Benjamin Elman News Today

Keju, China’s incredibly difficult civil service test, strengthened the state at the cost of freedom and creativity

A French sneak in 1884 attack led to a fundamental misunderstanding of Qing technological prowess. It’s time to reexamine the popular — but simplistic, if not outright wrong — idea that China’s military losses to Europe (and, later, Japan) owed to its inability to modernize.

A journal of Art, Culture and Politics, Published by the University of Chicago

An unusual debate on what may seem an arcane topic—China’s imperial civil service examinations—recently took place on the op-ed page of the The New York Times. The argument centered on the question of whether or not China during the past 1000 years or so was a meritocracy. Prominent mainland intellectual Zhang Weiwei, first argued that “[m]eritocratic governance is

Confucian higher education in the Sinosphere Looking into the history of higher education in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. Biyong, the imperial lecture hall in Beijing Guozijian. Source: The awakening of China by WAP Martin (1907) April 25, 2021 Before the emergence of higher education in the West, older institutions were already teaching across the globe. Amongst them were the Confucian academies within the Sinosphere, which inherited the ideals of China’s Guozi...