650 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION
not only required to recommend others for office but could have their fief con-
fiscated for a bad recommendation, but in Chin times each official acted on his
own and was solely responsible for his own actions, eroding the standards of
the Chou recommendation system that held all recommendors liable for the crim-
inal acts of the recommendees.^9
By the fifth century bureaucratic personnel practice presumably reached the
nadir of devolution because of the routinization of procedure and the growth
of aristocratic and hereditary status. Neither emperors nor officials of the Min-
istry of Personnel in the state of Ch'i (479-502) in south China bothered to
conduct any investigation of candidates for office because they depended pri-
marily on written records and genealogies of maternal as well as paternal rel-
atives of officials. Sons of the highest ranking families were appointed to office
as soon as they reached the age of twenty, and those from lower ranking fam-
ilies were restricted to clerk's posts and given an examination to test their skills
when they reached thirty ycars of age. The Liang dynasty (502-57) established
the nine-rank systcm (chiu-p 'in) which was not inherently dangerous itself, but
in practice it favored hereditary familial and status criteria. The Ch'i methods
of recruitment were also carried over into the Ch'en dynasty (557-87) until the
reunification of China under the Sui.
In the Southern Dynasties, evaluation of candidates and officials was ignored
and vacancies were filled by transferring incumbent officials or appointing their
relatives because it was easier than a thorough program of investigation. All
appointments were handled by the Personnel Ministry (Hsiian-ts'ao) which
merely checked the status of the candidates to judge whether they were "noble
or base," and submitted the list of names to the eight highest officials of the
regime (the "eight seats" or Pa-tso) for approval. The emperor conducted no
interviews of any candidates in advance to determine their capacities but met
them for the first ti me after their appointment. Even though no system was estab-
lished for reviewing the pcrformance of officials in office, and rank changes were
made in an irregular and arbitrary way through the Ch'i dynasty, there were occa-
sional spokesmen like Wang Chien who recommended that local magistrates be
chosen on the basis of their past record of governance and support from local
residents rather than by selection by officials in the capital. JO
In Wei and Chin times (third century A.D.), a special recruitment officer, called
the Chung-cheng, relied on a man's pedigree instead of a true examination of
merit for determining which one of nine grades of rank (chiu-p'in) should be
assigned to a candidate. Magistrates and city officials were appointed by the Min-
istry of Personnel CLi-pu), but they were still allowed to hire their own subordi-
nates on the basis of village recommendation. I I Tu Yu then criticized the Northern
Ch'i (r. 570-76) for selling posts, appointing sycophants, and allowing the cen-
tral government to take ovcr the magistrates' right to appoint subordinates. On
the other hand, allowing magistrates to appoint their subordinates could just as
easily have been subverted by favoritism for men who had inherited high status.
Wei Hstian-t'ung in the seventh century remarked that in contemporary prac-