Since the mid-fifteenth century, the enrolment of the Ming Imperial Academy had kept increasing and the Confucian students eligible for official appointments had far outnumbered the vacancies with the bureaucracy. Despite oppositions to the seniority system in making official appointments in Chinese history from the fourth century onwards as Qiu Jun adduces texts to show, he proposed that it was crucial for the Ming emperor to adopt such a system for the fairness of selection on the grounds that the problem of too many candidates for too few offices needed to be resolved and that historical circumstances required changes in institutions rather than a strict adherence to received historical wisdom.