You guys are focusing mainly on practicalities and missing the key fundamental difference between China and the west when it comes to meritocracy, which is the attitude of the people towards it.
China is not unique in world civilisation in that the core fundamentals defining features of civilisation survives the fall of past regimes and is enthusiastically embraced and continued by the new. What truly sets China apart is how intolerant its people are to bad rulers. In no other civilisation has the people overthrown their rulers as frequently and consistently as the Chinese when those rulers start loosing their way and become incompetent.
France and Russia are the only European examples where a revolution has actually uprooted the aristocracy ruling class, and they have only done it once, and relatively recently.
That is a very idealized and romanticized view of the Mandate of Heaven that does not hold up to actual history. There has only been a single dynasty that was overthrown from a popular rebellion. Every other dynasty has been overthrown due to conflicts between the elites / noble families / military commanders. Qin: overthrown by nobles of conquered states, primarily from Chu. Han: overthrown by military coup followed by civil war between noble families / military commanders. Jin: usurpation by a nobleman. Sui: revolt by the military / noble families. Tang: revolt by military governors. Song: foreign conquest. Yuan: only dynasty to be toppled by peasant rebellion, but only after dynasty was weakened by revolt by Mongol nobles / princes. Ming: nobles sided with Manchus.
While only France and Russia had complete revolutions that destroyed their nobilities, countless European monarchs have been beheaded by their nobles over the course the history. Dynastic overthrow of the ruling family was not unique to China.
In all other civilisations the destruction of the aristocracy nobility also effectively destroyed the civilisation because it was the nobility who ran the machinery of governance, kept the history and records. And without them, there was no continuity of the civilisation, and things got worse extremely quickly after a fall and it took a long long time for civilisation to recover, so much so that what comes after is massively different from what was before.
This is why there is such a massively deep rooted cultural nostalgia about paradise lost and aversion to change in western peoples. They instinctively pine for lost past glory days of the post world war dynamism of the greatest generation; the world conquering dominance of the colonial era; the glory of Roman; the enlightenment of Greece; all the way back to the garden of Eden.
Their entire racial genetic memory and cultural teaching towards governance basically boils down to - don’t rock the boat with change or we risk another collapse and fall further from gods grace. This is why western democracy is held so sacrosanct, with zero tolerance shown to any idea or notion that it’s not the best form of governance that mankind can ever achieve and should not be changed in any way, shape or form. So in the west, while of course meritocracy exists, but it was largely limited to the plebeian masses as a means of rising (a little) above the station of their birth. But the nobility were able to largely keep themselves above such petty concerns and kept an iron grip on the paths into government and power. The self made ‘new money’ titans of industry built western economic and military power, but it was the ‘old
Money’ aristocracy that wielded that power.
Change of dynasty never resulted in destruction of the nobility. A significant proportion of the noble families simply continued to be influential across dynasties. And most dynasties following the Tang were very resistant to change. The dominant ideology of all Chinese dynasties after the Tang was Song-Ming Lixue, which is focused entirely on preserving the traditional order and social hierarchy. Only following the fall of the Qing dynasty and the Communist Revolution was the power and wealth of the nobility completely destroyed in China.
What really sets China apart from the West was that for most of the last two thousand years, China had no external threats. The Han dynasty conquered all cultivatable lands known to the Chinese at the time, assimilating or displacing all other peoples. When a Chinese dynasty collapses into civil war, the internal struggle will simply continue until one side emerges on top. When Rome fell into internal strife and disorder, the Germanic people swept in and established their own states. In China, there was no foreign group of peoples numerous or strong enough to capitalize on the chaos and sweep in to establish their own civilization. Chinese civilization was continuous because there was nobody else around strong enough to establish their own civilization.