REMOLDING THE RULING CLASS 143that fancy academic titles, degrees, and high offices were conferred on men who
excelled at rote memorization, wide reading, and hack writing while the really
talented died in poverty in the fieldsYl Wang ridiculed the reluctance of offi-
cials to abolish the examination system because it had been in use for so long,
and he urged a return to the methods of the sages where selection of men for
office originated in the local communities where education was based in local
schools and local officials observed the virtue, behavior, and talent of worthy
and able men recommended by the mass of the population and examined them
on their knowledge and handling of affairsJ7
Yu noted that Emperor Shen-tsung had responded to Wang by shifting the con-
tent of the examinations from literary skill to comprehension and understand-
ing of the classics and abolished the practice of pasting paper over all but a few
lines of a classic text. When the emperor personally examined chin-shih candi-
dates in 1070, he also confined his questions to policy matters. Unfortunately,
after Wang fell from power in 1086, "they restored the former system and exam-
ined people on the basis of shih andfu poetry."7^8 Yu failed to mention, however,
that Wang's plan to replace the examinations with government schools eventu-
ally failed because of Ssu-ma Kuang's opposition to his attempt to enforce con-
formity with his new commentaries on the classics in the school curriculumJ9
Yu also found that Chu Hsi, the grand synthesizer of Neo-Confucian ideas in
thirteenth-century Southern Sung, criticized the examination system in his own
time because students paid little attention to the accumulated commentaries on
the classics and simply devoted their time to memorizing only those passages
that had consistently been used in past examinations. The official examiners were
as much to blame because they rewarded the clever afficionados of literary leg-
erdemain with high grades: "They want to see how skilled a person is in attach-
ing and separating words and phrases. Once the officials in charge laud this, the
examination students also adapt their studies to it and spend their whole time
only trying to cut and paste phrases from the classics ... to accord with what
the examination officials want. ... "80 Chu praised Wang's abolition of poetical
composition in the written examinations and pointed out that even the critics of
Wang were less offended by this measure than by his attempt to dictate the proper
interpretation of the c1assics.sl
Ch'eng 1, the illustrious eleventh-century Neo-Confucian predecessor of Chu
Hsi, had also abhorred the examinations and the emphasis on rote memoriza-
tion or skill in poetry and rhyme instead of moral knowledge. He even opposed
the use of written tests in the schools because they were a poor means for judg-
ing people and stimulated personal ambition and competition.s2
Yu was by no means thorough in his coverage of Northern Sung criticism of
the examinations. He failed to mention the Ch 'ing-li reforms of 1043-44 led
by Fan Chung-yen, Han Ch'i, and Sung Ch'i, who objected to the impersonal
nature of the Sung examinations such as covering the names of the candidates
to eliminate favoritism because they preferred that the candidates be known and
their moral character taken into consideration.s3 He also omitted mention of