Recapping the Academic Seminar “教育就是不間斷的考試：重訪清末廢科舉興學堂的制度史” held on 15 April 2026

Dr. CHU Shiuon from the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica was invited by the Department and the Leung Po Chuen Research Centre for Hong Kong History and Humanities to deliver an academic talk on 15 April 2026. 

In this talk, Dr. CHU revisited the historical interpretation of the abolition of China’s imperial examination system (keju) in 1905.  He challenged the functionalist narrative that frames the abolition as the inevitable displacement of new learning over an outdated system. Instead, he argued that the decision was neither a necessary outcome of a conflict between tradition and modernity nor the result of clash between Chinese and Western educational models. Rather, it merged from specific political circumstances and contingent historical developments. The persistence of examination-derived status credentials after the abolition, together with recurring calls for restoration of the keju, suggests that the “abolition” was far from complete.

Central to Dr. Chu’s argument was the concept of “institutional mobility.” Students in Qing academies habitually viewed enrolment as a means of achieving examination success, leaving once they had obtained their degrees and thereby rendering long-term educational investment unrealised. This pattern was not an inherent feature of the millennium-long examination tradition, but rather an eighteenth-century innovation. As essay competitions flourished, students and academic directors increasingly moved across institutions, steadily weakening the academy’s capacity to regulate and cultivate talent.

Dr. CHU further argued that reforms introduced by Zhang Zhidong and other late Qing reformers, such as residential requirements, daily logbooks, and restrictions on examination candidacy, were designed to address these indigenous institutional problems rather than being mere transplants from Western or Japanese educational models. The “fixed-schedule” school of the late Qing corresponded precisely to this evolving local tradition.  Dr. CHU concluded that the fundamental tension between the keju system and the modern school lay in the incompatibility between a single high-stakes examination and a standardized and continuous curriculum. In this sense, Foucault’s conception of the school as an “apparatus of uninterrupted examination” coincidentally captures the crux of this transformation.