You could fairly say that China’s pre-Opium Wars obsession with testing and meritocracy based on said testing is what brought them into all that mess, I’m pretty sure that the Portuguese that had gotten all the way from their small country all the way to Southern China using some stingy boats were not clerks nor great (potential) test-takers, and yet it was those Portuguese seafarers that were to change the fate of most of Asia forever, not the test-taking Chinese.

Testing and meritocracy of what, though?

Don’t forget that China chose Confucianism to put a halt to the perpetual, European style wars.

Stagnation was by design, and caught up with them after 2000 years.