China's Imperial Bureaucracy: Its Direction and Control

B ECAUSE historic example helps give perspective to contemporary problems, current administrative theory might do well to examine the administrative system of Imperial China. That was a civil service of great longevity, existing with relatively fixed form and function for some one thousand years; and, equally important, it was an administrative system designed to meet problems of striking modernity. The Chinese civil service was structured to recruit men of undeniable talent into the bureaucracy and to retain these talented few for a lifetime of service within the bureaucratic ranks. It was also concerned with, and made provision for, insuring the loyalty of those within the administrative system, not only to the then-existing governmental structure, but to the ideals and ethics of the greater society as well. And finally, the imperial service was organized to insure a system of centralized direction and control while at the same time offering scope for discretion and policy-making throughout the administrative ranks.' All of these accomplishments, of course, are of concern to present-day administration; but of the three, perhaps most important is the last: the working out of an accommodation between bureaucratic policy-making and the existence of a centralized control over the administration. A search for this accommodation, in proper