Before the Spring and Autumn Period, officials were mainly produced through the system of "being a university student and being a great leader". During the Warring States period, the system of "clearing the stone with ten rewards" was gradually abolished, and the election of officials had undergone fundamental changes. Before the reunification of the Qin Dynasty, "to be an official, we must first open up territory and conquer the enemy", and defeating the enemy is its main way. After the reunification of Qin, most officials did not serve in the army. In the Han Dynasty, in order to meet the needs of autocratic and centralized feudal state rule, the imperial court established and developed a set of official selection system for selecting and appointing ruling talents on the basis of Qin Dynasty. This system includes inspection, emperor recruitment, removal of government and county, recommendation of ministers, examination, appointment of children, recruitment of funds and other ways, not limited to one way, but also can be used interchangeably. Later, the selection of officials in ancient China appeared in Wei and Jin Dynasties, and the imperial examination system originated in Sui and Tang Dynasties. These systems of selecting officials and employing people played a certain role in the development of politics, economy and culture at that time, but at the same time they also showed various disadvantages.
Inspection system
Chaju is also an election, and it is a system of selecting talents as officials from the bottom up. There are roughly four inspection standards in the Han Dynasty, which are called "selecting scholars from four subjects" in history, and Ying Shao's "Han Guan Yi" is quoted in Records of the Later Han Dynasty.
One said that virtue is noble and ambition is innocent; The second is to study and practice and get a doctorate in classics; Third, understanding Dafa is enough to doubt and answer questions according to the chapter. Fourth, he was said to be resolute and resourceful, not to be confused by things, observant and meticulous, and made a decision, so he was appointed as the third assistant, and everyone had a trip to filial piety.
The selection of four subjects began in the Western Han Dynasty and remained unchanged in the Eastern Han Dynasty. However, sometimes only one or two or all four of them are temporarily stipulated in the imperial edicts. Although the standard of Tea Classic is only four subjects, there are many specific subjects in Tea Classic, including filial piety, Cai Mao, virtue and founder, literature (usually referring to Confucian classics) and temporary special subjects such as Ming Jing, Fa Ming, entertainment, drama management, art of war, yin and yang disasters. These are all fame, and with fame, you can actually be awarded an official position. In fact, the above disciplines are divided into annual promotion and special promotion. Annual promotion is a regular system, and special promotion is temporarily stipulated by imperial edicts. Both are bottom-up talent selection systems. The selection of officials in the Han Dynasty took "villagers choosing officials" as the standard, which reflected the respect for the authority of rural public opinion in judging scholars' moral integrity. However, once public opinion evaluation is linked with the ups and downs of official career, it is easy to be controlled and used by some powerful and influential people or social groups. Cao Cao sized up the situation and put forward the principle of "meritocracy is promotion", which is not only the need of seeking talents in troubled times, but also the deliberate correction of "inaccurate selection" in Han Dynasty.
levy
Expropriation is a top-down official selection system, which mainly includes two ways: emperor recruitment and state and county recall. Emperor recruitment is to select some prestigious people with excellent academic performance, prepare consultants or appoint political affairs through characteristics and recruitment. The recruitment party has a long history. If Qin Xiaogong publicly orders the recruitment of talents, it is of a recruitment nature. When Sun Tong, the uncle of Qin Shihuang, took literature as the symbol and Wang Cizhong took Cang Xie's old prose as the symbol of official script, it also belonged to the nature of conscription. In the Han Dynasty, in the eleventh year of Gao (BC 196), he also inherited this method. Later, from the Western Emperor Wudi to the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xiang Yan became an example. For venerable old scholars, special treatment is given. For example, at the beginning of Liang Wudi's accession to the throne, that is, "making the emissary bundle silks and add jade, loading and wrapping the wheels with simplicity, and driving the chariot to meet them" can be said to be the first example of loading and loading the wheels to meet the wise men in the Han Dynasty. The emperor's conscription was the most honorable official career in the Han Dynasty, and conscripts came and went freely. Although the court can urge them, if they refuse, they cannot be forced. Moreover, the status after the levy was different from that of ordinary courtiers, and most of them were treated with courtesy.
Expulsion is a system in which senior officials appoint lower-level officials. In the Han Dynasty, there were two situations except for officials: one was that after the county trial, court officials or foreign ministers could recommend them for inspection and supplement, so the official positions of the three official houses were low, but they were easy to be prominent. One is to abolish states and counties, where officials are assisted. Because of their qualifications, contributions, or after probation, they can recommend or inspect their talents, or they can be promoted to court officials or local officials.
The government and counties have the right to choose their own officials, and the excluded officials are not appointed by the court. They can stay or stay as they please. Should not open, can not be forced to open; Otherwise it will be criticized by public opinion. In particular, the state and county summoning order was a relatively free way of being an official at that time. After it was removed, the officers should reuse it; Otherwise, honest people will resign. On the other hand, ministers and priests can be dismissed by themselves. In order to develop personal power, they compete to win over scholars. In order to be an official, scholars also have to rely on the power gate. This has developed into a combination of private interests. In the Western Han Dynasty, the exiled people were still state officials, but in the Eastern Han Dynasty, they actually became the private ownership of the chief officials. As a result, the centralization of the imperial court was divided and the local separatist forces developed. The separatist situation in the late Eastern Han Dynasty had a lot to do with the transfer of human rights to private hands.
Jiupinzhong Zheng Zhi
Under the impact of the warlord melee at the end of Han Dynasty, the village community organizations were destroyed, and the traditional practice of "village election" was unsustainable. In this case, Cao Wei in the Three Kingdoms period formulated and implemented the "Nine-grade Zheng Zhi System". Among the officials, prestigious people are elected as "officials" in various counties, who are responsible for visiting local scholars, rating them into nine grades according to their talents and prestige, and then recommending them to the official department according to the grades. According to Chiang Kai-shek's report, the official department awarded awards to officials according to their grades. At first, this system was dedicated to unifying the election of officials in the imperial court and the discussion in the countryside. This is the continuation of the tradition of selecting officials in Han Dynasty and the inheritance of Cao Cao's employment policy. However, at the turn of Wei and Jin Dynasties, officials of all sizes were monopolized by "gentry" in all counties. They are partial to the gentry when evaluating grades, and the division of nine grades has deviated from the principle of "regardless of family status" In the following 300 years, there was a situation that the gentry monopolized the political power, and the Nine Grades System was always a bureaucratic selection system to protect the hereditary political privileges of the gentry.