Today is the Gaokao (高考) when parents across China send their senior high school students off to take the most important exam of their lives by offering such helpful, encouraging words as, “If you do badly, your mother will die in a pauper’s grave.” Clearly in today’s China-A-Go-Go, competition for elite, urban jobs is intense. You don’t want to be left behind in a rapidly stratifying society, and since every family only has one shot at exam success, let’s just say there are a few stressed-out teenagers and parents around town this morning.
Sam has a great post over at The Useless Tree about how “Confucian” this sort of exam culture really is and it got me thinking about exams and social mobility in Chinese history. As hard as the gaokao is, it’s nothing compared to the ordeal of the imperial civil service examination. For three days exam candidates were locked in a cell and forced to write formulaic essays that required instant recall of the entire canon. But as Sam points out, despite their “Confucian” content, these kinds of examinations are not to be found in the original Confucian classics. In fact, given Confucius’ emphasis on