(Translated by Sherwin Lu, including all quotations from classics except for those from The Book of Lord Shang (《商君书》), which are taken from its whole text translation by J. J. -L. Duyvendak)

II. The Social Merit System and the All-Society Mutual Supervision System

The social merit system and the all-society mutual supervision system are the two mainstays of classical Chinese political institution. The former, which originated in the Spring and Autumn Period and developed to the full in the Warring States Period, obliterated the demarcation line between aristocrats and commoners. Lowering the rank of an heir who failed to accomplish the same merits as his ancestor had would spur on people to work harder for the society. A government employment mechanism based on the unity of political dedication and professional competence was established – a long-lasting landmark in the history of human civilization.

The history of communications between the Western and Eastern cultures has been a strange combination of circumstances. Westerners’ first glimpse of China presented the image of a country that had already been much weakened by Confucianization and was as fragile as the blue and white porcelain vase.  Since Western countries established their civil service systems after China’s civil service examination system in the 19th century, they have been claiming theirs as “merit systems”. But by comparing it with China’s social merit system during her golden times, i.e., before Confucianism became the dominating ideology, we can see the weak side of Western political institution.

First of all, since the West’s was modeled after China’s later examination system, it has also inherited its defect, that is, judging the candidates’ professional capability by their crammed-up book knowledge, while the Chinese merit system checked whether the candidates had achieved any military or other social service merits, and what merits, to see if they qualify both politically and professionally at the same time. Whereas in the West, they separate the two aspects of the criterion into two criteria, political and professional, each for a separate group of people: the hierarchy of officials and the clerical staff. People in the former group are awarded their offices on the principle of the “spoils system” after their party wins an election and they have to leave if the party loses the next election. The clerical staff members are selected on the principle of “professional/clerical competence” and they can stay to serve any party. This dualistic piecing together of two systems violates the criterion set by modern political science, that of unity of political and professional adequacy in each individual government worker

Secondly, China’s merit system made flexible the status difference between nobles and commoners and put everybody on an equal footing (except for the one topmost head of the state, which was hereditary).  Whereas in modern West, the awarding of offices is based on the wealth of the candidates: only the rich can have access to political power. According to Western scholars’ findings, only 3% or 10% of the voters base their choices rationally on their own political belief or their own views respectively and all the rest are just manipulated by the mass media financed by big capital. Take the US for instance; in eight out of the ten presidential campaigns from the 1950s through the 1980s, the one who won the highest rate of newspaper endorsement became the final winner. The only two exceptions were the one in 1960, when Kennedy was elected because the serious economic crisis going on at that time put his rival Nixon at a disadvantage, and the one in 1976, when the Republican Party lost the battle for presidency because of the Watergate scandal. (http://www.chinaelections.org/PrintNews.asp?NewsID=106435)

 Finally, in spite of the facts that the US, for instance, has established some agencies such as the Office of Personnel Management, Merit Systems Protection Board, National Labor Relations Board, and Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service, to guarantee the smooth operation of the “nonpartisan“ civil service  “merit system” and that The United States Code, Title 5, Sec. 2301(b)(9) protects government employees against reprisal for revealing any violation of law that harms public interests, all these supervision mechanisms can only work between and within different governmental departments. There has never existed in the West an all-society supervision system as that established in ancient China to guarantee the integrity and efficiency of government officials. Western political scientists are now worried that the ever-expanding civil service body might cause the spreading of bureaucratism, a repetition of China’s nightmare brought about by the civil service examination system replacing the earlier social merit system.

Early missionaries from the West were puzzled to see the Chinese people living a happy life in their pagan society. They asked how an orderly way of life could be realized in this world without belief in God as the source and supervisor of a legal covenant.  The reply is in the fact that the Chinese had developed a political instrument that was superior to the Western inter- and intra-department supervision. It was the all-society mutual supervision system that involved everybody in the population.

The central idea underlying the all-society supervision system is that of joint legal liability. Unfortunately, this innovative idea was later cast away during the late Qing dynasty by Westernized intellectuals because they said this was an indication of the “backwardness” of the Chinese legal system. And, so, they amended the existing legal code in such a way as to establish for the first time in Chinese history the principle of full and sole responsibility for one’s own acts. Since then, the kins-shielding-kins principle pursued by Confucianists for thousands of years to serve the rule of man came to be fully realized, though those Westernized intellectuals thought highly of themselves as trying to establish the rule of law for the society. As a result, a new law was introduced but the rule of law has never taken root on the Chinese soil.

Fortunately, the Qin Law (《秦律》) and Han Law (《汉律》), after being ploughed under for over a thousand years, re-emerged as archaeological discoveries in the later half of the last century and vindicated themselves as no “cruel laws” at all but as embodying a highly-developed sense of rationality fit for the rule of law. And their texts have proved it wrong to allege that the principle of joint liability underlying them caused mass slaughter of innocent people.

China’s social supervision system originated as early as West Zhou dynasty in the form of local mutual-help arrangements among plebeians; the assumption of joint liability was only one of its many functions. Rites of Zhou •  Diguan Situ (Chap. 2) •  Senior Situ (周礼•地官司徒第二•大司徒) records: As instructed by the Senior Situ, every five households made up a BI (比) to have them vouch for each other; every five Bi made up a Lŭ (闾) to have them entrust each other; every four Lŭ made up a Zu (族) to have them aid one another with funerals; every five Zu made up a Dang (党) for mutual rescue at times of natural calamities; every five Dang made up a Zhou (州), for mutual relief when needed; every five Zhou made up a Xiang (乡) and all inhabitants were instructed to treat respectable people within the area with respect.

This joint liability system for mutual help and supervision was later inherited by Qin dynasty, but some later Confucianist critics of Qin, while heaping praises on the West Zhou system and also well aware of the fact that the Qin system was its continuation, still impudently denounced the Qin system as making people mean and ruthless. For example, Ma Duanlin (马端临) of Southern Soong dynasty acknowledged that “Qin’s practice of grouping people into fives and tens was the same as Zhou’s.” But he went on to play off part of the West Zhou system against part of the Qin system by saying that “Mutual help and support in case of sickness or other misfortunes was intended to teach people to be benevolent and amicable gentlemen. But according to Qin law, when somebody had illicit affairs, his/her neighbors were made to inform against him/her; when somebody committed a crime, his/her neighbors would also be punished if they failed to report it. This would turn them into ruthless and mean people.” (Wenxiantongkao٠Zhiyikao,《文献通考•职役考》). Actually, both the praising and the denouncing were dictated by the Confucianist tradition of vilifying the Qin rule of law while distorting and idealizing the Zhou system as the so-called “rule of virtue”. Their dogmatic sense of “political correctness” resembles that of some present-day scholars of China who accept without doubt everything from the West, even what obviously yields evil results, as “modern” and “advanced” while belittling everything that is originally Chinese.

What the Confucianists have alleged is sheer injustice to Qin! What Shang Yang did in his reform was to carry on the joint liability principle from before, refine the all-society mutual supervision system based on it, and extend its application from the commoners to government officials, thus realizing the principle of “no status difference in punishment for crimes” through “mutual supervision among all officials”.

In the management of socio-political activities, Qin procedurized record keeping and with its help brought about check-and-balance between common people, administrative officials and law officers. The intent was to help the people achieve self-rule, with the sovereign remaining largely symbolic and doing nothing against the way of Nature. The author of The Book of Lord Shang describes in detail the operative process of procedurized record keeping. Thanks to this process, China could do without legal attorneys for long and, together with the institution of “law officers”, reduced the cost of legal actions to near zero while achieving higher efficiency.

The Book of Lord Shang ۰The Fixing of Rights and Duties (§26) says: “Whenever government officials or people have questions about the meaning of the laws or mandates, to ask of the officers presiding over the law, the officers should, in each case, answer clearly according to the laws and mandates about which questions were asked, and they should, in each case, prepare a tablet of the length of 1 foot 6 inches, on which should be distinctly inscribed the year, month, day and hour, as well as the items of law about which questions were asked, for the information of the government officials or of the people. Should an officer who presided over the law fail to give the desired information and, because of the failure, those inquirers later committed crimes against the very law about which they had asked questions, then the officer should be punished according to the contents of that very law, that is, he should be punished according to the law about which the government officials or people have asked information. The officers, presiding over the law, should forthwith give the left half of the document to those who ask information about the law and they themselves should store carefully the wooden bindings with the right half of the document, keep them in a room and seal them with the seal of the chief of the office of laws and mandates. Later, on the death of the officer, affairs should be transacted according to these files.”

The Shang Yang school of thought completed the theoretical work on the joint liability principle and on the all-society mutual supervision system. The author of The Book of Lord Shang points out: Inter- and intra-departmental supervision [such as practiced by the Western countries today] cannot guarantee the effectiveness of supervision, because it cannot prevent the staff in those departments exercising supervision from perverting the law from selfish motives. So, this kind of supervision is still in its lowest form. The Book says: “…nowadays, reliance is placed on a multitude of offices and a host of civil servants, and in the official bureaus assistants and controllers are appointed. Now, the idea of appointing these assistants and controllers is indeed to prevent men from making profit, but these assistants and controllers themselves also desire to make profit. How then can they prevent others from doing so! Therefore, if one relies on assistants and controllers for one’s administration, then will it be an administration that can barely maintain itself. It is not thus, if one understands “system”; one separates their power (shih) and puts checks on their conduct. Therefore is it said: If the conditions of power (shih) are such that it is difficult to conceal anything, then even a man like Chih [盗跖] does no wrong.” (The Book of Lord Shang ٠ Interdicts and Encouragements (§24).)

The replacing of joint liability and all-society supervision, which was characteristic of classical Chinese legal system, by the Western principle of full and sole responsibility for one’s own acts plus the Confucianist one of kins-shielding-kins has had disastrous consequences not only in socio-political life but in the economical, especially financial, realm as well. For thousands of years, credit loans had been the major form of money-lending in China, but the introduction from the West of collateral loans by banks almost destroyed the financial system in China’s rural areas, because the peasants cannot use a goat, for instance, as collateral to get a loan. Even in big cities, small and medium-sized businesses can hardly break through the credit bottleneck and raise sufficient capital as they need. Only recently has the joint liability idea come back to be applied to small loans in the countryside and to capital-raising for small and medium-sized businesses in cities – yet still in its “trial” phase. Such is the current mentality of the nation that it seems hardly possible ever to shake off the spiritual fetters imposed by a blind worship of everything from the West. When a nation has lost its soul, there seem no other alternatives but to follow others in every step.

Three thousand years ago, the early Zhou credit system based on joint liability worked like this: when people needed a loan, grass-root officials will go with the borrower to the lending institution as the guarantor. According to Rites of Zhou •  Diguan Situ (Chap. 2) •  Quanfu (《周礼•地官司徒第二•泉府》), a loan used for worshipping service should be paid back within ten days;  that for a funeral within three months. Whoever needs a loan in money or in kind should go through the procedure together with the official in charge of him and pay an interest at the state-assigned rate.

 According to Anecdotes of Zhou Dynasty, the typically Chinese credit system was established as early as the time of King Wen of Zhou. In its fourth chapter King Wen’s Basic Principles (《逸周书•文酌解第四》) it says that one of King Wen’s basic policies is for the government to hold people together by lending money or things when needed. Historical record shows, for instance, that in the year 1123 BC, when there was a serious famine, the government made extensive loans to people with local officials as guarantors.

While not objecting to learning from Western banking institutions, the author of this essay does not agree, either, to dump everything belonging to the Chinese tradition. Though native traditional banking houses in Beijing went broke after being ransacked by the Eight Power Allied Force from the West, those in Shanghai, as a matter of fact, did not decline but continued to prosper even after modern Western banking system was introduced to China. Their closedown after the 1949 revolution was a political rather than an economic issue.

Now in the 21st century, the peasants who constitute 60% of China’s population cannot go without credit loans. The small and medium-sized businesses that make up the greater majority of all national businesses cannot go without credit loans. It is said that the Chinese are born not trust-worthy. This is the biggest lie ever heard of in world history. The credit loan system has been functioning as the major lending mechanism for three thousand years. This should be sufficient evidence showing that the Chinese are among the most trust-worthy people in the world. It is because they are born and brought up in a culture advocating joint responsibility, not “Everyone looks after himself and the devil takes the hindmost”!