One of the oldest cases I know of large scale official discrimination
to even out differences in performance
Ming China. In 1370, the first Emperor of the Dynasty, Chu Yüan-chang, who expelled the Mongols in 1368, reinstituted the great
Civil Service Examinations,
which had been suspended by the Mongols. In 1371, 75% of the degrees
from the national examination had gone to candidates from the South of
China. This displeased the Emperor, who believed, with many
traditionalists, that Northerners were morally more worthy -- from the
area where Chinese civilization had begun. The examinations were thus
suspended until 1385, but then the geographical division of those who
passed did not change. At a special Palace examination in 1397, all of
the 52 candidates who passed were Southerners. Borrowing from the Josef
Stalin school of bureaucracy, the Emperor had two of the examiners
executed. In a subsequent retesting, all the successful candidates were
Northerners.
between populations that
otherwise do not seem very different comes from
By 1425 it was decided that places in the national examinations
would be reserved by region, with 35% for the North, 55% for the South,
and 10% for some places in the middle. This extraordinary provision was
imposed on a nation that to us may seem to be uniform in race,
language, and religion. But clearly there were cultural differences,
and these were not merely of an economic character. The Chinese Civil
Service Examinations did not test economic susccess or even mathematics
or engineering. It was all based on the literary culture of the
Classics of Confucianism.
In our own time when "Asians" are generally expected to do better on
IQ tests, and in mathematics and science, it is extraordinary to see
that Southern Chinese of the Ming Dynasty apparently enjoyed a marked
advantage in literary culture over the Northerners, to the point where
"affirmative action" or "reverse discrimination" was imposed by the
Government in favor of the Northerners. Of course, there was nothing
"reverse" about this. Chu Yüan-chang was probably as perplexed as
anyone why such a difference had emerged between North and South [cf.
Timothy Brook,
The Troubled Empire, Harvard, 2010, pp.36-37].
See the paragraph preceding the above to at
http://www.friesian.com/discrim.htm
