Murder House: Zhong Na on the Silicon Valley Tragedy That Exposed the Cracks in China's Meritocracy

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Gua coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia.

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So do check out the page to see all that is on offer and consider helping me out. This week on Seneca, we're looking at one of the most widely discussed and unsettling stories to cross the Pacific in recent memory, a murder that took place in Solcon Valley that, for reasons we will be exploring, really captivated audiences across China. A young couple, both brilliant engineers, both products of China's most elite university. both living the dream at Google found themselves at the tragic center of a case that quickly became far more than just a true crime story. It became a kind of collective Rorschach test, a a mirror held up to contemporary Chinese society, to the myths of meritocracy and, you know, study your way out social m mobility, to the prestige of global tech firms like Google, to shifting notions of gender, of class, and the Chinese dream itself.

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