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Yuanchong Wang, Lawrence Zhang. Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1243–1244, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae224
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If a man living in the 1790s in the Qing dynasty of China (1636, 1644–1911) was determined to serve the state, he had two options to gain entry into the civil service: he could take the requisite examinations and hope to obtain an excellent degree, or he could purchase an official title from the government. We tend to assume that he would choose the former, as it was widely celebrated and surely consolidated the meritocracy on which the sophisticated bureaucracy of the Chinese empire was based for centuries. Paying for an official appointment would not only be unfair to other potential civil servants but could even disgrace the appointee’s family. If you are astonished at the fact that dozens of toddlers already held official titles their families had bought for them at the time (118, 147, 184), Lawrence Zhang’s Power for a Price will open your eyes to the appalling truth: the unpleasant distance between the reality of the statecraft and the rosy world constructed by a few generations of historians who relentlessly promulgated the merits of the system of civil service exams.