China Expat is a cultural and literary forum for expatriates interested in China and has been published by Asia Briefing Ltd since 2001. The sites resident China culture writers have included such expatriate luminaries as 
Harvard, the Hanlin Academy of the West
Much is made of guanxi, influence-peddling, as an integral facet of success in China. In fact, the maintenance of power through personalized networks of influence is a universal phenomenon. What bears consideration is that in China, these networks were accessible through moral and intellectual merit as early as the eighth century. This was the age of the storied Charlemagne, who could not even sign his name to a treaty, should he have cared to sign one. Meanwhile, in Tang Dynasty China, civil-service tests were in place kingdom-wide, to ensure that only those steeped in classical Confucian traditions could hold official power, short of the royal family, of course.
Of all the centers of learning set up to produce the most successful exam-takers and capable administrators, none rivaled Beijing’s Hanlin Academy. Because a civil post promised more prestige and remuneration than one in the army, and far more than one in commerce, Hanlin’s early success in turning out top scholars soon drew China’s best and brightest. This academic prowess inevitably translated into political guanxi of the most potent caliber.
By the early tenth century, China’s rulers were already given to selecting top-scorers on the test as their most trusted personal advisors, positions of unimaginable guanxi, especially when considering that such a one did not have to be born of the aristocracy. Moreover, these Northern Song emperors held moral attainment as important as intellectual accomplishment in selecting their consigliares. The Hanlin Academy had already cemented its reputation as the institution that could “manufacture” such men, and had evolved an Old Boy Network to rival those of Cambridge and Harvard. Unlike its analogues, though, this network’s foundations were built not with commercial plunder or noblesse oblige, but rather Confucian virtue.
Predictably, the Yuan Dynasty, China’s age of Mongol rulers, saw a decline in Hanlin influence. To Kublai Khan and his ilk, shooting arrows at things while riding a horse was the only true occupation of a ruler; fancy book-learning was for the vanquished. But the Ming Restoration was also the Hanlin restoration, and the academy surpassed even its Song brilliance to become a fully-fledged government institution, the only pool from which those scheming palace eunuchs were selected, as well as the Grand Secretariat (not the horse – a high official).
Great power inevitably brings its vicissitudes, and by the Qing Dynasty the Hanlin network found itself being marginalized by court intrigue. Troubled relationships between the royal court and the imperial oppressors only exacerbated the troubles. But the death-stroke of China’s seat of learning was self-inflicted. The Boxers burned the Hanlin compound, strategic arson, since the besieged foreign legation abutted it.
The buildings might have been restored, but certainly not its library, an academic Ark of the Covenant containing, among other priceless treasures, an eleven-thousand volume encyclopedia of China compiled by ten thousand of her best scholars from 1403-1407. Political upheaval precluded any resurrection of the academy’s fortunes, and today the only place the name is being carried on is in Bulgaria. In any event, Hanlin Academy serves as an eternal example that in China, guanxi need not necessarily be equated with nepotism.
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