A mathematician whose business card bills him as a Ph.D. in the “technological economy,” Wu likes to think of his challenge in numerical terms. He knows, for example, that China needs an extra 40 billion cubic meters of water annually. He also knows that the country’s agriculture sector wastes about six times more water than the U.S. farming industry. Rather than give him a headache, the data soothe him. “If the thoughts are clear, then there is no pain,” Wu says. “We just go step by step.”
He’s in the right country. China has some of the world’s most daunting technical challenges–and perhaps the greatest number of high-ranking technocrats to deal with them. This is a nation of micromanagers: nearly all 24 members of the Politburo, the country’s ruling body, have technical degrees from universities with names such as the Beijing Petroleum Institute, the Harbin Military Engineering Institute and the No. 1 Ordnance Technical School. Each of the nine members of the Politburo’s Standing Committee is an engineer by training. And President Hu Jintao and other top pols are graduates of Beijing’s Tsinghua University, China’s MIT. Wu himself is the No. 2 person in China’s Bureau of Water Resources and a member of the National People’s Congress. He worked on the plan for the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest construction project.
In the 1980s, when the Middle Kingdom began opening up to the world, the country lagged far behind in science and technology. The government decided to recruit brainiacs at every level to catch up. The technocrats hatched ambitious programs in such areas as satellite communications and cell-phone production that have helped the country move quickly beyond making shoes and shirts.
The pace of modernization also means that the country needs major infrastructure upgrades. China’s lack of democracy gives remote planners incredible power, and they’ve used it to start construction on the world’s highest railway, from Qinghai to Tibet, and one of the world’s longest bridges, 36 kilometers, from Ningbo to Hangzhou.
While intellectuals don’t usually last long in government, the technocrats are seldom buffeted by the–winds of political change because they focus on hard facts rather than lofty ideas. That’s one reason the unassuming Hu Jintao, the former deputy director of the Construction and Development Commission of Gansu province, rose so quickly through the political ranks. “Those with liberal-arts backgrounds often write articles, or make speeches, and maybe they say something wrong,” says Yang Yiyong, an economist at the State Development and Reform Commission. “Those with technical backgrounds are never forced to reveal their true feelings.”
Yang, an industrial-engineering graduate of Tsinghua, works at an agency that is now trying to prevent China’s sizzling economy from crashing, as some experts predict it will. The Development and Reform Commission recently ordered banks to curb lending to firms in industries suffering from overcapacity, such as steel and iron production.
But even China’s most skilled technocrats may not be able to solve the country’s complex economic problems. Many provincial officials ignore advice from Beijing. Western experts think China should focus more on improving its legal system and promoting transparency in the corporate and financial sectors than on manipulating the economy. And the nation’s next generation of leaders will have to do more than build–namely, tackle the socioeconomic and legal implications of China’s pell-mell growth. But don’t expect a bunch of lawyers in the Politburo any time soon. As Yang acknowledges, “The technocrats will rule China for a lot longer still.”
