ChinaTalk: Autocracy, Exams and Stagnation: Imperial China's Modern Legacy

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Yasheng Huang 黄亚生 is the author of one of the decade’s greatest books about China — The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline. It’s a rich book, a product of a career of reflections, with each page delivering something novel and provocative.
In this first half of our two-part interview, we discuss…

• How the imperial examination system (known as keju) shaped Chinese governance, culture, and society,
• Why autocratic Chinese dynasties benefitted from a meritocratic bureaucracy,
• Statistical methods for analyzing social mobility in imperial China,
• How the keju system survived the Mongol conquest,
• What the tradeoffs in the imperial exam system can teach us about the future economic prospects of China and Taiwan.

Outro music: 等着你回来 by 白光, a 1930s Shanghai starlet (Spotify link)

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