Who is the scholar-bureaucrat?

Scholar-officials are the collective names of scholars and officials in ancient China, which began in the Warring States Period. They are not only direct participants in national politics, but also creators and inheritors of social culture and art.

Politics is the first priority of most "scholar-officials" in life; But at the same time, their cultural accomplishment also determines that they are the inheritors and creators of literature, calligraphy, painting, seal cutting, antique collection and other cultures.

The word "scholar-bureaucrat" originally meant scholars and their future. "Scholar" refers to scholars, while "doctor" is the official name in the Spring and Autumn Period. Together, it refers to these people who study and are officials. In ancient China, literati, as "scholars", together with farmers, craftsmen and businessmen, constituted the whole society. This society composed of scholars, peasants, workers and businessmen runs the whole society under the rule of imperial power. It is these bureaucrats who are called "scholars" who form and operate a huge administrative organization that links imperial power and maintains social operation. As a result, the scholar-officials have become the class with the least number and the greatest energy in this society. They inherited the orders of the empire from above, controlled the society from below and maintained the normal operation of the dynasty, so they became the darling of this society for thousands of years.

Since the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the imperial court has used officials, abolished the hereditary system and replaced it with the imperial examination. In this way, being the number one scholar has become the object of contention of scholars in previous dynasties. However, becoming a scholar is not easy. First of all, the family should have money to support the children who go to school to study; Then, under the strict discipline of Mr. Xue, the students read aloud and memorized every day, and finally got a scholarship. Then study hard and get the best candidate before going to Beijing to try. That is to say, in the middle school and court exams, those who are qualified to attend the Baohe Hall will be decided by the emperor himself and become the emperor's protege. Scholars who obtained Jinshi were appointed by the court to join the hierarchical bureaucratic group. Then from low to high, up the ladder, this is the life track of literati. In the long history of thousands of years, only a few scholars have really entered and climbed this ladder of life, and the vast majority of students have been ruthlessly eliminated in layers of screening. However, it is these few successful people who have become role models for scholars all over the world and attracted countless students to work hard for them.

However, the imperial examination system, which prevailed for 1400 years, was suddenly and abruptly abolished when it entered the threshold of the twentieth century. Although Yuan Shikai, Zhang Zhidong and others want to introduce the western education system, replace the imperial examination with schools, and establish a new national talent training mechanism to achieve the effect of using western learning for China. However, they ignored an extremely important role of the imperial examination system: China's imperial examination system is not only an education system, but also a system of selecting and employing people in the country. Scholars finally selected through the imperial examination system will enter the bureaucratic management system at all levels of the country.

After the abolition of the imperial examination system, the selection and employment of government bureaucrats changed from the personal election of the emperor to the free choice of bureaucrats at all levels. This method of appointing subordinates by superiors originated from the secret society of China people, which completely destroyed the national system and the method of selecting and employing people in China (including the system of advocating filial piety in Han Dynasty) which lasted for thousands of years. This way of employing people was first introduced into the management system of local strength by local governors in the late Qing Dynasty (Li Hongzhang's employment is a typical example), and it officially became the basic law of selecting and employing people in the country after the Republic of China. Because officials at every level have the right to choose and employ people, the state has completely lost the final decision on the use of talents and the basic criteria for unified evaluation of talents. Abandoning national discipline is the root of all social ills. Selecting people by fame and fortune is no longer the benchmark of talent balance, and the chaos of employing people also follows. From the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, people used this method to log in to temples, which has been used to this day and people have long been accustomed to it.

However, the scholars who graduated from this school have no initial home. The road to being an official immediately is broken (of course, a few people have achieved their careers through other means), and scholars have to rely on their own cultural knowledge to make a living. As a result, a new class has emerged in society, which is a new social class who has read books but can't be an official. Rejected by the power core, they came to the society, engaged in new jobs such as teachers, lawyers, doctors, judges and engineers, and served the society with their knowledge and skills. People call this new social stratum "intellectuals".

Studying as an official is the way to cultivate and use talents in the Millennium traditional society; Reading without being an official is the way to create a new society; This is the basic difference between the literati class and the flower-growing class. The change from the scholar-bureaucrat class to the intellectual class has greatly changed the historical fate of scholars in the changes of modern society. The sign of this change is that the original literati class that maintained the rule of the dynasty disappeared rapidly, and the emerging intellectual class was increasingly marginalized. Sadly, intellectuals do not become officials, but directly enter the society. These scholars who are unable to fight cocks have truly become the most cowardly part of this law of the jungle society. Not only do the ruling groups no longer favor them, but even rural farmers disdain them, and the theory of "reading is useless" also arises. The tragic fate of scholars in the twentieth century is unprecedented in thousands of years of ancient history.

The disappearance of the literati class is actually a complete change in the way the country employs people; The change in the way of employing people is the root of all the chaos in China in the 20th century. Without this threshold of talent selection, the country lacks the ethics and standards for being an official (although it has also shouted some empty slogans). The values established by scholars in the past have been abandoned, and temples are no longer a quiet place. When people no longer respect ethics, violence begins to replace the legal system, and violence becomes a magic weapon that rulers and ruled people admire. The decline of fame and the disappearance of the literati class is the time when violence rises and flourishes.