The people benefited from the
extractive political structure always try to avoid creative destructions.
Keep knowledge from spreading, keep the public innocent is certainly a good way
to do it.
The Ottoman Empire did this by imposing high
restrictions on printing press while in China, there were two noteworthy
incidents of destroying existing knowledge and forbidding new learning. While
one being the famous "Cultural Revolution" leaded by Mao, the other was the "Burning of books and burying of scholars" in the Qin Dynasty happened after Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor in China,
united China and tried to seize more centralized power. Following his
chancellor's idea, Qin Shi Huangdi ordered to bury Confucian scholars alive
and to burn all the non-official thought books and most of the history books,
which was about 80% of the total collection of books at that time.
By doing this, he successfully forbad free
thoughts (people talking about thoughts from different schools were to be
killed if discovered) and created a "more stable" society, which,
remained highly extractive, quickly failed within 50 years, largely
resulted from the incident.
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