Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127–1279) (review)

What was the function of the Chinese civil service examinations? The state used them to discipline and control the literati, some historians maintain.¹ Instead, Hilde De Weerdt proposes that the examinations constituted an intellectual field in which different contestants such as the court, examiners, teachers, students, and private printers interacted with one another. In the early Southern Song period, when the court weakened, competition among these different groups intensified. This was the environment in which the Learning of the Way school arose.

De Weerdt’s book has four major parts. The two chapters in Part I provide a basic introduction to the examination system and Southern Song intellectual thought. Part II focuses on the scholars of Yongjia 永嘉, now the modern city of Wenzhou 溫州 in Zhejiang province. During the late twelfth century, these scholars enjoyed a reputation among students throughout the empire for their successful teaching methods emphasizing “practical thinking.” Part III sketches a brief political history of the rise of the Learning of the Way movement in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Part IV examines the writings of the Learning of the Way movement, which emphasized the primacy of moral principles in learning. De Weerdt shows how this movement escaped from political oppression in the 1190s and 1200s, how it became popular and expanded its power in the examination field through the teachings and writings of Zhu Xi 朱熹, and how it eventually became the orthodoxy of the empire. De Weerdt concentrates on the Yongjia scholars and the Learning of the Way because these two schools of thought played dominant roles in the school curriculum and examination preparation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

In Chapter 1, De Weerdt first discusses two general terms—William Theodore de Bary’s “Neo-Confucianism” and Hoyt Tillman’s “Daoxue”—and the controversies they have aroused in the English-language historiography. Historians use both terms to denote the various schools that aimed to revive Confucianism by incorporating new metaphysical and moral elements. Recently, more and more works have adopted “the Learning of the Way,” the literal translation of “Daoxue,” as the best term for the Confucian intellectual movement led by Zhu Xi and his followers in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Using the term, De Weerdt lists four discursive practices that distinguish the Learning of the Way from other intellectual traditions: the belief in the consistency among the writings of ancient sage-kings, Confucius, Mencius, and the contemporary leaders of this movement; the hierarchical authority in the teacher-student relationship; the commitment to study and self-cultivation; and active participation in intellectual and political realms. In contrast to the highly organized Zhu Xi School, which was preoccupied with a proper transmission and interpretation of moral principles, the Yongjia tradition was remarkable for its practical and effective teaching efforts and for its profound influence over students. The teachers in the Yongjia region, such as Chen Fuliang 陳傅良 and Ye Shi 葉適, were famous for their fervent interest in discussing current affairs and for advocating new political and military policies in training students to write essays.

The next chapter of Part I introduces the formats and basic requirements for the last two sessions of the examinations. These two genres were examination expositions (lun 論) and policy-response essays (ce 策). The former required students to identify and interpret a given passage from philosophical and historical texts, mostly from Confucian Classics and early official historical works. The latter tested students’ ability to review philosophical and historical issues and to provide tentative solutions to contemporary issues. Both represented changing examination standards since they tested the students’ exegetical skills. A new type of essay structure also gradually emerged and evolved into the eight-legged standard of the Ming and Qing periods. De Weerdt provides a detailed analysis of a specific examination exposition that follows this standard structure and demonstrates how Huang...