Jeffrey Wasserstrom: evaluation

Transcript context

…But to which degree, this idea of meritocracy that’s inherent to the notion that we all start at the same line, there’s a meritocratic view of human nature there? Or if you work hard and you learn things, you will succeed. And so the reverse, if you haven’t succeeded, that means you didn’t work hard, and therefore do not deserve the spoils of the success. Does that carry over to the China of today? There’s such a challenge in all these forms of meritocracy because you had the civil service exams, but the question was if you had a really good tutor, if you could afford a really good tutor, you had a better chance of passing the exams. One thing that happened there was families would pull together resources to try to help the brightest in their group to be able to become part of the officialdom. And this kind of pooling together resources to help as a family was an important part of that structure. But there was always a tension of that, so what if you don’t succeed? Some of the leaders of rebellions against emperors were failed examination candidates. You had this issue, and then it became something, well, the system was out of whack, and it needed a new leader. And also there was something built in that was not so much Confucius himself, but one of his main interpreters, early interpreters, Mencius, had this idea, which can be seen as a crude justification for a rebellion or for a kind of democracy to say that even though the emperor rules at the will of heaven, if he doesn’t act like a true emperor, if he’s not morally upstanding, then heaven will remove its mandate to him. And then there’s no obligation to show deference for a ruler who’s not behaving like a true ruler. And there it sort of justifies rebellion. And the idea is that if the rebellion isn’t justified, then heaven will stop the ruler from being killed. But if heaven has removed his support, then the rebellion will succeed, and then a new ruler will be justified in taking power. So it’s an interesting sense that the universe in this Confucian view has a kind of moral dimension to it, but it also, it’s when things actually happen that you see where the side of morality is. Okay, so it’s meritocracy with an asterisk. It does seem to be the case, maybe you can speak to that, that in the Chinese education system, there seems to be a high value for excellence. Hopefully I’m not generalizing too much, but from the things I’ve seen, there are certain cultures, certain peoples that it’s just part of the value system of the culture that you need to be a really good student. Is that the case with the China of today?…

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