In an imperial government in which power had been balanced since the early empire between an emperor and his officials, the interests of the Ch'ing dynasty were never uniformly decided in favor of either the ruler or his officials. No essentially “Manchu state” ever materialized that merely served the whims of the emperor and his court without resistance from the bureaucracy and the Han Chinese literati officials who served in it. Given the asymmetrical overlap between imperial interests and literati values, the dynasty functioned in terms of a partnership between the ruler and his literati officials in the bureaucracy. This dynamic partnership made Chinese political culture, especially under non-Han emperors, vital and adaptive. Despite misgivings on both sides, Ch'ing rulers made the classical values and ideas of their Han elites the sacred doctrines of Ch'ing civil governance because, in part, that is what their elites themselves believed.

Imperially sanctioned doctrines did not represent a monolithic and unrelenting system of dynastic hegemony, and the consequences of the Ch'ing dynasty's educational regime are analytically distinct from its intended political function. For example, important intellectual trends were unrelated to the empirewide civil examinations. In the first, second, and fourth sections below, an institutional and social analysis of the transformation of literati roles from 1650 to 1800 is presented in light of the empowerment of classical literacy by way of the civil examinations. The third section describes the interactions between the examination marketplace and elite cultural practice.