AHC: A "Confucian" European state

I've lowered(and changed) the bars on what "Confucian" means to the following:
  • The entire bureaucracy(government officials, police, fireman, etc) all wears uniforms
  • The suffrage policy is based around passing the civil examination(or a non-financial assessment)
  • The lower class is prohibited from wearing certain clothes/doing certain things that the "uppers" may enjoy.
They do not need to be influenced by China, and this policy should be enforced for more than a century.
POD is in the Renaissance Era and this policy must be implemented before 1900.
Have fun.
 
I think you could probably get the Byzzies to that point.

Alternatively, "centralize" the HRE. The Empire had, in theory, a sophisticated bureaucracy, seeing as it was an improvised realm invented by lawyers. If you can mangle it together into a unified state, then I could see the proper Imperial bureaucracy having unfiorms, having rights based around examinations, and with restrictions on peasants and Jews.
 
Actually for my money, with that as a set of conditions you're not that far off the Platonic Republic.

Which can be accused of being an attempt to recreate the advantages of Sparta on a sounder philosophical basis and without the drawback of helot revolts, which I could see appealing to a Renaissance prince whose city state had lost too many battles and who had personally been hit on the head a little too often.

Not really Confucian, though, is it?

Which, well, actually reading the Analects and comparing them to the result is like asking how many Guards Tank Armies the Labour party had. I find political Confucianism to be such a pale shadow of Master Qiu's aggressive, urgent demands to forge a better world as to be almost a parody.

"All I am sure of is that if this is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist."- Karl Marx, 1879 or thereabouts. Hm?
 
I've lowered(and changed) the bars on what "Confucian" means to the following:
  • The entire bureaucracy(government officials, police, fireman, etc) all wears uniforms
  • The suffrage policy is based around passing the civil examination(or a non-financial assessment)
  • The lower class is prohibited from wearing certain clothes/doing certain things that the "uppers" may enjoy.
They do not need to be influenced by China, and this policy should be enforced for more than a century.
POD is in the Renaissance Era and this policy must be implemented before 1900.
Have fun.

The third one happened IOTL. The first seems doable without too much trouble. (Heck, if your definition of "uniforms" is expansive enough to include servants wearing their lord's liveries, it happened IOTL too.)

The second should be possible as well. I think the most likely time for it to happen would be during the Renaissance/Early Modern periods, as a way for rulers to reduce their dependence on hereditary aristocrats. (Which is pretty much why it was introduced in OTL China, actually.)

Or alternatively, maybe a monarch trying to stave off calls for reform could do something similar. The educated citizens would all be able to get the vote, which should theoretically stop them supporting any revolutionary upheavals, whilst the exam could still act as a filter to keep undesirable voters (read: the poor) from the franchise.
 
I've lowered(and changed) the bars on what "Confucian" means to the following:
  • The entire bureaucracy(government officials, police, fireman, etc) all wears uniforms
Prussia.


  • The suffrage policy is based around passing the civil examination(or a non-financial assessment)
Improved Prussia.


  • The lower class is prohibited from wearing certain clothes/doing certain things that the "uppers" may enjoy.
Hardcore Prussia.
 
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Prussia.


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Improved Prussia.


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Hardcore Prussia.

Especially if you do not start with secularized Polish-vassal Prussia, but with Teutonic Order Prussia.
A different kind of Reformation that creates a secular state but keeps the structure of the Order as ruling body and transforms the lower ranks into a bureaucracy and the upper ranks in to a ~meritocratic leadership.
 
Macauley thought a surviving Roman Empire would (most likely) have ended up like the Chinese, especially if it never Christianised.
 
Especially if you do not start with secularized Polish-vassal Prussia, but with Teutonic Order Prussia.
A different kind of Reformation that creates a secular state but keeps the structure of the Order as ruling body and transforms the lower ranks into a bureaucracy and the upper ranks in to a ~meritocratic leadership.

Can a Teutonic Prussia maintain its presence in the Baltic states? Having such a presence there other than Germany TTL would be an interesting scenario.
 
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