Alexander Woodside's recognition of the variety of meritocratic civil service systems in pre-modern China, Korea and Vietnam challenges not only the Eurocentric view of modernity, but the very concept of modernity itself.
by Catherine Schuknecht (UCLA 2015)
UCLA International Institute, March 3, 2015 — A recent Asia Institute event marked the beginning of a new initiative called “East Asia — Regional and Global Perspectives,” which aims to build ties between students and faculty studying different parts of East Asia. To launch the program, which is expected to result in new courses and branches of study, the inaugural seminar partnered the Asia Institute with three of its affiliated centers: the Center for Chinese Studies, the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies and the Center for Korean Studies.
The featured speaker, Alexander Woodside, spoke about his book, “Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History” (Harvard 2006). Woodside is an emeritus professor of Chinese and Southeast Asian History at the University of British Columbia in Canada and has contributed major scholarly works to the fields of both Vietnamese and Chinese history.
Published almost a decade ago, the book offers a reassessment of the meritocratic civil service examinations that emerged in China, Korea and Vietnam at the time of the Tang dynasty in China (618–907 CE). “Scholars like Alex Woodside have been helping us reframe the ways we think both about parts of Asia together and. . . the ways Asia fits into world history,” said Asia Institute Director and economic historian R. Bin Wong. The event also brought together four UCLA faculty experts on Korea, Vietnam, Japan and China, respectively, to comment on Woodside's scholarship.
The argument
The rise of meritocratic civil service examinations in China, Korea and Vietnam preceded the emergence of a comparable system in Western Europe and Japan. In the century that followed the founding of China's Ming dynasty in 1368, a common bureaucratic structure of civil government was established in relatively standardized form in China, Choson dynasty Korea (1392–1910 CE) and Ly dynasty Vietnam (1010–1225 CE).
However, the civil service exam systems in these three countries varied. Confucian political theory, explained Woodside, was flexible enough to accommodate monarchies in Vietnam, Korea and Japan that bore very little resemblance to the Chinese emperorship. The former combined distinctly feudal hereditary principles and court cultures with post-feudal, merit-based civil services.
“The Ming dynasty political system and its variations in Korea and Vietnam appeared to Western observers then to be both stable and forward looking,” remarked Woodside, “despite struggles between regional lords in Vietnam from the 1500s on and factional battles. . . in Korea.”
Unsurprisingly, the political systems of the three East Asian countries seemed admirable to their European contemporaries. “Europe during the life of Ming China was the Europe of murdered kings,” explained Woodside, "Three English kings alone were murdered between 1399 and 1483.”
During the same era, Europe also endured the Spanish Inquisition and the Thirty Years’ War, with the latter killing close to one-third of the population of Central Europe.
Challenging a Eurocentric history of modernity
The Eurocentric historical interpretation of modernity associates rational bureaucratic systems exclusively with the history of Western capitalism and industrialization. “Lost Modernities,” commented Katsuya Hirano, seeks to restore “the creative agency of non-Western societies”. Hirano is an historian of Japan at UCLA.
“Alex's [Woodside] book seems in some respects to be a call for the identification of autonomous modernities, . . . allowing us to sidestep the impact of Europeanization,” agreed Vietnam specialist George Dutton (director, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and professor, Asian Languages and Cultures).
By recognizing different forms of an exam-based bureaucratic system in the three societies, Woodside said his book counters a Eurocentric approach to modernization that has sought to suppress these differences. “A great variety of forms can exist in any given socioeconomic system,” he noted. “Just as there are a variety of forms of capitalism, there are also several forms of pre-industrial experiments with examinations-based meritocracy.”
Hirano, however, voiced concern that Woodside’s use of the terms “modernity” and “lost modernities” stopped short of refuting Eurocentrism. He warned that by taking meritocracy as a definitive feature of rationality and equating it with modernity, historians risk losing sight of the distinction between two forms of rationality — one developed in non-industrial societies and the other, in industrial capitalist societies.
In fact, Hirano asserted, equating rationality with modernity was “an ideological construct through which Europe sought to project and assert its centrality in human history.”
From left: R. Bin Wong, George Dutton, Alexander Woodside, John Duncan and Katsuya Hirano. (
Photo: Peggy McInerny/ UCLA.)
Korea specialist John Duncan (director, Center for Korean Studies, and professor, Asian Languages and Cultures) offered a counterargument, suggesting that the reimagining of the histories of China, Korea and Vietnam within a Western model of historical progress has been an important part of the process of decolonization. The tendency to equate modernity with Western-style industrial capitalism, Duncan explained, has allowed historians to deconstruct what he called the “historical interpretations that apologists for colonialism . . . use to rationalize the Japanese takeover of Korea.”
Dutton warned that a linear view of historical development that culminates in a western-style industrial democracy fails to acknowledge the rich and variegated histories of Korea and other postcolonial nations.
“Modernity cannot be understood simply in terms of [a] radical break with the past,” argued Hirano, “It entails the constant reconfiguration of the old.” In his view, the competitive examination systems that took root in China, Korea and Vietnam were the result of reconfigurations of old institutions, values and practices to meet the requirements of a new age.
Duncan agreed, adding that Woodside’s work challenged the western understanding of modernity “as constituting some sort of radical break from previous human experience.”
The discussants agreed that scholars must also consider the effect of transnational transfers of political and legal institutions in the three East Asian countries. Dutton, for example, argued that “participation in Roman Catholicism made the Vietnamese part of a global network of fellow Christians, with not only theological, but also bureaucratic implications.”
“We should question any predisposition to assume that the history of successful state formation is a history of an evolution almost entirely from within the states in question,” concurred Woodside.
However modernity is understood, he added, “the Eastern Asian invention of a public service ideal based on merit. . . was an important contribution to something that is surely modern — namely, our de-tribalization as a species.”
An institution comes full circle
During the latter half of the 20th century, a “modern convergence myth” took hold in Chinese political thought that suggested the Western model of rationality and modernity caused “human societies everywhere to shed traditional attachments to religion and to their allegedly pre-rational political systems,” said Woodside.
But the convergence theory overlooks the fact that the meritocratic civil service examinations of East Asia predated the European Enlightenment in the 18th century and the continent’s industrialization in the 19th century.
“What happens in the Chinese case — tragically — is that. . . the fusion of moral vision and bureaucratic competence. . . [is] lost with a vengeance after 1949,” remarked Wong. The result, he observed, was historical amnesia. In 1988, for example, an international symposium was held in Beijing to offer China international advice on how to create a modern civil service. The deep irony of the symposium, said Woodside, was epitomized by the declaration of British and American guests that “We got our civil service from you.”
The symposium itself illustrated how western notions of modernity have obscured the “pre-modern” East Asian origins of a merit-based civil service. If the afternoon’s spirited discussions were any indicator, comparative historical analysis will continue to redefine the notion of modernity from a global perspective.
Published: Tuesday, March 3, 2015