REMOLDING THE RULING CLASS 139
of the ruling class were not behaving in a moral fashion. They were placing
their own private interests over those of the state or the public good, and since
their main occupations were officeholding and scholarship, they were failing
in their jobs as officials and teachers. But the important question was, would
Yu's obvious displeasure with the yangban stir him to champion a position of
equal opportunity based on moral capacity as resolutely as P'ei Tsu-yeh?THE EVILS OF EXAMINATIONSEven though north China had been overrun by the tribal "barbarians" of the area
north of the Great Wall after 304, and societies of the next few centuries were
dominated by aliens, military leaders, and aristocrats, bureaucratic organization
had been retained throughout even though central control over the districts was
weakened because of the domination of local aristocrats. When the Sui dynasty
reunified all of China in 589, the power of the central bureaucracy was strength-
ened and its control over the periphery extended. One of the key institutions in
this process was the introduction of the civil service examination in 606 to recruit
officials on the basis of performance in written examinations, a method that threat-
ened the stranglehold of the old aristocracy.
Although the aristocracy in T'ang China made a successful adaption to this
challenge by standing for the examinations and passing them in large numbers,
the examinations themselves introduced a completely new method of recruit-
ment with a number of problems of its own. The examination system continued
through succeeding dynasties until its abolition in 1905, and was also adopted
by Koreans in the Koryo dynasty in 958, and strengthened in the Choson dynasty
after 1392, making it virtually the exclusive route to the highest positions in the
state bureaucracy. It was after two and one-half centuries of experience with it
that Yu focused his attention on its weaknesses, and for this task he was aided
by his research into its history in China.Tso Hsiung's Examination System in the Later HanYu Hyongwon's first reference to the appearance of examinations as a means of
recruitment occurred fairly early in the Later Han dynasty, as a corrective to a
deteriorating situation. He cited Fan Yeh (398-445) of the Sung dynasty, com-
piler of the History of the Later Han Dynasty (Hou Hall-shu), who thought that
the decline in the recommendation system in the Later Han dynasty was offset,
if only for a brief time, in A.D. 132 by the reforms of Tso Hsiung, who estab-
lished two types of examinations for recruiting officials, one in the classics and
family law for Confucian scholars, and a written composition test for clerks. All
candidates had to be a minimum of forty years of age (the age when Confucius
said he was finally able to understand what the world was all about). The suc-
cessful candidates were given posts as assistants to high officials to enable the
latter to observe their performance.