Chaju is also an election, and it is a system of selecting talents as officials from the bottom up. In the Han Dynasty, there were roughly four criteria for the assessment of judges, which were called "selecting scholars in four subjects" and "the book of the later Han Dynasty". 6? 1 baiguanzhi "note cited British Shao" Han Guan Yi "said:

One said that virtue is noble and ambition is innocent; The second is to study and practice and get a doctorate in classics; Third, understanding Dafa is enough to doubt and answer questions according to the chapter. Fourth, he was said to be resolute and resourceful, not to be confused by things, observant and meticulous, and made a decision, so he was appointed as the third assistant, and everyone had a trip to filial piety.

The selection of four subjects began in the Western Han Dynasty and remained unchanged in the Eastern Han Dynasty. However, sometimes only one or two or all four of them are temporarily stipulated in the imperial edicts. Although the standard of Tea Classic is only four subjects, there are many specific subjects in Tea Classic, including filial piety, Cai Mao, virtue and founder, literature (usually referring to Confucian classics) and temporary special subjects such as Ming Jing, Fa Ming, entertainment, drama management, art of war, yin and yang disasters. These are all fame, and with fame, you can actually be awarded an official position. In fact, the above disciplines are divided into annual promotion and special promotion. Annual promotion is a regular system, and special promotion is temporarily stipulated by imperial edicts. Both are bottom-up talent selection systems. The selection of officials in the Han Dynasty took "villagers choosing officials" as the standard, which reflected the respect for the authority of rural public opinion in judging scholars' moral integrity. However, once public opinion evaluation is linked with the ups and downs of official career, it is easy to be controlled and used by some powerful and influential people or social groups. Cao Cao sized up the situation and put forward the principle of "meritocracy is promotion", which is not only the need of seeking talents in troubled times, but also the deliberate correction of "inaccurate selection" in Han Dynasty.

levy

Expropriation is a top-down official selection system, which mainly includes two ways: emperor recruitment and state and county recall. Emperor recruitment is to select some prestigious people with excellent academic performance, prepare consultants or appoint political affairs through characteristics and recruitment. The recruitment party has a long history. If Qin Xiaogong publicly orders the recruitment of talents, it is of a recruitment nature. When Sun Tong, the uncle of Qin Shihuang, took literature as the symbol and Wang Cizhong took Cang Xie's old prose as the symbol of official script, it also belonged to the nature of conscription. In the Han Dynasty, in the eleventh year of Gao (BC 196), he also inherited this method. Later, from the Western Emperor Wudi to the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xiang Yan became an example. For venerable old scholars, special treatment is given. For example, at the beginning of Liang Wudi's accession to the throne, that is, "making the emissary bundle silks and add jade, loading and wrapping the wheels with simplicity, and driving the chariot to meet them" can be said to be the first example of loading and loading the wheels to meet the wise men in the Han Dynasty. The emperor's conscription was the most honorable official career in the Han Dynasty, and conscripts came and went freely. Although the court can urge them, if they refuse, they cannot be forced. Moreover, the status after the levy was different from that of ordinary courtiers, and most of them were treated with courtesy.

Expulsion is a system in which senior officials appoint lower-level officials. In the Han Dynasty, there were two situations except for officials: one was that after the county trial, court officials or foreign ministers could recommend them for inspection and supplement, so the official positions of the three official houses were low, but they were easy to be prominent. One is to abolish states and counties, where officials are assisted. Because of their qualifications, contributions, or after probation, they can recommend or inspect their talents, or they can be promoted to court officials or local officials.

The government and counties have the right to choose their own officials, and the excluded officials are not appointed by the court. They can stay or stay as they please. Should not open, can not be forced to open; Otherwise it will be criticized by public opinion. In particular, the state and county summoning order was a relatively free way of being an official at that time. After it was removed, the officers should reuse it; Otherwise, honest people will resign. On the other hand, ministers and priests can be dismissed by themselves. In order to develop personal power, they compete to win over scholars. In order to be an official, scholars also have to rely on the power gate. This has developed into a combination of personal kindness. In the Western Han Dynasty, the exiled people were still state officials, but in the Eastern Han Dynasty, they actually became the private ownership of the chief officials. As a result, the centralization of the imperial court was divided and the local separatist forces developed. The separatist situation in the late Eastern Han Dynasty had a lot to do with the transfer of human rights to private hands.

Jiupinzhong Zheng Zhi

Under the impact of the warlord melee at the end of Han Dynasty, the village community organizations were destroyed, and the traditional practice of "village election" was unsustainable. In this case, Chen Qun, an ancient scholar of Cao Wei in the Three Kingdoms period, formulated and implemented the "Nine-grade Zheng Zhi System". Prestigious people are selected as "officials" in various counties, who are responsible for visiting local scholars, rating them nine grades (up, up, down, up, middle, down and down) according to their talents and prestige, and then recommending them to the official department according to the grades of scholars. According to Chiang Kai-shek's report, the official department awarded awards to officials according to their grades. At first, this system was dedicated to unifying the election of officials in the imperial court and the discussion in the countryside. This is the continuation of the tradition of selecting officials in Han Dynasty and the inheritance of Cao Cao's employment policy. However, at the turn of Wei and Jin Dynasties, officials of all sizes were monopolized by "gentry" in all counties. They are partial to the gentry when evaluating grades, and the division of nine grades has deviated from the principle of "regardless of family status" In the following 300 years, there was a situation that the gentry monopolized the political power, and the Nine Grades System was always a bureaucratic selection system to protect the hereditary political privileges of the gentry.

imperial examination system

During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the gentry system only distributed power according to the level of family background, which could not meet the requirements of a large number of landlords with humble origins. However, the gentry's corruption from a noble family aggravated the tendency of political corruption and local separatism at that time, indicating that the gentry system was decadent. At the same time, the feudal economy developed, especially after the implementation of the equal land system, the power of small and medium-sized landlords increased and they were very eager to enter the ruling class. During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the whole country was unified. In order to innovate politics, consolidate rule and strengthen centralization, the imperial examination system was implemented in the selection of officials.

Emperor Wendi of Sui Dynasty abolished the Nine-product system for maintaining the noble status of the gate, and set up two subjects of "Conscientiousness, Honesty and Dedication" and "Integrity and Dedication" in the seventh year of the Emperor (587). During the Sui Dynasty, Yang Di set up the Imperial Examination, hence the name "Imperial Examination" because it was divided into different disciplines. The dynasty began to identify talents by public examination and recruit talents based on ability. This was a major reform of the official selection system in ancient China, which was used by later generations.

There are two types of imperial examinations in the Tang Dynasty: formal and systematic. It is often held every year. Besides the Jinshi Branch, there are many kinds of scholars, including Ming Jing, Fa Ming, Zi Ming and Shu Ming. College students and apprentices can apply directly. Those who don't study can apply to the counties themselves, and then the counties send them to the central government to take the exam. After passing the exam. Most candidates are Jinshi and Mingjing. In terms of examination content, Jinshi mainly focuses on poetry and current affairs, and Ming Classics mainly focuses on reciting Confucian classics. Presided over the examination, in the twenty-fourth year of Kaiyuan (736), he was already a foreign official in the official department. In the future, they will be in charge of the etiquette department, and some will be presided over temporarily by the emperor, such as officials in charge of books. When Wu Zetian was in power, she personally presided over the examination. The examinee is called "Ji". The number of students admitted is about 1-2% of the candidates of Jinshi and 1-2/ 10 of the candidates of Mingjing. Because candidates submit resumes, it is called "vote", so the first place in Jinshi is "head" or "champion". Wu Zetian also added Wu Ju, presided over by the Ministry of War.

There are more than 100 kinds of temporary names given by the emperor, such as virtuous and outspoken admonition, beautiful words, knowledgeable and versatile skills, martial arts frontier defense, multi-disciplinary military planning, and talents who have failed to reach the bottom. Scholars and officials can take the exam. After the entrance examination, it is the immediate promotion of officials; Those who are not officials are immediately given official positions by the official department. But the origin of the system was not regarded as the right way at that time, but as "variegated".

The imperial examination system established in Sui and Tang Dynasties is of positive significance: it deprived landlords and gentry of their political privileges, weakened the power of local gentry, and brought the right of selecting and appointing feudal officials back to the central government, which was conducive to eliminating corruption in the selection of officials at local and central levels, and changed the system of selecting officials based on recommendation since Qin and Han Dynasties, which was a great progress in history. Opening the official career to the whole landlord class through the imperial examination is conducive to attracting talents, easing contradictions and expanding the foundation of the ruling class. The imperial examination system closely links reading, examination and being an official, thus improving the cultural quality of officials, greatly strengthening centralization, being conducive to political stability and promoting the development of education and science and technology.

The imperial examination produced a large number of famous officials, celebrities and politicians, as well as many outstanding thinkers, writers, artists, scholars, educators and diplomats, such as Wang Wei, Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, Liu Yuxi, Yan Zhenqing, Liu Gongquan and Bai Juyi in the Tang Dynasty, and Ouyang Xiu, Wang Anshi, Su Dongpo, Sima Guang, Zhu and Bao Zheng in the Song Dynasty.

The imperial examination system is rooted in the concrete soil of China, that is, it depends on the great advantages of the main ethnic groups in China's multi-ethnic countries in population, development level and cultural identity and the historical situation that feudal productive forces are constantly expanding to the surrounding areas. Its existence not only depends on the autocratic dynasty, but also promotes the unity and pluralism of the country. Taking the imperial examination as the "right path" and Confucianism as the content of the imperial examination, it is a great creation of China's traditional politics to naturally integrate the secularity of political power with the indoctrination of ideology. It objectively unifies China culture into Confucian culture, which is beneficial to the development of traditional centralized countries. If the Sui and Tang Dynasties, which laid the foundation of the imperial examination system, are used as the boundary to divide the early and late periods of China's history, we can also see that the cohesion and stability of the centralized state in the late period are greater than that in the early period, which is also closely related to the evolution of the bureaucratic civil service election system from "prosecution" to imperial examination system.

The imperial examination system was used by later generations, but in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the four books and the five classics were the main ones, and the eight-part essay was used to select scholars, which imprisoned the thoughts of scholars, greatly inhibited the creativity of intellectuals and hindered the development of science and technology and society to a certain extent.