Out with the technocrats, in with China’s new breed of politicians
Engineers no longer dominate the top echelon of power as the fifth-generation leaders – who studied politics, law and philosophy – take over
Once run by peasants-turned-revolutionaries and then engineers, China is now in the hands of a group of political experts, economists and theorists.
Only a decade ago, eight of the nine top Communist Party leaders studied engineering or natural sciences – the most sought-after majors when the country was struggling to industrialise.
But no one in the newly appointed Politburo Standing Committee, unveiled on Wednesday, belongs to the so-called technocrats, who worked as engineers or natural science researchers before entering the political arena.
President Xi Jinping, who studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University, was the only one with such experience, but he went straight to the government after graduation and pursued a higher degree in Marxist theories and political education.
Among his peers, two studied political education for their first degree and the rest majored in management, philosophy, politics or law.
Their education history varies. Wang Yang, who started as a food factory worker, got his first degree in management at a party school in 1992, when he was a mayor in Anhui province.
