A French sneak in 1884 attack led to a fundamental misunderstanding of Qing technological prowess. It’s time to reexamine the popular but simplistic, if not outright wrong idea that China’s military losses to Europe (and, later, Japan) owed to its inability to modernize.
An unusual debate on what may seem an arcane topic China’s imperial civil service examinations recently took place on the op-ed page of the The New York Times. The argument centered on the question of whether or not China during the past 1000 years or so was a meritocracy. Prominent mainland intellectual Zhang Weiwei, first argued that “[m]eritocratic governance is
Confucian higher education in the Sinosphere
Looking into the history of higher education in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. Biyong, the imperial lecture hall in Beijing Guozijian. Source: The awakening of China by WAP Martin (1907)
April 25, 2021
Before the emergence of higher education in the West, older institutions were already teaching across the globe. Amongst them were the Confucian academies within the Sinosphere, which inherited the ideals of China’s Guozijian and were scattered across Vietnam, Japan and the two Koreas. These ancient temples of learning offer both an alternative to Western conceptions of scientific education, and a cautionary tale for meritocratic reforms elsewhere.