Symbol and Reflection of the Reconstituting State

The standard works on the Nanjing decade (1927-1937) have typically dismissed the Examination Yuan as an empty, unimportant organization, whose efforts did little to change the regime's otherwise weak, corrupt and ineffective state bureaucracy during its tenure on the mainland of China (Ch'ien, 1950: 233-246; Eastman, 1974, 1991; Tien, 1972). In contrast to this earlier scholarship, which was engaged in assessing the performance of the entire Nationalist government in the light of its eventual defeat, this article takes a different approach: evaluating the Examination Yuan as a state organization on its own terms. In so doing, it confines its analysis to the 1930s and early 1940s, a period well before the Communist victory of 1949 was widely anticipated. In the 1930s, the Examination Yuan was both a symbol and a reflection of a regime whose goals were simultaneously restorationist and revolutionary. During these years, the Guomindang not only worked to reconstitute the state after decades of central weakness and political fragmentation, it also attempted to drastically enhance the national bureaucracy's institutional and projective capacity for rapid