, and Harriet Zurndorffer. They all at various crucial times made suggestions, offered comments, and gave advice. I would like to thank Muriel Bell, Sponsoring Editor at Stanford University Press, for her marvelous support and extreme patience with this project. My thanks also to Judith Hibbard, Senior Production Editor, for shepherding the manuscript through the process. I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to the following for their nurture and encouragement: Michael Barnhart, Paul Gootenburg, Ned Landsman, Gene Lebovics, Gary Marker, Joel Rosenthal, Nancy Tomes, Fred Weinstein, and Barbara Weinstein. I owe a special thanks to the late Michael Sprinker, Joanna Waley-Cohen, Naomi Rosenthal, Rui Magone, Kathleen Wilson, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Ira Livingston for being so generous to me with their time. I am indebted to Xu Tong for his careful attention in compiling the index. Without the friendship and support of Young-sun Hong and Larry Frohman, my life would have been immensely dull. My thanks to Michael Crook for making China possible for me, and to Liu Yuan, Chen Yanni, and Xiang Yan for always making China a much more interesting place to be. I also would like to thank my family: my brother, Ying-fook Man, his wife Jenny, and his children, Peter (and his wife Stella and son Caius), Keilu, Sasha (and his wife Emily and children Nicholas and Lauren), and Emma; and my other siblings Kam Shu, Kam Yuk, and her husband Yip, Kam Chi, and his wife Malina (and son Harvey), who have all been important to the writing to this book. I owe my sons, Liam (and his wife, Francesca) and Nikki, and especially my daughter, Lang, immeasurably—the time with them always made the time away from them bearable. Liam’s daughters—my grandchildren Clio and Isabella—will one day, I hope, continue the academic enterprise. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Ira Livingston for his help, comfort, encouragement, and those dinners—without which this project might still be in process.

IONA MAN-CHEONG

1 The Meanings of Examination

Yet in some states little heed is given to birth, and every man’s nobility is derived from his own virtue, and what he has done for the state in private and public capacity.

—Pufendorf 1672

Our word examination is used in a wide variety of ways to denote everything from the tests given to candidates for civil service appointments and academic degrees to the diagnostic scrutiny that a physician makes of a patient, or the search of luggage made by a customs officer.

—Herrlee Creel 1970¹

Imperial China’s examination system was part of what made it a model meritocratic state. It employed men of demonstrable talent and promoted them according to the merit of their deeds. Excellence was an attribute of exemplary action, conduct, and attitude—not of high birth. But, as sinologist Herrlee Creel notes, the term examination encompasses a range of meaning. The constellation of techniques used in eighteenth-century Chinese examination practice ensured that subjects were tested both in their cultural knowledge and in their fortitude, moral and otherwise, to stand the many years of test taking. In fact, the meritocratic ideals of the Chinese imperial examination system joined the repertoire of European enlightenment concepts held by early modern thinkers as aspiring models of rationality.²

In the imperial Chinese examination system, as in modern examination practice, examiners applied a scrutiny as diagnostic as any associated with medical practice; one that determined whether the subject had absorbed and applied the requisite knowledge and distinctions. Thus, besides literally undergoing a body search, the candidate also had his mental luggage searched. The most crucial effect of this system was thus the training of loyal, obedient subjects, inculcated with the behaviors, values, and principles of government deemed appropriate for servants of the state. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that this disciplinary process was unilateral in scope. Imperial examinations occurred within and between sets of vibrant state-society relations. Interacting with the more contingent elements of court politics, intellectual fashions, and social ambitions, examinations become a site of collaboration, contestation, and conflict. It is in this context that examinations also become historically specific. When investigated within the contingencies of both imperial policy and, in the eighteenth century, a growing, multicultural, multiethnic empire ruled by a minority group, practice diverges sharply from typically static, descriptive accounts of structures and institutional functions. These sets of concerns shape the main thrust of this book.

The most challenging question about the imperial Chinese examination system is not how the system worked—the several available institutional studies are excellent and provide more than adequate answers—but rather, what the system meant.³ Thirty years ago, Chang Chung-li and Ho Ping-ti both argued that examinations determined membership in the Chinese gentry—a rather anomalous concept, since, unlike in Britain, the gentry was not an exclusively land-based social class, but rather an elite for whom both cultural and other economic capital were significant and for whom, in the final analysis, cultural capital remained decisive.⁴ In fact, subsequent work has shown that the elite controlled a diverse number of resources that it deployed through various strategies to achieve and maintain its preeminent socio-economic position.⁵ Although examination qualification was an important resource, contrary to earlier claims it did not hold any absolute determinative role. Once again, then, the question of the significance of examinations opens up. If cultural capital was an important determinant of Confucian elite membership, and yet academic qualification was only one of a range of resources, why did the examination system remain so well subscribed into the late imperial period and why were the educated elite so dedicated to the acquisition of examination status? Much of the answer, I propose, lies in the structural relationship of the examination system to the state, the access to political power that acquisition of examination degrees gave, and the collective identity the system generated. Three basic points summarize the main argument of this book. First, the Chinese examination system was crucial to the process that helped produce and reproduce a unitary, centralized state. Second, it was also a process that shaped candidates through the necessary disciplinary training as servants of the state. Third, the examination system structurally elaborated a collective identity, one that would eventually become the nation-state for the modern intelligentsia, and arguably in the process would make a material contribution to modern Chinese nationalism. The chapters to follow demonstrate how these effects were achieved and elaborate on both the process and its contingencies.

To frame the investigation, this chapter outlines the meaning of examination for the state, for the bureaucracy, and for the 1761 cohort of metropolitan graduates who are the focus of this study.

The Meaning for the State

Examinations were a site where the Han Chinese educated elite, holding cultural capital derived from their training in Confucian texts, enacted a relationship of reciprocity with the throne. The combination of these two elements—throne and elite—constituted a significant portion of the state’s structure. Rather than being seen as an exchange, the relationship between throne and Confucian elites is better understood as a practice that partially produced (and reproduced) the political legitimacy of rule. In the process, the throne and the social elite became closely bound in a nuanced, asymmetrical power relationship. Examinations were enacted neither as if after some prior agreement of partnership or exchange, nor as if some unspoken contract or even some market exchange mechanism were at play. Instead, the practice of examinations was itself productive of that part of legitimacy that enabled both throne and elite to make joint claims on political power. Examinations generated loyalty toward and partial legitimization of the ruling house—thus contributing to the construction of power that the state wielded over the empire—and, in that same process, generated the elite’s access to direct political power.⁶ I emphasize the partial nature of this dynamic—one particularly involving the throne, the bureaucracy, and Confucian-educated elites—because many other constitutive elements (as others have discussed and as I mention below) contributed to producing the Qing imperial power and its state structure. Each examination contributed to the reproduction of the state’s political legitimacy by reenacting a double and mutually reinforcing authorization. The cultural elite, through its submission to examination, invested the throne with the authority to rule. The throne, in the same act, acceded political authority to the cultural elite while it retained the power of delegation. The educated elite was effectively brought to this arrangement freely and willingly—a crucial condition for the naturalization of the system—in part by its desire to participate in the state’s power and in part as an effect of the very training undergone in the examination system. Thus we are looking at a dynamic of voluntary, unequal, hierarchical relations that produced an asymmetry acceptable to the throne and basic to the structure of the state for the government of China proper. It is this process and relationship that lies at the heart of what has been called the gentry stage of China’s imperial history of government.

Jack Dull’s short overview of the development of imperial government in China is useful for understanding the interpenetration of rulership, bureaucratic recruitment, and dominant social groups and examinations.⁷ In Dull’s schematization of the historical construction of state power and legitimation, gentry government—the mode that brought the examination system to prominence—comes as the final stage in a four-part development, following the patrimonial, the meritocratic, and the aristocratic modes of government. In the patrimonial mode of government, during the classical period (1122—256 BC), political power was determined by birth and kinship. A limited form of meritocracy characterized government in the early empire (221 BC—AD 202); performance criteria determined entry into and promotion within government service. Given the very limited sphere of literacy, however, merit could only have applied to an extremely circumscribed service pool.

The early empire ended with the rise of powerful, quasi-aristocratic regional families; the prominence of these clans led to a government service monopoly. The clans treated government service as an inheritance right, and the only opportunity left to the less privileged but talented was to attach themselves and their loyalties to the clans rather than to the central government. During much of the early middle empire (589—907), the throne continually had to make accommodations with this powerful elite, generating a delicate balance of power instead of centralizing it in the person of the emperor. Emperor Wu Zetian (r. 690—705), the only female emperor in China’s history, was the first to use the examination system politically, foreshadowing its later role during the period of gentry government.⁸ As part of her thrust to centralize power and bypass the control of the great families, Emperor Wu supervised the recruitment examinations herself, in order to create a direct and personal claim on the loyalties of those selected. So began the trend toward bringing the growing body of non-aristocratic, lesser provincial families into the political arena. It took time before the aristocracy could be denied automatic access to power and instead be assimilated into a new regimen in which examinations could ensure centralized control over government administration. In a move that seems symbolic of the system’s new legitimating role between throne and elites, examination supervision was transferred in 736 from the Board of Civil Office, where examination was oriented toward employment, to the Board of Rites, where it came within the purview of the productive and symbolic power of ritual practices.

Peter Bol’s work also acknowledges the increasing importance of examinations as part of the transformation of the aristocratic great clans from medieval social elites, dependent on birthright, into a transitional group he calls civil-bureaucrats. Stressing continuity, Bol maps the shifting weight of three defining features of socio-political elites: birth, government, and culture. Further reconstellations of these elements completed the transformation of the civil-bureaucrats—who were still semi-aristocratic but had parlayed their advantages into a tradition of family officeholding—into scholar-officials. This family-based structure still had repercussions in 1761, as indicated by the ongoing law-of-avoidance examinations (see Chapter Four). The final shift was the entry of local or provincial elites onto the historical stage. At this point, neither lineage nor family could rely on inherited privilege for access to government service. Instead, government service was the reward for competition through the examination system, which judged success against a standard of ethically based cultural knowledge, thereby allowing the state to appropriate claims of moral leadership.

In his discussions, however, Bol’s narrative tends to imply a contractual type of exchange.⁹ I would suggest two slight modifications to his nonetheless brilliant formulations. First, centralization of authority required displacing the family as a potential power base and thus shifted the sphere of activity onto a broader nexus of social relations that was ultimately controllable by the throne. Thus, for Confucian educated elites to become willing subordinates, without independent power, who depended on superior authority for their political position meant sacrificing a more institutionally cohesive family power. Second, rather than deal with the contract metaphor and its various implications, we might focus instead on the dynamic as a reciprocal, structural relationship enacted or performed between throne and elites. Both sides had continually to reenact the symbiotic relationship that established the foundation of government, and the repetition itself meant both constant flexibility and an inherent instability.

The shift from an aristocratic to a gentry mode of government was achieved gradually, first by instituting a school system that focused ambition on government-accredited education as a necessary criterion for official appointment. As status rank was still an entrance prerequisite, the school system was able to foster the prestige of examination qualification such that even the aristocracy increasingly expected it of themselves. The throne also began centralizing control of the great families, compiling a national ranking of them, subtly changing their nature and undermining their autonomy. Finally, aristocratic families not only lost their dominant position—during the Five Dynasties (907—960) period of disunity—but also began to disappear as a socio-political group, facilitating the rise of the new provincial elite.¹⁰

Gentry government was never absolutely stable. The composition and thus the definition of the state shifted from period to period with changing bureaucratic arrangements and ruling houses, but the general mode of government lasted through the late imperial period. This mode was characterized by a relationship between the throne and a social elite defined by its cultural accomplishments, and mediated by the increasing importance of examinations as the primary method of recruitment.¹¹ Historically, then, the examination system had been found to be most successful in promoting the centralizing impulses of the throne and in controlling the necessary delegation of political power to particular social elites.

The Qing dynasty (1644—1911), ruled by the ethnically non-Chinese Manchu minority, is now recognized as the preeminent empire-builder of China. The Qing very quickly adopted the previous Ming dynasty’s examination system in their efforts to ensure that the conquered area of China proper had a continuous flow of administrators. Their adoption of the Chinese examination system, like their strategic use of other Chinese institutions, exemplifies the conquest rulers’ political acumen, a strength that enabled them to achieve and sustain a spectacular level of administrative control and stability for a period of almost three centuries. Examination recruitment of civil servants was particularly instrumental to the successful, stable governance of China proper. China proper, where the Han majority—subjugated by the Manchus—lived, was governed much like non-Chinese territories such as Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang), using a complex system of direct rule through native proxy. One important problematic arising from these circumstances (see Chapter Five) is the question of what it meant to be a Chinese elite in this period, living within the Qing multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural empire. At any rate, by the mid-eighteenth century, scholar-officials were satisfied to claim the minority-ruled empire as their own. At least as represented in examination discourse, they registered no difference between themselves, as members of the Han-Chinese majority, and their Manchu minority rulers. Evidently, examination practice, within this ethnically mixed environment, was productive and representative of a developing imaginary of collective identity, a mental and textual space of empty time stretching across the country holding Confucian elites in a common understanding of themselves, fostered by imperial ideology.

Examinations allowed the Qing state to control China proper and enact a stable administration. The first Qing emperor, Shunzhi (1644—1661), instituted the first metropolitan examination in 1646; even preconquest, however, the Qing institution of civil service recruitment examinations illustrates the Manchu understanding of their importance. In his use of examinations Kangxi (1662—1722) explicitly recognized the relationship of reciprocity between throne and elites, as he made evident in his assiduous efforts to woo the many disaffected Chinese scholars over to the Qing cause. Although there were probably surveillance and censorship motives at work, the use of examinations also exploited the disciplinary training of test taking that Ming scholars had absorbed.¹² As each of the southern provinces was conquered, examinations were held immediately to give the Confucian-educated elites the opportunity to serve the new regime. Examinations reached a new height under the Yongzheng emperor (1723—1735), whose focus on administrative improvements had the effect of opening wider the gateway into Qing politics. The expansion of examination entrance extended even to bypassing established laws of avoidance, which were essentially conflict-of-interest laws (see Chapter Four) that prevented candidates being examined, and thus favored, by their relatives. By the time of Qianlong (1736—1795), through other kinds of institutional initiatives (see Chapter Two), examinations were thoroughly regularized and held more frequently. These last efforts came at a point when Qing rulers needed larger numbers of reliable administrators to govern both the larger population of China proper and the newly acquired populations brought into the empire by the huge eighteenth-century territorial expansions. Thus examinations became key to the maintenance of the burgeoning empire.

We can to some extent observe this development of the use of examinations statistically, while keeping in mind that this approach tends to elide important contingencies. In the Kangxi and Qianlong periods the average number of metropolitan degrees awarded for each examination was below 200 (see Table 1.1; I explore this question further in Chapter Two). The highest averages came in the first (Shunzhi), third (Yongzheng), and last (Guangxu) reigns, when numbers of graduates rose to over 300. Each time different factors account for the fluctuations. The Shunzhi average of 370 reflected strenuous attempts to win over the Han Chinese elite. Yongzheng’s average of 300 came because of his efforts to expand and regularize government administration. By Guangxu’s time, examination qualifications were widely believed to have lost their integrity, a belief perhaps supported in the high average of 315 passed at each examination. Overall, though, the numbers remained relatively stable during the dynasty. Only when demographic pressure on administrative structures pushed Qing control to the limit, followed by external pressure from Western imperialism, did the whole system start unraveling. Then it was not only the Manchu Qing dynasty that threatened to collapse but the system of imperial rule itself that began to crumble. One of the most symbolic and traumatic moments of that disintegration came with the 1905 abolition of the imperial examination system, which suddenly made examination training redundant.

TABLE 1.1 Average Number of Metropolitan Degrees Awarded in the Qing Dynasty

SOURCE: Calculated from Jinsbi timing beilu, pp. xv-xvii, and Ho, Ladder, p. 189.

Control and definition of the examination system were a constant contestation. Initially, the Manchu nativist policies of the Oboi regency (1661-1669) resulted, according to Lawrence Kessler, in a radical restructuring of the examination format and the further disaffection of Chinese Confucian-educated elites. Only when Kangxi took up personal rule were efforts made to reverse this trend. The ongoing struggle for hegemonic control of examinations by the Confucian elites and the shifts in intellectual trends and orthodox Confucian interpretative modes are analyzed in detail in Benjamin Elman’s recent work.¹³

As a practice, examinations helped generate the link between the throne and the Confucian-educated elites; this linkage was central to the state’s authority, and the production of ideology was a crucial function of this nexus. However, neither the concept of state nor that of ideology is unproblematic. Ideology has been discussed in widely varying ways; here I would like briefly to situate the discussion in terms of this study. In particular, I would like to displace two common assumptions of many studies: first, that ideology is a singular, monolithic, and authoritative totality; and second, that the Qing examination system rehearsed or reproduced a pre-existing ideology.

One of the most important results of examination practice, and fundamental to my argument, is the training of candidates to be subjects of ideology. This subjectification—the process whereby individuals are produced as subjects of the state by literally subjecting themselves to a training process—manufactured consent for the legitimation of state authority among the mainly Han Chinese Confucian-educated elite. This subjectification (the material practice of which is explored in Chapter Two) meant rehearsing and negotiating ideology embodied through long years of practice and offering it up to the examiners for evaluation. Through their negotiation of the complex intersection between two major components of the state—the throne and the bureaucracy—candidates naturally demonstrated their willing participation in that subjectification. In this process, both sides sanctioned the hierarchical nature of state power.

If ideology is inextricably tied to examination practice, is it necessarily singular? Taking ideology as a complete system, as for example later intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement did, can be part of a strategy to promote the notion of a degenerate, single Confucian ideology and is thus a way to rationalize the decomposition and later complete breakdown of the imperial state. The unitary model is also convenient for imagining some generalized moment of rupture between a nonspecific Confucian or traditional culture and modernity.¹⁴ I suggest instead that our present knowledge of the eighteenth-century Qing empire precludes the possibility of imposing a singular model of ideology and that it is more productive to recognize a range or multiplicity of overlapping ideologies in which examination candidates participated.

For example, imperial ideology is one category of ideology that probably ought to be separated, at least heuristically, from any unitary model. Growing numbers of scholars have contributed to the conclusion that a productive distinction can be made between the imperial ideology that held together the Qing empire and the narrower one of the state or government. As much recent scholarship makes clear, the empire in the eighteenth century was undergoing a rapid building process with the state necessarily in the forefront. As a conquest dynasty, the Qing had through time appropriated to itself a wider and more diverse range of cultural symbols, rituals, and models of legitimation than any previous ruling house. Even subsequent regimes would be hard put to make comparable claims. The Qing expansion necessarily involved an ideology far more complex than any singular set of Confucian concepts, and imperial ideology functioned precisely by making links between disparate cultural symbols and legitimating practices, appropriating and welding them into an imaginary totality to support its claims. Joanna Waley-Cohen, for example, in her analysis of the way Qianlong manipulated religion to advance the imperial project, points out how the Qing by using multiple languages asserted a claim to universal spiritual as well as terrestrial overlordship (1996). Drawing together a multicultural agglomeration of legitimating practices, the Qing ruling house cemented to itself much of non-Chinese Inner and Central Asia, which it had conquered or allied with, constructing an imagery of empire it proceeded to redeploy and refine in negotiating diplomatic relations with the neighboring Russian empire. The Qing empire and its imperial ideology, by its sheer diversity in addressing all ethnic groups within its expanding boundaries, was always faced with the danger of fragmentation and the loss of its putative singularity. It therefore constantly needed to reinvent its ideological totality, which recent research suggests was achieved through the appropriation and invention of new cultural constructs.¹⁵

If we accept the possibility of imperial ideology, we might consider further distinctions such as some notion of state ideology. Philip Abrams (1977/1988), in a seminal analysis of the modern state, argues that the state does not exist as such, but only by virtue of the state idea—in other words, that the state is itself an ideological construct. The questions Abrams raises about the impossibility of the state are useful in pointing out the complexities of state ideology in Qing China and, here in particular, its relationship with examination practices. Abrams argues that rather than being a monolithic, unitary entity, the state is an unstable amalgam comprising many parts (institutions and agencies) that he calls the state system. These institutions and agencies themselves interact dynamically, sometimes in conflict and always threatening to break apart. But the amalgam is held together in an imaginary coherence by the ideological power of the state idea, which also produces (for us) the sense of the state’s objective materiality. Abrams proposes that the state comes into being as a structuration within political practice; it starts its life as an implicit construct; it (the state) is then reified ... and acquires an overt symbolic identity progressively divorced from practice (and exists) as an illusory account of practice (58, 82). In this sense, both state and ideology are reifications, arguably part of a self-referential system producing their imaginary completeness. By this logic, if the Qing state needed an ideology to establish its existence, how does this construct fit with the various systems of ideas that inform what kind of state it is? The state system is defined as the agencies, institutions, and their key agents that we take for granted to be a unitary whole, whereas in actuality this entity often conspicuously fails to display a unity of practice (79). The Qing state system, for example, included minimally the institutions and agencies of the throne and palace administration, the six Boards, other central government agencies and advisory councils, provincial and local government offices, the military, and the overlapping Manchu governmental structure. Within that basic framework, the key agents were the emperor, his administrators, and the military, but even within the bureaucracy, as Beatrice Bartlett’s recent work has demonstrated, there was far from unanimous acceptance of the status quo among the various agencies, let alone complete unanimity between throne and bureaucracy.

The state idea, on the other hand—the imaginary means through which the state is made to have a unitary, cohesive, material body—allows us to conceive of its objective existence as a real, complete entity. The notion of centralization was a basic unifying ideology in imperial China—an abstract ideal toward which rulers struggled, and which state agencies and institutions like the bureaucracy and military worked to support or to undermine, depending upon the circumstances. Ideological power, as Abrams points out, is historically constructed from a panoply of doctrine and legitimation (80), but here Abrams is just one of many who assume state ideology to be, like the imaginary state, a coherent whole instead of a much messier nexus of ideologies. Whether we take James Hevia’s focus on how the Qing imperium deployed ‘guest ritual’ to produce ‘interdomainal’ relations, specifically in enacting the subordinate and incorporation of other sovereignties or whether we use Pamela Crossley’s concept of concentric or simultaneous modes of rulership and their ideologies, what we find are ways the Qing centralized the idea of state and provided an overlapping framework of imperial and state ideologies. Thus Qing rulers appropriated the diverse notions associated with Chinese and non-Han legitimation of rulership to create their authority.¹⁶ If we separate these overlapping strands in order to make a narrower definition of the Qing state—one in which the examination system played a crucial role—the focus turns to the three interrelated components of the throne, the Qing civil service, and the Confucian-educated elites. Each of these forces played a vital role in the construction of ideology and contributed to the contradictions, articulations, and tensions that characterized the multiple structures of the Qing state and its strength.

The Meaning for the Bureaucracy

As Crossley summarizes it, the emperorship and the bureaucracy were organically linked in that the bureaucracy justified itself through service to the Son of Heaven, and the emperor justified himself through moral harmony with the bureaucracy. This characterization of moral harmony with the bureaucracy was as much fiction as it was part of state ideology, for one of the purposes of state ideology was indeed to create the imaginary moral harmony that the state’s support of Confucian beliefs was supposed to generate. I would also add that examinations were a primary site of what Crossley describes as imperial attempts to co-opt the instruments and ideologies of the bureaucracy as well as a site where the civil service asserted its own bureaucratic sovereignty.¹⁷ Crossley’s work supports the contention that state ideology is itself a multiplicity within which we can discern discourses such as Confucian orthodoxy, which is appropriated precisely for generating the moral harmony in the relationship between emperor and civil service, making it merely one strand amongst many that comprise state ideology. Within that framework, Confucian orthodoxy, or state-sponsored Confucian doctrine, construed as a form of managerial discourse for and of the bureaucracy, might in this guise be reclassified as Confucian bureaucratic ideology.

The meaning of the overused term Confucian orthodoxy has become so slippery that its utility and value have been seriously questioned. However we define it, its ambiguous relationship to Confucian ideology more generally has further confused and complicated the issue. Because both terms are associated with the examination system and the state, some clarification seems necessary. James T. C. Liu’s 1973 essay How Did a Neo-Confucian School Become a State Orthodoxy? draws a direct link between orthodoxy and ideology, asserting that state orthodoxy survived as the common ideology of both state and society until 1900. State orthodoxy in this analysis is defined as the selection of one particular school or set of interpretations ... as the officially approved ones used in the civil service examinations; [and] officially proclaimed ... for presumed application throughout the government; [and] ... the whole society. Willard J. Peterson, in a perceptive review of Liu’s Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (1990), describes how the two terms, orthodoxy and ideology, are assumed to be interchangeable, if not completely identical. Taking up the philological line of reasoning found in Chen Chi-yun’s essay and thinking it through with Charlotte Furth’s processual understanding of orthodoxy, Peterson concludes that "all three forms of zheng (to correct, to rule and to reduce to submission) can be taken as rooted in the process of correcting with the threat of coercing, leading to the conclusion that orthodoxy is the process of correcting applied to others."¹⁸ This understanding of zheng (the usual term for orthodoxy) as a verb meaning the process of imposing correction upon others can thus be applied constructively to a range of situations and social relationships.

Taking into consideration the nature of this orthodoxy redefined as process, two features are most pronounced; first, its coercive mode of operation—the imposition of authority on others—and second, the implication of a hierarchical, passive-active power relationship. Both Liu and more recently Elman appear to adopt this position of orthodoxy as ideology. When thinking of orthodoxy or ideology, often interchangeably, these scholars, as historians of ideas, are also more interested in how systems of ideas are instrumentalized by authorities in order to manipulate targeted social strata—specifically, the process by which a system of ideas, Neo-Confucianism or Dao xue, was appropriated by the state in order to manipulate and, to some extent, to control the Confucian-educated elite, through the examination system in particular. In this view, orthodox simply implies state-sanctioned. W T. de Bary, also working from a Chinese thought perspective in his study of Confucian orthodoxy, designates a category he calls official state orthodoxy or ideology, which also conforms closely to the idea of state sanction. He defines this ideology as using Cheng-Zhu doctrine through commentaries on the classics as a standard for civil service examinations, including the promulgation of selected Song texts as authoritative doctrine. ¹⁹ This kind of orthodoxy is contrasted with a second type, philosophic orthodoxy: a sectarian doctrine held by non-official schools that identify with Cheng-Zhu teaching and practices such as scholarly study and quiet sitting. It is mainly distinguished from official state orthodoxy by its critical attitude to state authority or prevailing attitudes. De Bary also has a third type of orthodoxy—an alternative tradition still well within Neo-Confucianism—but this category has more relevance to discussions of the development of Chinese thought than to examination practice.

If, however, we move away from the specific concerns of scholars of Chinese thought to focus on our particular source—the 1761 palace examination questions and answers—we find that it may be more productive to think about the process of how orthodoxy in its guise as ideology gets generated. With the exception of one of the four sections of the examination, little raised in the policy issues put forward by the palace examination (the final written part of the metropolitan examination) is directly implicated in mid-Qing intellectual trends. Although, arguably, everything written in the examinations relates to the cultural framework of the Confucian canon, the solutions to policy issues (as Chapter Three will show) fall outside strictly defined categories of intellectual thought, necessarily focusing our attention instead onto the constructive or generative process. In place of rigidly differentiated orthodoxies, we might consider orthodoxies more dynamically as categories defined by different authoritative interpretations imposed by groups who stand in different power relationships with each other. In this view, the interpretations imposed by the state differ from those imposed by mainstream, conventional scholars (remembering that these differences are always historically contingent), and, considering the continually shifting ground of cultural politics, from those imposed by specialists in cultural production. Furth contributes an important analytical dimension to this argument by observing that importance lay less in the transmission of orthodoxy than in encouragement to participate in a repeated reinvention of the orthodox world order and ... a willed living performance by social actors.²⁰ This stress on performance and process rather than on static classifications emphasizes the shifting, interactive, and temporary nature of all categories. Taking into consideration the processual nature of this redefined orthodoxy, its performative mode of operation, and the hierarchically passive-active power relationship always involved, we might, according to Furth’s logic, consider ideology as produced in examination practice (although not necessarily interchangeable with orthodoxy) to be somewhat similarly structured. Rather than a reified, pre-existing object or set of ideas, ideology becomes something that is produced, rehearsed, and reinvented through practice, a model that fits better the actual event of the 1761 palace examination.

I will explore the examination discourse produced by the candidates and assess the potential for individual agency in Chapter Three.