Ideology gone wild..................

     Mao's last great program was the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, where ideological purity rather than competence became the rationale for promotion at state-owned (which is to say substantially all) Chinese industry.  Colleges and universities were closed, while teenagers were released from school and dispatched to attack the Four Olds:  Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas.  (While touring a cave in Hangzhou filled with Buddhist carvings, I noticed that the figures near the ground level had all had their faces smashed off, while the figures higher up the walls were intact.  When I asked our guide about this, she said simply, "The high school students did not bring a ladder that day.")

-Clay Shirky,  Little Rice:  Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream