Summary of The Rise and Fall of the EAST By Yasheng Huang: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of The Rise and Fall of the EAST By Yasheng Huang: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline

 

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China's history of stability, diversity, and prosperity is shaped by the EAST (exams, autocracy, stability, and technology) from ancient times. The Keju civil service exam and the Chinese Communist Party's personnel management system have homogenized ideas and norms, but stifled creativity. Under Xi Jinping, China's political and economic reversals may threaten this delicate balance, as the CCP's focus on conformity over new ideas may lead to technological decline.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Aug 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223440222

Willie M. Joseph

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This is an unofficial summary & analysis of  Yasheng Huang’s The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline designed to enrich your reading experience.

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Preface

In November 2022, hundreds of thousands of protestors in Shanghai, Beijing, and other cities took to the streets and university campuses to demonstrate against the government's zero-COVID controls. This was a brave act of defiance against a leader who had just consolidated power at the Twentieth Party Congress. The protest was not a movement, but rather a COVID protest, not a COVID Spring. The Chinese state is incredibly strong, with coercion, ideological indoctrination, and strong GDP growth. However, there is a need for a more comprehensive explanation for the power, reach, and discretion of the Chinese state.

The first component of the EAST formulation is examination, which is China's blessing but also its curse. Keju, the civil service examination, was an incubator of values, norms, and ideas, influencing the ideology and epistemology of Chinese minds. The Chinese state is strong because it reigns without a society, which is organized, has its own identity, and is considered separately legitimate from the state. Keju is fiercely competitive, vaulting triumphs achieved in small and isolated examination cells while harshly punishing collaboration, or cheating in a Keju context. The Chinese state's powerlessness in the face of collective action is a significant cause, as seen in the individualistic Chinese entrepreneurs and the lockdown order in Shanghai.

The author presents a broad and ambitious book on four topics, exploring historical and contemporary facts and events. The book is self-consciously ambitious, aiming to propose scaffolding ideas to make sense of historical and contemporary facts and events. The author believes that books provide a way to tackle big topics that are not possible in refereed journals. The book explores the COVID protest, which has been a game changer, and the tenacity of imperial regimes and the CCP. The author hopes that the book may open further debates and discussions.

The author has presented parts of the early draft at various conferences and panel discussions, and has received feedback from friends and colleagues on various topics. The author acknowledges the contributions of scholars in China, who helped acquire historical knowledge and data, and student research assistants who helped with database construction, literature reviews, and fact-checking. The author is grateful to Nancy Hearst at Harvard's Fairbank Center library, Peter Bol of Harvard University, and several people at Yale University Press for their attention, quick turnaround time, and excellent editorial assistance. The author acknowledges that the author alone is responsible for the remaining errors in the book.

INTRODUCTION

Unpacking the EAST Formulation

The Qin Dynasty (221-207 BCE) was China's first dynasty, known for its unitary autocracy, top-down rule, impersonal nature, meritocracy, and repressiveness. It gave birth to political China but was short, lasting only fourteen years, and was toppled by a ragtag gang of peasants-turned-rebels in the Dazexiang Uprising. The story of Chen Sheng and Wu Guang's rebellion in 209 BCE is familiar to school-age children in China. The dynasty's harshness is often taught through the storyline of Chen and Wu's rebellion. However, the real lessons lie in the incentive system.

The Qin espoused Legalism, which prized incentives above all else. Zhu Zhuofeng's book The Elegy of the Qin suggests that the conscript-destination rule was designed for the smaller Qin kingdom, which unified China in 221 BCE. The larger Qin empire increased the heterogeneity of conditions, as a small region was more homogenous in topographical, climate, and environmental conditions. The decision-makers who created the time-bound rule likely had no idea about these heterogeneities on the ground and failed to consider the added complexities of a larger empire.

The tensions between homogeneity and heterogeneity in Chinese history and today are evident in the Dazexiang Uprising. Chinese rulers often resolved these tensions in favor of homogeneity, with Confucianism or Communism gaining at the expense of other ideas. In politics, one ruler, such as the emperor or general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), dominated other centers of power. In bureaucracy, Confucian mandarins or technocrats edged out other human capital. As China homogenized, it also became larger, with the Han dynasty covering an area of six million square kilometers.

The Tang dynasty doubled this to 12 million square kilometers, while the Song dynasty shrank to only 2.8 million square kilometers. China expanded rapidly, with the Ming and Qing dynasties covering 10 and 13 million square kilometers, respectively. The People's Republic of China (PRC) occupies an area of 9.6 million square kilometers. The bureaucracy in China also increased, with officials comprising 0.08 percent of the population in 1982. Later dynasties were durable, with the Han dynasty being the longest-lasting in China, lasting 414 years.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has been one of the world's five Communist countries, withstanding catastrophic upheavals such as the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. It has survived and prospered from crises that have toppled lesser regimes, such as the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis, the 2008 Great Recession, the 2015 stock market crash, the 2003 SARS epidemic, the 2008 melamine scandal, many days of