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This chapter focuses on the intellectuals' voluntary attachment to the ruler's service as their single most significant choice. It elucidates both the advantages of this choice and its price. Having opted for a political career, leading intellectuals had to accept their position as the emperor's servitors, which was at odds with their self-proclaimed moral superiority over the throne; and the resultant tension between their roles as the leaders and the led generated persistent frustration and manifold tragedies. Yet bitterness aside, the voluntary attachment of the intellectuals to the throne had also greatly empowered the educated elite as a whole. For two-odd millennia, members of this stratum navigated the empire through many storms and challenges, contributing decisively toward the preservation of the imperial political structure, and of its cultural foundations, against all odds.

This chapter proposes another institution—the Academy—that is meant to further restrain the power of parliamentarians. In Western constitutionalism, power is limited by means of rights. In Confucian constitutionalism, power is limited primarily by means of morality. The chapter explicitly invokes the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar Huang Zongxi's proposal for an Academy composed of scholar-officials who could question the emperor and appraise and adjudicate the rights and wrongs of his policies. It is careful to note that the Academy supervises, but does not run the state. Subordinate bodies exercise their own authority according to the principle of balance of powers and independence. The Academy does not interfere in these operations and hence its maintenance of religion and morality is different from that of a Taliban-style theocracy.

This chapter examines the role and significance of a unified script and Mandarin Chinese for the political and cultural formation of ancient China. From the Qin dynasty on, the bureaucracy was staffed by intellectual elites selected from their localities but sharing a unified script system and approximately similar pronunciation. The forms of writing and pronunciation, therefore, became a crucial part of China's “cultural constitution.” The chapter shows how the script and its two aspects, reading and speaking, were unified. It considers the Qin dynasty's unification of the script system, based on the judgment that the standardization of Chinese characters became the basis of China's bureaucratic governance. It also discusses the constitutional significance of a unified speech, how Mandarin Chinese was maintained and spread, and how a unified script integrated the scholar-officials in different geographical locations in a transgenerational cultural community.

This chapter examines the evolution and development of the selection system for scholar-officials in ancient China. It also considers how the institution of selection has adjusted in response to the politico-social-cultural conditions of different periods and how it embodies political rationalization. The chapter first explains why ancient China's politico-cultural elites differed in practice from the elite politicians of ancient city-states in the West or modern Western nation-states before discussing how the social consensus for historical China's meritocracy formed. It then explores the problem of creating ancient China's meritocracy, focusing specifically on how, in a large state, an elite can be selected in an institutional way that is fair, accurate, and effective. The chapter goes on to describe the recommendation and examination systems for scholar-officials and concludes with an analysis of the politics of meritocracy as well as the politics beyond meritocracy.

Zen first emerged in China as a renegade spiritual movement located in the southern area, far from the halls of power, which used shocking teaching methods and found itself positioned on the fringes of society. After a prolonged period in which all Buddhist and other foreign religions were suppressed, in the eleventh century Zen became a full-fledged mainstream religious institution integrated on diverse levels with the machinations of the imperial court. Provocative koan stories appealed to the free thinkers and spiritual aspirants among the class of scholar-officials, who craved the sense of independence from ordinary intellectual constraints that Zen dialogues eloquently evoked. However, another set of cases highlights the ways that anointed masters faced the new challenge of opening and operating their own temples, where their main tasks included maintaining discipline and order in the temple compound as well as selecting successors based on a strict set of monastic rules.