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.

AcknowledgementsIntroductionTarun Khanna and Michael SzonyiPhilosophical1. Political Theologies of Justice: Meritocratic Values from a Global PerspectiveMichael Puett2. Merit in the Mirror of Democracy: Caste and Affirmative Action in IndiaAshutosh Varshney3. Political Meritocracy in China: The Ideal versus the RealityDaniel A. BellHistorical4. Locating Meritocracy in Early Modern Asia: Qing China and Mughal IndiaSudev Sheth and Lawrence LC Zhang5. Meritocratic Empires? South Asia c.1600-1947Sumit Guha6. Meritocracy and the Making of the Chinese Academe Redux, 1912-1952James Lee, Bamboo Yunzhu Ren, and Chen Liang (Nanjing University)Contemporary7. The Origins and Effects of Affirmative Action Policies in IndiaAshwini Deshpande8. Merit and Caste at Elite Institutions: The Case of the IITAjantha Subramanian9. The National College Entrance Examination and the Myth of Meritocracy in Post-Mao ChinaZachary M. HowlettProspective10. The Singaporean Meritocracy: Theory, Practice and Policy ImplicationsVincent Chua, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung11. The Merits and Limits of China's Modern UniversitiesWilliam C. Kirby12. Reimagining Merit in India: Cognition and Affirmative ActionD Shyam Babu, Devesh Kapur, and Chandra Bhan Prasad13. Meritocracy Enabled by Technology, Grounded in ScienceVarun AggarwalAfterwordTarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi