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Notes -
The big problem with this is that it doesn't scale. It's fine to educate a small elite this way, but you can't teach the masses like this. (Though you could keep doing it for your small elite and educate the masses in a more assembly-line-like manner, which kind of is what ended up happening anyway.)
During the course of the 19th century, the British Empire quite consciously copied elements of the Chinese imperial examination system in order to find talent and staff their civil service.
It's not even necessarily about meritocracy, though it does help. If you need a large civil service to run a somewhat centralized empire, there aren't enough nobles, you will need to recruit commoners and you will need to be able to figure out which commoners to recruit. You will also need to educate said commoners. Something like the Chinese system is the natural result. The British just didn't have or need a large civil service before.
So this:
is simply a necessity for a large, centralized society, which China had and European countries did not really start developing until the rise of absolutism, at which point they ran into the same problems China had had and solved them similarly.
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