Keju had deep penetration both cross-sectionally in society and across time. It was all encompassing, laying claim to enormous investments in time and effort by a significant proportion of the Chinese population. It was an incubator of values, norms, and ideas, and so influenced the ideology and epistemology that lay at the foundation of Chinese minds.
Directly, the state monopolized the very best human capital; indirectly, the state deprived society access to talent and preempted organized religion, commerce, and intelligentsia.
At its height, during the Yan Dynasty in the 13-14th century, China occupied 34m square kilometers, double Russia at 17m square km today
The Roman Empire never invented a scaling tool as powerful as China’s civil service exam and the fierce, resilient heterogeneities derailed all the unifying campaigns. As a collection of sovereign states, Europe today is a legacy of that scaling failure.
A polity with scope has more than. One political party, more than one ideology and more than one center of power.
The referendum movements in Scotland and Quebec suggest that the UK and Canada may operate at the edge of an invisible optimal zone between scale and scope. The preferences, cultures, and historical legacies may be too diverse to be accommodated under a single political framework.
Autócrats proactively homogenize their countries rather than taking heterogeneity as given.
Jeju decimated society by denying it a vital nutrient — human capital
Something of a profound and material nature occured after the Sui: China figured out a way to govern on a large scale durably and in a unified fashion. The Sui invented a system that enabled imperial China to successfully scale both spatially and temporally
Scaling requires moving a thousand people forward a foot at a time, rather than moving one person forward by a thousand feet.
No other ideology comes remotely close to Confucianism in terms of textual richness and fecundity and thus in its suitability for a standardized test.
Tô scale any human system requires scaling it on universal human capabilities and potentials
Each Chinese civil servant was required to undergo training for about 133 hours a year
China invented meritocracy 1300 years ago. The West stole it 1,300 years ago, but now China is getting it back.
An M-form corporation consists of several scaled-down U-form corporations, with each division heading the specialized functions like manufacturing, finance, or sales.
The advantage of M-form economies are:
Market reforms unfolded in China not because Chinese leaders bought into the idea of market economy, but because they had lost the capacity to execute central planning.
Rotation deters network ties that might compete with the CCP’s formal command structure
High literacy in Imperial China was not deployed to deliver growth. It was used to augment autocracy and shackle society.
Chinese society is not just weak; it is congenitally weak. It barely exists as even a notionally seperate and parallel identity to the state. There is no room for society in a private government like China’s.
Fredrick William, the father of Fredrick the Great, was a big fan of China, had many China experts as part of his staff. When his professionalization of the Prussian state created demand for new personnel recruitment, he held the first written civil service exam in Europe in 1693.
His advisors continued to be fans of the Keju
In this respect, Prussia emulated China, Britain emulated Prussia, and the US emulated Britain.
Jeju also kept the Chinese population busy.
The skills required to pass the Keju exams were nearly useless in everyday life.
The preemption of individual agency lies behind the shackled society
The personal agency effect of Protestantism manifested itself in a movement away from the Latin language and an embrace of the familiar vernaculars of the masses
Deng’s rise to power itself was sufficient to signal the intention to allow more capitalism in China.
Under crony capitalism, the power of the CCP was monetized on a global scale rather than being limited to the pool of domestic savings.
The Chinese state is strong because it successfully preempts collective action by Chinese society. The CCP system also has an elaborate protocol to limit collective action by its elites.
Deng’s Southern Tour which rescued economic reforms and launched China on a path to globalization took place when his only official position was honorary chairman of the Chinese Bridge Association (card game)
In China, politics controls wealth, not the other way around
Imagine if, after signing the Japanese surrender, Douglas MacArthur proceeded to implement the Japanese royal system in the United States. An equivalent of this happened several times in Chinese history.
The Yuan Dynasty, ruled by Mongols, replicated the political and administrative structures of the previous dynasties
Confucianism is an autocrat’s ideology, both in substance and as a ruling instrument
The reverse takeovers, instrumented by Keju, ensured the transmission and an uninterrupted lineage of autocratic values and ideas.
Hong Xiuquan took Keji four times, first at age 15. He then turned to Christianity and came to believe that God wanted him to launch the Taiping Rebellion.
The lack of system thinking insulates the CCP in another way—only the local leaders, whom citizens have done direct interactions with, get the blame. Chinese citizens are uniformly negative about local officials, but hold the central government in high regard, the opposite of democracy.
A major vulnerability of the Chinese system is leadership succession.
The Chinese imperial state rewarded government service, and it did so at scale. One way it did this was to keep inventors on the government payroll.
Of the 3,988 notable scientific achievements between 988 and 1988, only 45 of them originated in China, and of these, 38 occured between 988 and 1600.
Not one of tens of thousands of sailors who went on the greatest Chinese navigational feat published a travelogue. The Chinese during the Ming dynasty no longer entertained any curiosity about the outside world, and there was very little that could have ignited and nurtured this curiosity.
The unified, empire-sized dynasties are not nearly as incentive as the fractious kingdom-sized dynasties.
In 1960, there were 960k university students in China, in 1970 only 48k. In 191, 1.28m. In 2007, 19 million.
China outspends Singapore on R&D as a percentage of GDP.
In the 10 countries listed in a citation analysis, China comes dead last in average number of citations. Chinese knowledge production is overwhelming oriented towards quantity, not quality.
80% of Nature and Nature-related papers with Chinese authors are joint collaborations with international researchers. 43% of these papers are coauthored with scientists in USA.
Term limits lower exit costs by curbing the excesses of power struggles.
The very fact that Xi has been so eager to accumulate titles is proof that he does not perceive himself as a charismatic leader.
As of 2011, of 72 Chinese billionaires, 14 had been executed, 15 had been murdered, 17 had committed suicide, 7 died from accidents, and nineteen had died from diseases