diagnosis
The Keju is restricted to elite families because mastery of literary Chinese requires money, tutoring, leisure, and decades of preparation.
Topic brief
A Jiang Lens evidence brief for this topic, built from source tags, transcript matches, and linked source refs.
Literary Chinese
A transcript-matched topic anchored by excerpts such as "...knowledge of something called Wen Yan. Okay? Or classical Chinese. Classical literary Chinese. Okay? This is a very hard skill to learn. It will..."
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Topic Scope And Freshness
A transcript-matched topic anchored by excerpts such as "...knowledge of something called Wen Yan. Okay? Or classical Chinese. Classical literary Chinese. Okay? This is a very hard skill to learn. It will..."
Key Notes
diagnosis
China is unique in Jiang's telling because it made literacy harder over time, turning literary Chinese into a bureaucratic rent-seeking language.
Timestamped Evidence
Transcript
"...knowledge of something called Wen Yan. Okay? Or classical Chinese. Classical literary Chinese. Okay? This is a very hard skill to learn. It will..."
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"You don't have to work. Okay? So in other words, only the elite families of China can compete in the system. And that's the..."
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"you want to be admired, if you want to be respected in China, you do well in the Keju and you become an official...."
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"So let's look at an example of Egypt. Okay? Egypt. Egypt has been around for as long as China. And over centuries, they would..."
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"...very complex grammatical rules to the language. And created something called literary Chinese. Okay? Literary Chinese. But that's a nice... That's a euphemism. That's..."
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"All right? And this is what we call rent -seeking behavior. You create something that only you can use. And people have to pay..."
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"...over status, literacy, and culture through three mechanisms. The Kuju, Wenyan, literary Chinese, and Confucianism. Okay? And that stopped the development of... That stopped..."
Relevant Lectures And Readings
Reading
China had the technologies that made modernity possible, then built a political culture that made those technologies inert.
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