My Chinese history is cursory at best, but I think I'm grasping onto something worth looking into. If my understanding is correct, within Chinese history becoming a scholar was awarded with much more prestige than any other job. If (this is where there is probably a hole in my question) this phenomenon continued through the 20th century, was there any interplay between the ideology of Maoist Communism? If so, how? Maybe there's an interesting monograph or someone touches on it a book.
Maosim, for a period in the 1960s-70s at least, was explicitly against this kind of scholarly prestige which was part of traditional Chinese Confucian society and therefore stood in the path of Socialism. And the cultural revolution was explicitly directed against intellectuals and many teachers and writers were persecuted. Some were killed or committed suicide.