Meritocracy And The Crisis Of Legitimacy

This thesis studies modern China’s elite recruitment mechanisms in the context of the rise of meritocracy and relates it to changing social mobility and a crisis of legitimacy. The College Entrance Exam system was reinstituted after the Cultural Revolution in1978. Modeled on the traditional Imperial Exam in China, the College Entrance Exam serves as a screening mechanism in talent selection. Upward mobility in the1980s was activated by the newly-established meritocracy. By placing the most talented into political and economic managerial positions, the College Entrance Exam system helped rebuild legitimacy after the communist ideology went bankrupt. The modern Civil Service Exam established in the mid-1990s was expected to serve as a meritocratic mechanism supplementary to the College Entrance Exam. This exam system is successful in the sense that it reconstructs China’s traditional Imperial Exam tradition and institutionalizes official selection based on merit. With China’s economic marketization, however, problems emerged within the meritocratic system. The College Entrance Exam established in the context of a centrally planned economy has become increasingly incapable of adjusting social mobility after the late1990s. When the government gradually lost full administrative control of the society, especially in the economic sphere, talents selected by the College Entrance Exam lost the political career endorsement once guaranteed by the party-state system. The profound impact of the decline of meritocracy is that it undermines the mass belief, derived from Confucianism in the link between meritocracy and legitimacy.