Bureaucratic hopefuls sweating it out with the Imperial Exams of ancient China
By Abdul Mohammed
I was at an AI (Artificial Intelligence) tech meet not too long ago, where the co-founders of a start-up, two decent chaps were making a presentation. Theirs was a product targeted at university students, and at some point in their presentation, they made it known that they were at the beta-testing stage and that they were dealing directly with the students one on one and bypassing the school authorities all together. They were asked why, to which one of them answered that he hated dealing with bureaucracy. A deafening silence hung in the air. At this point I smiled a wistful smile, because just a couple of days before that meet, I was reminded in the most visceral way, why we all hate bureaucracies, irrespective of whether we are trying to renew a driver’s license, passport, get a voter’s card or like in their case, land a contract. I had been involved in a shouting match with an employee of a federal parastatal that was so loud and fierce that two of her colleagues had to come from their own office to calm me down, ask me what they could do to help. One even offered to get me water to cool down. The two of them eventually sorted me out, though it took a few days but the lady was the physical manifestation of everybody’s worst bureaucratic nightmare: the bureaucrat that is only concerned with whether he/she had followed the rules, irrespective of whether your problem was solved or not. It was this memory I recalled, as the co-founder expressed his distaste for bureaucracies. Despite that, I still voiced out what clearly what other people were thinking and that it was that, it was inevitable that he would have to deal with them.
I feel the need to explain why I was especially irate. I had been to no less than five of the offices in Lagos of this federal parastatal (six, if you count one office at the state level from which I needed something to meet the requirements) before I found the one responsible for handling my case. It needed something from the other office where that nightmare bureaucrat worked and the two of them were playing me back and forth between themselves like ping-pong (which I already suspected they would). It is kind of fitting in a very annoying sort of way that they would be playing me like ping-pong, since the game is extremely popular in China, and modern bureaucracies can trace their roots to ancient China.
Bureaucracies first arose in the ancient city of Sumer (which today, would be in Southern Iraq), which itself arose some 7,000 years ago (around 5,000 BC). [1]. At the time of the development of writing around 3,500 BC, which also first occurred in Sumer, scribes would record agricultural produce on clay tablets as a form of book-keeping [2]. Sumerian bureaucracies, however were distinct from modern bureaucracies in that Sumerian bureaucrats were hand-picked by the rulers often from the noble families without recourse to meritocracy in any shape or form and the positions were inheritable. Descendants of bureaucrats could inherit their positions when they were dead.
A little bit over 2,000 years ago (around 200 BC), a new form of bureaucracy emerged in ancient China. In contrast to the Sumerian model, the Chinese emperor at the time started to pick officials based on merit [3]. Not all his motives were altruistic, part of the motive was to break the power of Chinese nobles. No more than a few centuries later, another emperor decreed that formal, written examinations be used to select officials into the Chinese empire’s bureaucratic cadre. This is referred to by historians as the Imperial Examinations system. The Imperial Exams were legendary for their difficulty [3]. The entry level exam had a passing rate of 10-20%. The highest cadre exam had a passing rate of 1-2% [4]. Not a few rebellions were started and officials murdered, as a result of the difficulty of the exams. Chinese classical literature seems to corroborate this. I recall when reading one of China’s greatest literary classics titled Outlaws of the Marsh (known in China as the Water Margin), a Robin Hood like story, which was set in the 12th century (coincidentally, that is roughly the same century that the most famous version of Robin Hood is set in) about a band of outlaws fighting corrupt officials, one character was described as having decided to become a bandit after failing the imperial exams [5]. The book also happened to mention a game that struck me as being very similar to football and on further investigation and to my utmost surprise, I discovered that it was indeed football (known as cuju in Chinese). So you see, they knew what they were doing when they made the movie, Shaolin Soccer.
The Chinese bureaucratic model would soon be emulated in nearby countries like Japan and Korea. As a result of the work of European missionaries and diplomats in Asia, the Chinese Imperial Examination system would be adopted by Germany, France (with suitable local modifications of course) and one of the world’s first megacorporation’s, the British East India Company (EIC) [6]. The British government would then borrow the model from the EIC. The US government in turn would borrow the model from Europe. African governments of course inherited it from their colonial masters.
It goes without saying without saying that bureaucracies have become a fixture of modern life. So much that one of 20th century’s greatest novelists, Franz Kafka, made a name for himself writing fiction almost exclusively about them and their penchant for causing alienation (I recommend The Trial. It’s very good). Such was his influence that the English language evolved the word, Kafkaesque from his name, which is used to describe nightmarishly complex administrative situations where in, the individual feels powerless to understand or to control what is happening. You know you are chilling with the big boys when your name becomes an adjective or verb like “google”. His influence doesn’t end there. In tech, the Big Data ingestion tool, Kafka is named in his honour.
We probably all have had a Kafkaesque experience at one time or the other. I think it behooves us to try to objectively understand why an institution so important causes so much anguish. There are multiple dimensions to it. One obvious one if you take the time to think about it is the large-scale complexity of the problems that bureaucracies are typically tasked with. From your point of view, it’s just a simple identity card or driver’s license but from the bureaucracy’s point of view, it is a gigantic coordination problem involving tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions individual parts. When looked at from that perspective, that the experience is going to be a nightmare for members of the public from time to time shouldn’t be too surprising.
Another dimension is a well-known problem in economics I discussed when treating privatization that is known as the principal-agency problem. There I had explained that the owners of a company and the managers who run the company on a day to day basis often have misaligned interests, such that it is often a struggle for owners to get managers to do what is in the best interests of the company and not just follow their selfish interests.
A similar dynamic exists between elected politicians and bureaucrats. Politicians are supposedly elected based on their electoral promises and visions for the country. However, it is the bureaucrat who is going to implement those promises and visions on a day to day basis. So a constant problem for the politician is how does she make sure that bureaucrat does what is supposed to be done in the best interests of the country and not follow her selfish interest. This is made more complex by the fact that the bureaucrat, having a lifetime of expertise in that area will very often know more than the politician that is supposed to supervise her.
The solutions politicians typically come up with to this problem is an extensive body of detailed rules trying to govern every aspect of bureaucratic behavior, such that monitoring becomes relatively easy for the politician and any deviation from the rules could be met with punitive measures. This goes a long way to explain the apparent insensitivity that members of the public often encounter when dealing with bureaucrats. This tends to happen because it is impossible for the politician to come up with a rule or procedure that covers every possible scenario. In such circumstances, bureaucrats are often hamstrung because not many would want to take the risk of using their initiative or judgement in an unclear situation, only to be penalized later for impropriety.
This discussion would be incomplete without discussing problems peculiar to developing countries like the effects of corruption, tribalism, nepotism, favouritism and every other “-ism” on bureaucracies. Good bureaucracies by design are meant to be impersonal organizations run on abstract, scientific principles. The implication of this is that, in order to have high functioning bureaucracies in a society, a rational, scientific culture needs to be pervasive in that society, so that bureaucratic recruits in general have the right mental models for performing their jobs at the highest levels. A scientific and rational mindset cannot be described as being pervasive in Africa, where a traditional mindset with a focus on family and tribe predominates.
This unfortunately causes a significant number of bureaucrats to see their organization as a fiefdom, rather than as a place to render public service. It also leads to a vicious politics where the object of the game is to control the source of economic rents to distribute to friends and family rather than an inclusive political setting where the object of the game is to design institutions that enable largely homegrown science and technology to deliver the high productivity needed for inclusive economic development.
These are hard, seemingly intractable problems but it might be a source of encouragement to know that other climes that we associate with having a more enlightened political culture have had similar problems in their past. 19th century American politics was notorious for corruption though mostly at government levels lower than the federal government [7]. This was driven partly the large-scale migrations to America by many different ethnic groups from Europe and Asia [8], creating a culture of ethnic politics. This led a number of American cities, particularly New York, Chicago, Jersey City, St. Louis, and Kansas City (among many others) becoming synonymous with corruption, kickbacks, and bribery. Some political leaders were even nicknamed “Boss”, mafia-style and the entire phenomenon itself was nicknamed “machine politics”.
Solving problems of the kind discussed in the last paragraph, is by nature a slow, gradual process that cannot without major institutional reform. Institutional reform is necessary because such situations imply that a society’s rules have too many loopholes. Effective institutional reform requires active involvement of a significant part of the populace beyond voting in elections because coming up with rules that are fair to everyone requires the active participation of a large number of disparate groups in the reform process. That is how the west came to evolve fairer societies. In the relatively distant past, their societies were just as unfair as any one that can be found in the developing world but getting to where they are now would imply doing what they did, which means more of us would need to get out of our comfort zones and get involved.
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References
- Wikipedia article on Sumer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer
- Wikipedia article on Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy
- Wikipedia article on Imperial Exams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
- Ibid
- Shi Nai’an. Publication date uncertain. Outlaws of the Marsh
- Wikipedia article on Imperial Exams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
- Rubinstein, William D. et al. 2010. ‘Weber, Bureaucracy and Corruption’ Open Access Repository www.ssoar.info
- Ibid
