Yes, the PRC today is built on top of a tradition that first started over a 1000 years ago which was merit based and required an examination:
en.m.wikipedia.org
The Chinese imperial examination or keju (lit. "subject recommendation") was a civil-service examination system in Imperial China, aimed to select candidates for the state bureaucracy. ... The system became dominant during the Song dynasty (960–1279) and lasted until its abolition in the late Qing dynasty reforms in 1905.
Under the communists, China actually lost touch with this. In the 1980s and 1990s, China sent many officials for training in the traditional Confucian states of Japan, Korea and Singapore which are in many ways modern evolution of the old merit-based exam systems.
This was a monumental decision for two reasons:
1) Japan and the Four Tigers were the only countries from the non-white world that became developed and
2) they were part of the Sinosphere culturally so lessons learnt there was more applicable than those learnt in the West.
That is not to say Western methods were rejected but if you look at Chinese systems and policies in its rise they are far closer to Japan and especially Singapore than anything in the West. Japan and Singapore always had a state-led all-of-society approach to development.