New development: Wang Anshi's Wanyanshu as the origins of modern public management?

Abstract

A recent paper in this journal (Drechsler, 2013) traced the origins of modern public management to the Wanyanshu, a memorandum Wang Anshi submitted in 1058 to a Song Dynasty emperor in China. We raise doubts about the author's assessment and claims about that still remarkable document about government human resource management, in part by citing Chinese historians' ambivalence. Believing in the value of Sino-Western comparative research in public management, we push back the origins of Chinese statecraft by 2,000 years by suggesting further research into older and greater Chinese contributions to global public management.

Keywords:

• China
• civil service examination
• human resource management
• international comparative public management
• Wang Anshi
• Wanyanshu

Acknowledgments

We thank Professor Liang Kenyao for granting us an interview in July 2013 and for answering our questions in writing. The research assistance of Wenxing Xu, Jack Yuanzhen Lyu and Jason Mian Luo is appreciated.

Notes

* Following convention, Chinese names in this article begin with the family name followed by the given name, i.e. Wang is Wang Anshi's family name. The ‘Memorial in Ten Thousand Words’ is called here by its popular title of Wanyanshu, a term that consists of three characters Wan Yan Shu in Drechsler (2013).

* Woodside (2006, p. 47) characterized this as the link between official corruption and low salaries, and credited Wang Anshi as arguing this was a ‘first principle of politics’.

* In the historical context, the change from ‘public administration’ to ‘public management’ in the early 1980s is not significant enough to warrant the use of two terms. We use the term ‘public management’, and understand it as the present evolution of public administration.