8 of China's Top 9 Govt. Officials Are Engineers

kkleiner writes "Did you know that the president of China is a scientist? President Hu Jintao was trained as a hydraulic engineer. Likewise his Premier, Wen Jiabao, is a geomechanical engineer. In fact, 8 out of China's top 9 government officials are scientists or engineers."

Re:Worthless degrees by equally worthless schools.

[marcushnk]

I do hope you all don't think this way.
Don't be fooled by the Faux News view of China.
One day you'll wake up and it'll be too late to do anything about their world markets domination.

Minor quibble...

[SnapShot]

> Did you know that the president of China is a scientist? President Hu Jintao was trained as a hydraulic engineer.

So, he's not a scientist, he's an engineer. That's not a slam against engineers (or scientists) but I believe that the two outlooks are very different.

Please! We got you beat easily

[ddd0004]

100 out of 100 are laywers in the US and not the attractive altruistic 22 year old laywers that you see on TV.

Re:Worthless degrees by equally worthless schools.

[Lunix Nutcase]

That's a good one. Yes, let's forget all the people in that "golden age" that only made it into colleges due to their parent's wealth.

Re:That's also why they are not great leaders

[purpledinoz]

This was definitely not Mao's game plan. China transitioned from communism to capitalism after Mao's death because Mao's plans weren't working.

Re:Interesting.

[drolli]

I dont believe that democracy in China would work better if it would be managed by the Chinese banker and lawyers and political majors.

Having lived in Germany i can say that the last professions where the culture was strongly influenced by Nazi ideology are the lawyers(/courts) and the philosophical sciences. The law system in Germany took 40 years to begin to reflect on its own role during this time. And some of the banks never reflected where their money came from.

This is because *by definition* being part of the legal system requires you to "be on the side of the state" in sense of your ideology. If at a single time this field adheres to the Idea of a "strong state" in the negative sense, that is a state consisting of the people in power (chosen by god, by money, or as some kind of elite), not of the people in general, then its very unlikely that the legal system will give up this view very quickly - the people in power will understand how to use this legal system.

This usually involves that people who oppose in some sense are declared to be "enemies of the state" and therefor have less rights. You can observe this idea nearly everywhere, and i would think that the western world, where the US are discussing if torture is ok again for suspected terrorists, and the European union not sending help to refugees on the Mediterranean sea and letting them drown, where its only 25years ago that the French secret service sunk the Rainbow warrier as enemies of the state, should be a little more humble when claiming ideals.

If you look closely to china you see that many, if not most of the human rights violations are *not* a centrally controlled act from Bejing (I exclude the question of Tibet, which is purely driven by the fact that the West wants a stick to poke China from time to time and China need to prove itself exactly because of that reason). Many things happen because locally (on the province-and city-level) the local officials actually dont want to have the central government and laws invading into their personal business, and the police and courts etc. also are - effectively - controlled by them.

If i look at China i am actually amazed that they managed to progress so well, despite that a large class of people in their system would profit from the situation staying constant. Looking at other parts of the world with a similar starting point, i can say that the human rights situation in China seems to be slowly improving, with bumps, and sometimes not in the direction like the West expects it, but the police and law system seems to get more and more stable.

The Chinese which i know (most of them are scientists) are usually well-informed, capable of critical thinking and confirm this view, and they overall feel that the things develop to the better.

My personal opinion is that there are dangerous paths down the road for China, and the west should try to help China to master these problem as much as we can - the best way to do this IMHO is to invite as many Chinese as we can into the West to work and stay for some time or longer, so they can look at it and hopefully the best (not the worst) of what they see and what can work there back with them.

This does not mean we should not mention where we think something is going wrong, actually we should, but i think it would be more productive to keep political interests out of it.

Re:Worthless degrees by equally worthless schools.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

One day you'll wake up and it'll be too late to do anything about their world markets domination.

China's got a buttload of problems coming up fast, like:

• o Wage Inflation - average wages are expected to double in the next 5 years [chinadaily.com.cn] while food and housing inflation is already here [latimes.com] that means a significant loss in global competitiveness
• o Massive Gender Imbalance - 55% male to 45% female birth ratio [bbc.co.uk] - that means crime, revolution or possibly war is coming, because when young men can't get laid, they take their frustration out in violence
• o Too Many Retirees - The one child policy is turning their social security system upside down [latimes.com] - there just aren't going to be enough young workers to support all the old people in non-productive retirement
• o Massive Waste - a command economy is great when the people running the show guess right, but when they guess wrong you get massive waste like Ghost Cities [businessinsider.com] and boondoggle trains. [wsj.com]