Abstract:

From the perspective of social mobility and with the existing data， this paper takes the smallgroupbased traditional society and the large group of scholars who took the Chinese Imperial Examination System to investigate the breadth and depth of the real life covered by such examinations in MingCh’ing period. From there， the paper analyzes people’s loyalty to， trust in， and passion for this testing system in their real life world， as well as the dissolving of social pressure， to illustrate traditional society’s structural characteristic of having the officialdom at its center， surrounded by agriculture， industry， and commerce. The paper discusses further in two aspects the consequences of social mobility： a societal structure with officialdom in the center and a social value with official ranks in the center. These two centers incorporated each other to form the very core of traditional society’s integration. Finally， the paper proposes to shift the angel from the state politics to the social life. Such a shift will not only enable us to exhibit the functions of the Chinese Imperial Examination System in an indepth and comprehensive way， but also enable us to better understand traditional society’s way of integration.

Key words:

the Chinese Imperial Examination System, officialdom, social mobility, traditional society’s way of integration, center of society