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

The seemingly precise fit between the Chinese civil-service examination system and Bourdieu and Passeron's notion of social reproduction has meant that few have seen in Chinese examinations anything more than the creation of a governing elite loyal to Chinese tradition and the ruling dynasty.¹ In The Class of 1761, a careful examination of those who took and passed the highest Chinese civil examination, in the spring of 1761, Mancheong shows that the story had much more to it. In particular, she argues that the examination represented a "performative re-enactment" of loyalties on the part of the Chinese elite, a moment when those members of the current generation accepted their responsibilities as leaders of the Qing bureaucracy. She also shows how connections long-formed and just being forged, and intellectual commitments made and immanent among the members of the class, shaped appointments and policies for the remainder of the candidates' political lives.

Mancheong's view of the examination process may derive, in part, from the elements of the system that she studies. The Palace Examination was one that almost no one failed; it concerned placement and prestige more than academic accomplishment. Nonetheless, she makes an important point, and her close study of the 217 who passed makes a signal contribution to the literature on Chinese examinations. In successive chapters, she studies the backgrounds of those who sat for the examinations; the questions that they were required to answer and how the three top candidates answered them, a remarkable case in which the Emperor personally changed the rankings of the top candidates; and the subsequent careers of all who passed.

In the densest chapter, Chapter 3, Mancheong looks at the questions on the exams and the top candidates' answers. First, Mancheong reconstructs the logic behind the questions, arguing that the 1761 examination called for an analytical grasp of the entire Chinese classical tradition, rather than an ability to explicate one text alone. Second, she seeks to present a template for each question, what an ideal answer to each question would be. Third, she tries to assess the differences between the answers that the three top candidates gave to the questions.

Mancheong attributes some of the differences to candidates' fealty to the Han and Song learning traditions, but she is at some pains to argue—justifiably—that these partisan traditions do not account for all the divergences. The sharp disputes between Han and Song learning did not begin until about a decade after the exam, although she has to explain certain answers by implausibly comparing the recipients of the best classical education in eighteenth-century China to today's undergraduates, who seek to gloss, or simply ignore, the difficult parts of a question. All of the analytical thrusts of Chapter 3 are useful, but they tend to get tangled in an exposition that rests on paraphrases of answers. Yet, reading eighteenth-century essays with the red pen of an imperial examiner is a valuable experience in reconstructing the meaning of the testing process.

The strongest part of the book is its discussion of what happened to the various candidates after the examination. Statistical accounts constitute a part of this discussion, but even more valuable are discussions of individual lives. Mancheong seems to give away too much when she writes that biographies are "of somewhat limited use for modern China scholars" (109). Although Chinese biographies are epitaphs mostly written after the death of their subjects, thus providing little insight into thought or attitudes, they are indispensable in tracing political careers, patterns of association, and the policy initiative most closely identified with their subjects. In fact, the strongest sections of this book draw on biographical materials. Biographical materials permit Mancheong to show how the examination...