马斯克 技术专家当政是中国的优势

2023-04-25 14:53:31

China's Overrated Technocrats

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

By James Palmer, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.

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.

许多西方议会由具有法律学位的人主导，但中国的领导人主要是工程师和科学家的训练，或者是传统的智慧。 倡导这种所谓的中国方法，例如企业家埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk），认为它会产生采用务实和技术官僚框架来解决问题的领导人。 理论认为，那些科学家政治家更有可能有效地管理自己，部分原因是他们对意识形态不承担重负担。

Elon Musk says China has an advantage because its politicians are better at science

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/07/elon-musk-china-advantage-is-that-its-politicians-are-better-at-science.html

 Saheli Roy Choudhury@SAHELIRC SEP 7 2018

KEY POINTS

• If American politicians were better at science, then it would help tech companies with innovation, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

• Politicians in China, including the mayor of Beijing, were better at science, he said on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast called “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

• The role of government in the technology sector is a frequently debated topic around the world.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla  Beck Diefenbach | Reuters

If politicians were better at science, tech companies could probably innovate better, according to Elon Musk.

The Tesla CEO appeared on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast called “The Joe Rogan Experience” late Thursday where he spoke on a wide range of topics including artificial intelligence (AI).

“You know, I wish politicians were better at science. That would help a lot,” Musk said when Rogan asked him about bottlenecks at the companies he runs and the things that were holding back innovation.

Musk agreed with Rogan that there are not incentives for American politicians to be good at science.

“Actually, they’re pretty good at science in China, I have to say,” Musk said, adding, “The mayor of Beijing has, I believe, an environmental engineering degree, and the deputy mayor has a physics degree. I met them.”

Beijing’s mayor, Chen Jining, is a “doctor of engineering” and a professor, and obtained a master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering from Imperial College, London. Beijing has multiple vice mayors and it wasn’t immediately clear whom Musk was talking about.

“And the mayor of Shanghai is really smart,” Musk said about Ying Yong, who holds a masters degree in law, according to the government’s website.

The role of government in the technology sector is a frequently debated topic around the world. Many argue that if governments come up with heavy-handed regulations against tech companies, or push for unfavorable policies, it could potentially stifle innovation.

Recently, U.S. lawmakers grilled Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey over what the tech giants are doing to fight abuse on social platforms and online election meddling. Other American tech names are worried about the impact of a potential new round of U.S. tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports. Dell, Cisco, Juniper Networks and Hewlett Packard Enterprise reportedly sent a last minute letter to the U.S. Trade Representative’s office asking for an exemption, worried that it could increase their costs and potentially lead to job losses.

For his part, Musk is facing a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission on whether he violated securities laws after he claimed in a tweet that he had the funds to take Tesla private. Musk has since posted that, based on the feedback he received, it was apparent that most of Tesla’s existing shareholders believed it was better off as a public company.

In China, local tech companies are already required by law to cooperate with domestic authorities — to the point that it has led to growing national security concerns from intelligence officials in the West. While Beijing has pushed for innovation and promoted entrepreneurship, the government still has plenty of oversight on tech companies.

Recently, for example, Beijing blocked tech giant Tencent from selling a blockbuster video game “Monster Hunter: World” on its distribution platform, WeGame. Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial has also come under pressure on several fronts from regulators. Alipay, the massive digital payment service that Ant Financial operates, was hit by a central bank decision to raise the reserve funds ratio of third-party payment firms to 50 percent, with the expectation that the ratio will be raised eventually to 100 percent and further squeeze profits, according to Reuters.

The newswire also reported that Ant Financial was singled out by the People’s Bank of China as the only online finance firm for a trial program to test stricter regulations on financial holding conglomerates.

Still, the country is also aggressively pursuing certain technologies including artificial intelligence and semiconductors as part of its Made in China 2025 plan. Earlier this year, Beijing said it would build a $2 billion AI research park to aid in its goal of becoming the leader in the technology by 2025. At the same time, China has raised multiple funds for semiconductor development within the country since 2014.

The Chinese Government Is Dominated by Scientists and Engineers

Their political elite are largely technocrats.

https://gineersnow.com/leadership/chinese-government-dominated-scientists-engineers

by Patricia Eldridge 4 years ago

Chinese government are full of engineers and scientists.

When Chinese Government comes to mind, what things do you generally think of? Most of you would say, The Great Wall, feng shui, their food, pandas, cheap products, communism, and martial arts, among others.

All of these are valid observations, as China is indeed famous for such. But I'd like to add something to that list, a thing that is so rare that China has to be remembered for it: most of the political leaders in China are scientists and engineers.

To prove that fact, let us play a quick game. Name a scientist or an engineer from your country's top government officials. Don't cheat with Google, just think of someone that you already know. Now I doubt that you have thought one especially if you’re in the U.S.

Nowhere in the world can you see the same admiration and respect from the public to their scientists and engineers other than in China. This is a little known fact.

They admire such professionals so much to the point that they qualify these people to be worthy and capable in handling political affairs. The Chinese people believe that scientists and engineers, who eventually become technocrats, have a highly disciplined mind fit for public office.

The Chinese Government Is Dominated by Scientists and Engineers Directly before the present administration, 8 out of China's top 9 government officials are scientists and engineers.

This leadership has brought laser focus on innovation, bringing much of China’s labor centralized in science, technology, and engineering.

This was followed by the current political lineup, which relaxed a little from technocracy. The top Chinese leaders are now diverse with former economists, research fellows and a journalist in the league.

Still, scientists and engineers occupy several of China’s highest political offices. Two of these offices are held by Xi Jinping and Yu Zhengsheng. Xi Jinping, the top leader in the Communist Party of China and the President of the People’s Republic of China, studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which is the same university where previous Chinese President Hu Jintao went for a degree in hydroelectric engineering. Xi obtained a degree in Marxist degree as well as a Ph.D in law at the Tsinghua Humanities Institute, becoming China’s first national leader to hold such degree.  

Yu Zhengsheng, the chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, is also an engineer. He graduated from the specialty of ballistic missile automatic control of the Missile Engineering Department of the Harbin Military Engineering Institute. Yu spent almost twenty years in the electronics industry before joining the Ministry of Electronics Industry in the 1980s.

Not only do scientists and engineers dominate the top political offices in China, they can also be found at all levels of the Chinese government. It has long been observed by the Chinese people to elect, or perhaps select due to their election system, politicians with a science or engineering background. A study by Li Cheng and Lynn White entitled “Elite Transformation and Modern Change in Mainland China and Taiwan: Empirical Data and the Theory of Technocracy” describes the domination of scientists and engineers in the Chinese political elite.

No wonder we see global dominance of Chinese technology made products such as laptops, 5G technology, home appliances, automotive, smartphones, medicines and  wearable technologies. These politicians encourage innovations as their key component in transforming China from a cheap products to world class trading destination. Did you know that the best drones brand (DJI) is made in China?

At the time the authors conducted the study, mayors and Party secretaries of cities of over a million, governors and provincial Party secretaries of China’s provinces, autonomous regions, and province-level municipalities; and Central Committee members were found to be 80% technocrats. This means that 8 out of 10 among them have four-year degrees or more in science or engineering.

This technocracy that exists in China is ingrained in their political culture. Mengzi, or Mencius, who was famous for being a loyal follower of Confucius, once said, “Let those who labor with their heads rule those who labor with their hands.”

This was uttered sometime in the 4th or 3rd century BCE, where technology, which was bronze casting, scapulamancy and plastromancy at the time, was dominated by the shamanic priests of the Shang dynasty.   Other political engineering stories you might enjoy reading

China's Overrated Technocrats

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-overrated-technocrats-stem-engineering-xi-jinping/

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

By James Palmer, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.  JULY 4, 2019, 9:00 AM

FP subscribers can now receive alerts when new stories written by this author are published. 

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.

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.

Out with the technocrats, in with China’s new breed of politicians

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2117169/out-technocrats-chinas-new-breed-politicians

Engineers no longer dominate the top echelon of power as the fifth-generation leaders – who studied politics, law and philosophy – take over

  Viola Zhou   26 Oct, 2017

President Xi Jinping (second from right) with members of his new leadership team including Premier Li Keqiang (right), Li Zhanshu (left) and Wang Huning in Beijing on Wednesday. Photo: Kyodo

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.

Chinese Government Lead By Scientists & Engineers

https://technologytimes.pk/2019/10/15/chinese-government-lead-by-scientists-engineers/

 October 15, 2019  Sara Ehsan

The Great Wall, feng shui, their food, pandas, cheap products, communism, and martial arts clicking in mind with reference to Chinese government among others. But the most hitting about Chinese government besides previously mentioned is that they are lead by Scientists and Engineers in their political body. 8 out of 9 China’s top government officials are scientists and engineers.

Chinese people elected their politicians who are worthy, professionals and capable in handling political affairs. The Chinese people believe that politicians with science or engineering background are eventually become technocrats, have a highly disciplined mind fit for public office.
The top Chinese leaders are now equip with former economists, research fellows and a journalist in the government. Several China’s highest political offices run under the command of scientists and engineers.interesting reading:  Chinese AI firm iFLYTEK posts strong H1 revenue growth

Top leader in the Communist Party of China and the President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping, studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He completed Ph.D in law at the Tsinghua Humanities Institute, becoming China’s first national leader to hold such highest degree.

interesting reading:  Scientists Find New Way To Clear Toxic Waste From Brain

Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Yu Zhengsheng is also an engineer. He graduated from the specialty of ballistic missile automatic control of the Missile Engineering Department of the Harbin Military Engineering Institute.

According to a study “Elite Transformation and Modern Change in Mainland China and Taiwan: Empirical Data and the Theory of Technocracy” by Li Cheng and Lynn White describes the supremacy of scientists and engineers in the Chinese political line.

interesting reading:  Chinese scientists find gene for drought resistance in rice

They concluded that mayors and Party secretaries of cities of over a million, governors and provincial Party secretaries of China’s provinces, autonomous regions, and province-level municipalities; and Central Committee members were found to be 80% technocrats. This means that 8 out of 10 among them have four-year degrees or more in science or engineering.