Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present

Description

How do societies identify and promote merit? Enabling all people to fulfill their potential, and ensuring the selection of competent and capable leaders are central challenges for any society. These are not new concerns. Scholars, educators, and political and economic elites in China and India have been pondering them for centuries and continue to do so today, with enormously high stakes.

In Making Meritocracy, Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi have gathered over a dozen experts from a range of intellectual perspectives--political science, history, philosophy, anthropology, economics, and applied mathematics--to discuss how the two most populous societies in the world have addressed the issue of building meritocracy historically, philosophically, and in practice. They focus on how contemporary policy makers, educators, and private-sector practitioners seek to promote it today. Importantly, they also discuss Singapore, which is home to large Chinese and Indian populations and the most successful meritocracy in recent times. Both China and India look to it for lessons. Though the past, present, and future of meritocracy building in China and India have distinctive local inflections, their attempts to enhance their power, influence, and social well-being by prioritizing merit-based advancement offers rich lessons both for one another and for the rest of the world--including rich countries like the United States, which are currently witnessing broad-based attacks on the very idea of meritocracy.

About the editors:

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School and the first director of Harvard's Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute.

Michael Szonyi is Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History and Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction
Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi

Philosophical

1. Political Theologies of Justice: Meritocratic Values from a Global Perspective
Michael Puett

2. Merit in the Mirror of Democracy: Caste and Affirmative Action in India
Ashutosh Varshney

3. Political Meritocracy in China: The Ideal versus the Reality
Daniel A. Bell

Historical

4. Locating Meritocracy in Early Modern Asia: Qing China and Mughal India
Sudev Sheth and Lawrence LC Zhang

5. Meritocratic Empires? South Asia c.1600-1947
Sumit Guha

6. Meritocracy and the Making of the Chinese Academe Redux, 1912-1952
James Lee, Bamboo Yunzhu Ren, and Chen Liang (Nanjing University)

Contemporary

7. The Origins and Effects of Affirmative Action Policies in India
Ashwini Deshpande

8. Merit and Caste at Elite Institutions: The Case of the IIT
Ajantha Subramanian

9. The National College Entrance Examination and the Myth of Meritocracy in Post-Mao China
Zachary M. Howlett

Prospective

10. The Singaporean Meritocracy: Theory, Practice and Policy Implications
Vincent Chua, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung

11. The Merits and Limits of China's Modern Universities
William C. Kirby

12. Reimagining Merit in India: Cognition and Affirmative Action
D Shyam Babu, Devesh Kapur, and Chandra Bhan Prasad

13. Meritocracy Enabled by Technology, Grounded in Science
Varun Aggarwal

Afterword
Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi