@samuelszuchan: China's Communist Party was not led by the poor. It was led by people promised something by their education who couldn't get it. For the better part of 1,300 years, China ran the imperial examination system, the keju. A clever boy from a small landowning family could study the Confucian classics, pass staged exams, and become a magistrate. Every ambitious family oriented around it. Every village schoolhouse trained for it. In 1905, the Qing abolished it. New modern schools were promised as replacements. Most were never built. The Qing fell six years later. The republic that replaced it had warlords running provinces and couldn't pay salaries. So now you had a massive supply of credentialed young men and no orderly route for them to redeem their credentials for status. Economists Ying Bai and Ruixue Jia published a paper in Econometrica in 2016 analyzing 262 prefectures across China. The result was clean. Prefectures with higher per-capita exam quotas before 1905 produced both more revolutionary recruits and more uprisings during the 1911 revolution that ended the dynasty. The complexity scientist Peter Turchin calls this elite overproduction: a society producing more elite aspirants than it has elite slots. The blocked aspirants don't give up on being elite. They mobilize the masses against the existing order. The masses provide the foot soldiers. The blocked elites provide the strategy, the ideology, and the cadre structure.

Sam Szuchan

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Thursday 25 June 2026 14:00:00 GMT