The Building of a Pre-eminent Social Status

UNTIL recent times in China, the scholar–gentry topped the social scale and possessed unchallenged status symbols and power in officialdom, scholarship and landownership. It was a combination of these three assets that enabled them to remain a self-perpetuating ruling class for over a thousand years after the institutionalization of the imperial civil service examinations in the T’ang dynasty (618–907). By contrast, colonial regimes in South-East Asia restricted and impeded Chinese political mobility and prevented the scholar–gentry from ever forming a ruling élite in a colonial setting…