Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present(Modern South Asia)

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.

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

About the Author :
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.

Review :
This remarkable series of essays examines the central issue of meritocracy from a broad yet complementary set of perspectives, from the historical to the contemporary and into the future. This novel and holistic approach allows for a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of this complex topic. I highly recommend this thought-provoking book as a must-read publication for both specialist and generalist readers. Making Meritocracy is a work of rigorous scholarship on a particularly topical and relevant subject. It examines the practice and theory of meritocracy in India and China, politically and philosophically, both in the past and at present. This collection of insightful essays by reputed scholars in the field comes when most societies face dilemmas in the making and definition of meritocracy, choices between merit and equity, and a certain populist backlash against expertise. This book deserves to be very widely read for our choices on this issue will deeply affect all of our futures. This superb collection of essays on the theory and practice of meritocracy in China and India is a fascinating contribution to comparative politics, and to ongoing debates about the meaning of merit. Ranging across historical and contemporary attempts to allocate social roles based on talent, skill, or virtue, this volume sheds new light on some of the most urgent social and political questions of our time. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in the meritocracy debates that are raging today.