Process, process, process. Prime Minister Keir Starmer attempted to dig himself out of a political hole over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the United States in part by pointing the finger at the British civil service. He did so by invoking the lodestar of civil servants: proper process. Commentators have been competing with one another to satirically inflate the number of times Starmer used the word in the course of a short address to Parliament, insisting on his own probity.

Lurking in the background was China, not because Xi Jinping is enjoying Sir Keir’s discomfiture – though he may be – but because, for all its elevated sense of history and institutional self-worth, the modern British civil service owes its origins, in part, to China.

By the 1850s, when the idea was being debated in Britain of tackling the scourge of decision-making based on vested interests by recruiting government officials via competitive examination, China had been on European minds for more than two centuries. At one point, it seemed that no palace or country house was complete without a Ming vase, some Chinese (or Chinese-style) wallpaper and furniture, and perhaps a pagoda out in the garden.

This Chinoiserie trend was linked to an amorphous sense among Europeans of China’s longevity and stability – in stark contrast to Europe’s seemingly incessant religious and colonial wars. How, curious Europeans wanted to know, had the Chinese managed that?

Cherry-picking from enthusiastic Jesuit missionary reports on Chinese history and culture, Voltaire concluded that China had been governed from ancient times along almost utopian lines: clever intellectuals – much like himself – ran the show, selected for their abilities via competitive examination and then working free from clerical meddling. François Quesnay, a physician at the court of Louis XV and author of a highly-complimentary book about China in 1767, held up the Chinese examination system as something that Europe ought to emulate.

Prominent 19th-century British thinkers arrived, via various routes, at the same principle of placing government in the hands of talented people chosen through competitive examination. The likes of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill hoped in this way to tackle corruption and put an end to the domination of official roles by a handful of families. This, of course, was the high noon of the British Empire, and some Britons found themselves drawn to the Chinese civil service in particular as a means of governing large populations spread out across great expanses of territory.

One of the best-placed British commentators on China was Thomas Taylor Meadows, a consular official in Canton, who in 1847 published his Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China. He credited the people he called ‘mandarins’ with being responsible for China’s success as a civilisation. ‘Good government,’ he wrote, ‘consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only, to the rank and power conferred by official posts.’ He traced this ideal all the way back to Confucius, and his call for ‘men of virtue and talents’ at the top of government. ‘Promote the upright and put down the vicious’, wrote Confucius, ‘and the people will obey.’

Writing in the wake of the First Opium War, Meadows claimed that these basic principles had served China well, including in dealing with its recent defeat. He clearly found it both remarkable and laudable that in contrast to the monopolisation of European wealth and power by a small number of families, in China ‘the poorest scholar, if he have talent, sees no bounds to his rise but the throne itself’. One of the causes of China’s recent humiliation at the hands of European powers, thought Meadows, was that it had confined meritocratic selection to civil government rather than extending it to its military.

A few years after Meadows published his book, the thesis about China’s success hinging on its civil service was tested in Parliament. A report was published in 1854, by Stafford Northcote and Charles Trevelyan, which advocated for the creation of a permanent and politically-neutral civil service, to which appointments would be made on the basis of merit. This was an all-but revolutionary idea, and, as with all such ideas, the challenge for advocates was to convince people that it could be achieved – even better, that it had already been accomplished elsewhere.

Colonial India provided a testbed of sorts. Qualifying examinations at Haileybury had operated since 1806 and the Charter Act of 1853 had just mandated open competitive examinations for the Indian Civil Service, the first of which would be held in July 1855. But for parliamentarians discussing the Northcote-Trevelyan report, China loomed large as the one place in the world where the ideas proposed therein had been tried out across many centuries.

For Lord Monteagle, this was an argument against adopting such plans in Britain. ‘I do not’, he declared, ‘feel very certain that the present internal condition of the flowery empire is such as to justify us in placing an unlimited reliance on the triumphs of its internal administration. I doubt whether the ministerial mandarins have… increased the wealth, secured the prosperity of the empire, or advanced the intellectual progress and happiness of its people.’

One of the reasons for this, Monteagle went on – drawing on observers of China less enamoured with the country than Meadows – was that the examination system favoured those who understood well a short roster of venerated ancient writers. It seemed unlikely to furnish the state with people given to genius, invention or science.

Lord Granville disagreed about the meaning of the Chinese precedent. The country’s examination system for the civil service had, he claimed, encouraged aspiration and provided a ‘great stimulus to education’ among ordinary people. He noted that some participants in the Taiping Rebellion, which at this time had much of China in its grip, were animated by a suspicion that government had ‘tampered’ with the civil service examination system. The implication was of a system so deeply valued that its corruption could become a cause of the most serious discontent. Granville had heard from no less a person than the British consul at Canton that, in an attempt to avoid such corruption, examiners travelled in sealed palanquins – ‘locked up in a box’, as Granville put it.

For years, this thread in the civil service’s origin story was downplayed by historians. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, European views of China became progressively more dismissive, and it seemed incredible – even shameful – that a country associated, however unfairly, with stagnation and opium addiction could provide any kind of a model for Britain and her empire. Not until the 1940s did scholars start to take seriously the idea that European awareness of China’s civil service had played a role in the formation of civil services founded on the principle of meritocracy.

Starmer might wish that the Chinese example had been taken even more seriously than it was back in the 1850s as a model for the British civil service and its relationship with political power. The Chinese system was, after all, designed to cut out the involvement – even any perception of the involvement – of personal networks in determining key appointments. The Qing examiners in their sealed palanquins were, in their peculiar way, doing exactly what Northcote and Trevelyan wanted the British state to learn to do. A deeper infusion into British political culture of the process ethic – the ethic he invoked this week with such feeling, or at least at great length – might have saved the P from the murky mess in which he now finds himself.