REMOLDING THE RULING CLASS I3I
subjected to triennial reviews of their performance and a grand review every
nine years.
Presumably there was a two-track system of schools. one set for the com-
moners, the others for the feudal nobility, but an exceptional commoner might
gain access to the elite National Academy. Students were subjected to severe
discipline inside the schools, and if a student failed to perform adequately, he
was liable to a series of punishments accompanied by an admonition to improve.
Tfhe could not do so, he was expelled from the school and returned to the lower
ranks of regular society. In the feudal social order outside the schools, however,
eldest sons inherited the positions of their fathers without having to pass any
examination of their moral behavior. Society was bifurcated into the elite and
the commoners, reflected in the two-track system of schools.
Since the purpose of the schools was to train men for office as officials in
bureaucracies of the king and the feudal lords, the optimum benefit from the
schools would have been the creation of a class of officials of merit, but the rul-
ing class would have remained feudal and hereditary. The contrast between hered-
itary status outside the schools and egalitarian meritocracy inside was the one
major contradiction in the model not fully resolved in the Chinese literature.
For that matter, the duality of social and school standards remained a problem
for Yu Hyongw6n as he attempted to concoct a formula for his own semiaristo-
cratic society in Korea.
THE HAN DYNASTY; RECOMMENDATION
The fall of the Chou dynasty in 22 I B.C. meant a major transition to the cen-
tralized bureaucratic system of the Ch'in dynasty. Yu Hyongwon found that the
most serious result of that transformation in China was that the face-to-face eval-
uation of individual behavior that constituted the ideal method of recruitment
in the feudal system of recommendation was undermined by the rationalization
and bureaucratization of selection procedures in political units of ever greater
size and complexity. The more centralized and bureaucratic the government
became, the more impersonal the process of evaluation. Officials in remote boards
of personnel could never have intimate knowledge of the behavior or moral capac-
ity of candidates for office from the local districts.
Yet the rulers of the Former Han dynasty were able to retain the spirit of per-
sonal evaluation of the ancient recommendation model and preserve the prin-
ciple of long-term personal observation of students and officials. A number of
Han emperors also allowed the few remaining feudal lords. high officials, ancl
local magistrates to recommend worthy men for office. and the latter to appoint
their own subordinates.
Both moral behavior and practical talent were used as criteria for recom-
mendation, but by the end of the first century of the dynasty Tung Chung-shu
complained that most high officials were sons and younger brothers of bureau-
crats who simply worked their way up the official ladder by accumulating time-