Choose the best example of behavior expected of a petrarchan lover.

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serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.

the answer is:

to persuade readers that a conquering prince must destroy a former republic if he hopes to hold it.

in the excerpt from "the prince," the author niccolò machiavelli suggests that to take possession of a city and endure the control over it, it is necessary to destroy it first. otherwise, people who have known freedom will eventually turn against the new rulers and fight back to recover their power.