The enigma remains greater than the answers.

It is an attractive proposition that engineers and scientists might make better rulers, people steeped in rigorous and logical evidentiary argument. It is certainly an article of faith amongst Marxists for whom history and economics are a science inexorably leading to the science of communism.

The actual evidence to support the proposition is more mixed. Che Guevara, psychotic marxist revolutionary was famously a medical doctor. A disproportionate number of western born terrorist converts are inexplicably middle class technocrats of one sort or another.

From China’s Overrated Technocrats by John Palmer. The subtitle is

Beijing is famous for putting engineers and scientists in charge. But that doesn’t make for better leaders.

Palmer reports that

Many Western parliaments are dominated by people with law degrees, but China’s leaders are mostly trained as engineers and scientists—or so goes conventional wisdom. Advocates for this supposed Chinese approach, such as the entrepreneur Elon Musk, argue that it produces leaders who adopt a pragmatic and technocratic framework to solving problems. And those scientist-politicians, the theory goes, are more likely to govern efficiently, in part because they are unburdened by ideology.

I am not sure I have registered just how strong this view is, but certainly I have seen it often.

But advocates for China’s supposed technocracy are not only wrong about the background of Beijing’s current leadership. They are also fundamentally mistaken about how their training shapes policymaking. China’s leaders today—including President Xi Jinping himself—have been molded less by their education and more by the need to consolidate control and prevail in the brutal internal power struggles of the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s true that a generation of engineer-leaders once dominated the Communist Party. But they’re now mostly retired, dead, or in prison. The current crop of leaders is distinctly lacking in engineers; Xi is the only member of the party’s seven-person standing committee with an engineering or science degree. That is in line with a steady trend: Among high-ranking officials born before 1948, who made up the majority of the leadership before this current generation, around one-third had engineering degrees. But for those born after 1948, including China’s so-called “fifth generation” of leadership, only 1 in 7 were trained as engineers. The ratio continues to fall; legal or economic training has become far more common.

The declining prevalence of technocratic training is new information to me.

Palmer points out something I knew but had never considered from the politburo perspective. Many Chinese degrees are purchased credentials. By no means all, but the diploma does not necessarily reflect knowledge, and certainly not experience.

Chinese leaders still do everything they can to promote the facade of a meritocracy. On paper, they remain a highly educated group: Xi got a doctorate in law from Tsinghua in 2002, while Chen Quanguo, the architect of Xinjiang’s detention camps, received a doctorate in management from Wuhan University of Technology in 2004. But the lofty degrees are less impressive in reality. Apart from Li and Wang, the advanced degrees of each of the top leaders were obtained while working full time as officials—an almost impossible time commitment, which calls into question exactly who did the work.

In the rare instances when reporters have been able to get ahold of leaders’ dissertations, they’ve found widespread plagiarism. In some cases, the writing of these theses was farmed out to other students at first-rank Beijing universities in exchange for a fee. It might seem strange that these degrees are faked rather than awarded as honorary titles, but there’s an ideological impetus behind the pretense that China’s leaders are scholars. The notion that science is important carries a special weight in Chinese culture thanks in part to the conviction of early 20th-century reformers that science was the way out of the country’s backwardness. To be scientific (kexue) in the 1920s was to be modern, advanced, and precise.

And far from being constructive problem-solvers, Palmer asserts that the actual track record is of dogmatic coercion.

Although the generation of leaders before Xi had far more practical technical experience and often held actual jobs as engineers before becoming officials, those qualifications didn’t guarantee the kind of clean, technocratic leadership that Westerners assume. Zhou Yongkang, one of the highest-level victims of Xi’s purges, not only worked as a geologist but kept a foot in the field throughout his time as an official, leading field teams as late as the 1990s. But instead of being a neutral technocrat, he was one of the most fiercely ideological leaders of the 2000s and early 2010s, tightening social controls through his role as domestic security czar at the same time as he used his power to accumulate enormous amounts of wealth and a few dozen mistresses.

Even for the more upstanding members of China’s leadership, an engineering background hasn’t necessarily brought pragmatism. As the sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog examined in their research on the backgrounds of suicide bombers, engineers raised with a strong ideology, whether Islamism or communism, can be among the most rigid of thinkers. Engineering is “more attractive to individuals seeking cognitive ‘closure’ and clear-cut answers as opposed to more open-ended sciences,” Gambetta and Hertog wrote. And that training seems to encourage the idea of a toolbox that can be applied to any problem, such as the application of Marxist ideas to society, producing the rigid cruelties of the Maoist era and the crushing of dissidents under Xi in the 2010s.

We have much the same issue here in the West where diplomas have been watered down in order to accommodate diversity quotas and similar social objectives. Regardless, they are still pretty useful indicators.

Education matters less than most observers think. China is not like the West, where a rigorous degree in law or economics often leads to a career that in turn becomes a path to politics, such as former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s days teaching law or London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s human rights work. For some Chinese officials, their schooling was cursory at best—and very rarely translated into actual work experience. As the Carnegie Mellon University professor Vivek Wadhwa and others have demonstrated, the quality of engineering education in China, especially before 2010, was well below international standards. Many engineering degrees would barely qualify as technical certificates in the United States.

I am willing to accept that is true (I have certainly seen it in other countries.) But if true, it suggests that China is perhaps at a more precarious peak than we might acknowledge. It has been an astonishing thirty years of growth. The assumption that part of that growth has been fueled by a deep pool of first rate technical talent.

If that pool is shallower than we think it has a couple of implications. Either technical talent can be more easily acquired through doing than we have acknowledged (and to a degree, I think that is true). Or it means that the great run of thirty years has depended on a coerced focusing of scarce talent on the commanding heights. In which case, the economy will have become lopsided and unbalanced as the commanding heights pull away from the foundation. There is some evidence for that as well.

As with many things to do with China, greater insight doesn't necessarily move us forward. The enigma remains greater than the answers.

It does rather drive the stake deeper into the Marxist assumption that life is a technocratic problem to be solved by technocrats.

A proposition fueling the current wave in the West where the Masses are rebelling against the incompetence of the Mandarin Class technocrats.