PERSONNEL POLICY 669
recommend qualified men would be punished by immediate dismissal from
office.^65
Another device to insure the steady flow of talented men by use of the rec-
ommendation system was adoption of a measure proposed by Lu Yii in the Tang
dynasty that regular court councilors (Ch'ang-ts'an-kuan) of fifth rank or higher
recommend the name of a substitute to replace him within three days of his own
appointment (chadae).ln the Sung period the measure was extended to include
lowcr officials such as district magistrates down to the seventh rank and required
men with the longest list of recommendations to be appointed to assume the
post. Yu was more cautious by restricting recommendation to the top three ranks
only for recommendations of censors, historians, district magistrates, and edu-
cational officials.
The proposal was also supported by Yu's favorite Ming statecraft expert, Ch'iu
Chun, who praised the Tang and Sung systems because only men with proven
talent were recommended and the procedure encouraged the spirit of altruistic
willingness to yield their positions to others. Ch'iu recommended that the Min-
istries of Personnel and War set up a roster of substitutes for cvery man in office
by requiring recommendations by incumbent officials rather than relying exclu-
sively on the impersonal method employed by regular personnel agencies.^66
CONCLUSIONIn his discussion for reform of the means of evaluating the performance of active
officials, Yu Hyongwon sought to recapture the spirit of classical, feudal times
and wed it to the bureaucratic system. When he praised the classical ideals of
recruiting the most talented men and defining talent as worth and ability. he
never meant to divorce moral knowledge and bchavior from competency on
the job to create a value-free system for evaluating candidates for office. In the
search for talent, moral criteria remained primary, and efficiency and compc-
tency secondary.
Yu did not believe that it was possible to escape the legacy of centralized
bureaucratic organization to return to the alleged purity of feudal norms, but he
did believe that the adoption of classical norms and principles would solve the
problems that had developed in the age of bureaucracy. His reading of Chinese
history revealed that routinization of personnel matters in the hands of a spe-
cialized and mechanical Ministry of Personnel and neglect of thorough inves-
tigation and evaluation of incumbent officials was responsible for the decline
of efficiency and probity in bureaucratic performance.
Maintaining the quality of bureaucratic personnel required constant care and
attention to the search for talent by enrolling all officials to recommend those
whom they deemed qualifIed. Promotion also required constant observation of
incumbents to recommend promotion, or at least to determine who deserved to
keep their jobs. This spirit of dedicated observation of human behavior had been
lost because it was replaced by the perfunctory handling of personnel fi les by clerks.