Cameron D. Campbell 康文林
@camerondcampbell.blog
Stratification, inequality, population, China, history
https://camerondcampbell.blog
ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6277-1941
Photos https://CamerondCampbell.smugmug.com
https://www.instagram.com/cameron_d_campbell/
Political science
31%
Economics
30%
I only heard about these yesterday for the first time when we were walking by the Adidas store in the Breeze complex in Taipei and our son wanted to check to see whether they had any. They were sold out.
My first thought when I saw it was, Marty Feldman.
There has been so much great work in the last few decades that has yielded a much more refined view of the keju, including its role and purpose, and its operation, but so far it hasn't had much influence except among historians, and lay discussions still emphasize more simplistic accounts. 2/2
Congratulations! As I alluded to in a response somewhere in the thread, increasingly I think it would be valuable for historians of the Ming and Qing to a review paper summarizing the consensus on the keju system, aimed at a lay audience. 1/2
Yep. Standardized exams certainly have their uses, and keju was probably better than any process for selecting officials in Europe before the 19th century, but it also had its limits.
What is it about tenure at Harvard Law that absolutely rots the brains of tenured faculty? Dershowitz... Ramseyer... Vermuele...
I'm holding out for the Cartier Badtz-Maru watch
Passenger aircraft
I remember hearing that in his later years Qian Xuesen became interested in 特意功能 and that because of his influence an institute was created to study them. Not sure if that is actually true or not, since I heard this second- or third-hand.
It's actually a serious issue because many contemporary advocates of standardized exams in places outside China, including the US, point to the keju as an inspiration, and it's very hard to get them to appreciate that while it had its uses, their understanding of its role and operation is wrong...
I feel like historians (or people like myself who straddle history and social science) need to do more to counter the triumphalist narratives about keju. While we all know about Elman and Hymes and Zhang and others, somehow little of what we have learned is influencing popular understanding of keju.
Yes on all counts. I think most of what I was saying would not be news to historians, but rather to laypersons who still have a caricatured notion of the role of the exams.
OSF
osf.io
keeps only a few of them. This has been overlooked because until recently we didn't know much about the dynamics of careers in the Qing. We've begun to look at turnover and exit for officials in the 19th century in a comprehensive way and my thinking has been evolving. 5/5 osf.io/preprints/so...
That the key meritocratic feature of the system may have been the evaluation (考核) of officials that resulted in very high exit rates in the first rates. It begins to feel like a development program at an investment bank or consultancy that hires lots of graduates from elite schools and then 4/5
My own take on keju increasingly is that it motivated elites to acquire the reading and writing skills required by a bureaucracy that relied on documents, and selected ones who were really good at it, but our findings that many officials left office soon after appointment leads me to think... 3/5
IMHO discussions of keju and gaokao often conflate 'written exams' with 'meritocratic', even if the skills being assessed were orthogonal to the needs of the selection process. This essay shows that defining 'meritocratic' is actually pretty complicated, and depends on context and goals. 2/5
Meritocracy and Its Discontents
<p>In this essay, I outline some ways to think about meritocracy. I interpret <span>meritocracy as a constellation of claims about who deserves certain thi
papers.ssrn.com
Great essay by @durlauf.bsky.social on the difficulty of assessing what is 'meritocratic' which crystallizes a lot of the discomfort I have had with discussions of the keju and gaokao as 'meritocratic' without really talking about what that really means. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... 1/5
Yeah. And how do you beat a rocket base with monorail and piranha tank in a hollowed out volcano with a retractable roof that looks like a lake from above?
My favorite Bond movie.
The helicopter with the giant magnet picks up the carful of Spectre agents who are trying to harsh Bond's mellow and ruin his vibe and drops it in a hippie commune where they drop acid and dance and make fun of Blofeld.
Tiger Tanaka's private subway train is a party train!
I'd definitely take Winnipeg over Edmonton.
"Oh uh receipts yeah uh I gave them to Frodo to turn in when he got back from Mordor and he accidentally threw them into Mount Doom by accident... can you just give me a per diem?"
Seriously, no one would do that if say they were trying to solve a science or engineering problem. But when it comes to policy, the opinion of some rando on the internet is apparently just as valid as someone who has been studying the problem for years.
But did he come back with 17 years' worth of receipts that took the finance office two years to reimburse?
Yep. Like most people who come to social media to 'ask questions' or 'debate', going back to USENET in the 1990s. Seriously, how does someone with some kind of business empire have so much time to spend posting?
The Lighthouse is a Christmas tree?
Reposted by Cameron Campbell
And Tiny Tim did NOT die, but was sustained by a feeling of brightness visible to others only as a soft phosphorescence — seeing the world more clearly and precisely than he had ever seen it before.
Annihilation is a Christmas story. Peace on Earth.
Annihilation is a Christmas story. Peace on Earth.
And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, his body surrendered to the sand in a slow, irreversible negotiation with eternity. Where a boy had been, a vast segmented body took shape, ring after ring locking into immortality.
And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, was immortal. From the dawn of time we came; moving silently down through the centuries, living many secret lives, struggling to reach the time of the Gathering; when the few who remain will battle to the last.
And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, joined the crew of a spaceship sent to Jupiter after the discovery of a monolith on the Moon, but the ship's computer killed everyone else, so he disabled the computer and then took a freaky pod journey, and then he ended up in a weirdly decorated hotel suite.
Reposted by Cameron Campbell
And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, was immortal. From the dawn of time we came; moving silently down through the centuries, living many secret lives, struggling to reach the time of the Gathering; when the few who remain will battle to the last.
And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, now has a machine gun. Ho. Ho. Ho.
And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, his body surrendered to the sand in a slow, irreversible negotiation with eternity. Where a boy had been, a vast segmented body took shape, ring after ring locking into immortality.