Communist Party

"But the capital is also a city of gravity and substance. Beijing attracts many of China’s smartest people, including scientists, technology leaders, and those seeking to advance in the Communist Party. The po-faced members of the Politburo don’t fool around. Greatness isn’t only a slogan for them: It’s a full-on, life-or-death pursuit. Beijing, for the rest of this book, stands in as the Communist Party and the central government. China’s leaders are driven by intense paranoia, doing everything they can to control the future."

"Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China. As a corrective to the mayhem of the Mao years, Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, *all* nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering and spent a decade building dams. His eight other colleagues could have run a Soviet heavy-industry conglomerate: with majors in electron-tube engineering and thermal engineering, from schools like the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute and the Harbin Institute of Technology, and work experience at the First Machine-Building Ministry and the Shanghai Artificial Board Machinery Factory."

"Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua, China’s top science university. For his third term as the Communist Party’s general secretary starting in 2022, Xi filled the Politburo with executives from the country’s aerospace and weapons ministries. In the United States, it would be as if the CEO of Boeing became the governor of Alaska, the chief of Lockheed Martin became the secretary of energy, and the head of NASA was governor of a state as large as Georgia. China’s ruling elites have practical experience managing megaprojects, suggesting that China is doubling down on engineers—and prioritizing defense—more than ever."

"The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles—where men have to be macho and women have to bear their children."

"Construction, capitalism, and control. These elements are sometimes in tension. After China’s digital platforms grew powerful and profitable, the Communist Party reined them in (the focus of my sixth chapter). It found a lot to dislike among tech tycoons and their business models. Companies and people were engaging in transactions—buying goods, borrowing money, contracting for services—without mediation by the state. And digital platforms created billionaires who could not resist flaunting their wealth or wisdom, much as their Silicon Valley counterparts do. Subsequently, the Communist Party smashed many of their businesses before they had begun to wield real power. The state wants to have the ultimate say in controlling economic relations throughout society."

"China has become a tech superpower by exalting process knowledge and the communities of engineering practice that keep it alive. Holding on to process knowledge helps us resist bad ideas about China's rise. The Communist Party would love to claim that China’s technology sector developed the way it has through wise planning from Beijing. And the American government also overstates the importance of the Chinese government through its accusations of cheating (including with unfair subsidies) or stealing (especially through cybertheft)."

"Li misused public funds. But he was also playing a political game recognizable to any other party secretary. One of the Communist Party’s personnel practices (inherited from imperial times) is to rotate officials between various jurisdictions, forcing them to gain broad experience and preventing them from drawing their power base from their home province. China has few officials with careers like Joe Biden’s, who, before becoming vice president and then president, spent his entire political life representing Delaware. Li Zaiyong had been an official all over Guizhou before landing in Liupanshui. The way for him to reach even higher office was to demonstrate a track record for growth."

"The engineering state, citing socialism with Chinese characteristics, is set up to give people one main thing: material improvements, mostly through public works. The engineering state builds big in part because it’s made up of self-professed communists who grew up admiring the Soviet Union. Communist Party leaders like Xi Jinping studied in an educational system steeped in Marxism. For them, production was a noble deed to advance communism, while consumption was a despicable act of capitalism. This party believes that only the state has the wisdom to invest in strategic megaprojects, whereas consumers will waste money on themselves. It is hostile to ordinary people having much command of resources, which empowers an individual’s agency rather than the state’s."

"The Communist Party celebrates the birthday of Karl Marx; to close out its party congress, held twice a decade, the military band plays the “Internationale” socialist anthem inside the Great Hall of the People. But as I said in my introduction, China is also a country governed by conservatives who masquerade as leftists. Perhaps no other self-proclaimed socialist country is as lightly taxed as China. Nearly three-quarters of China’s population are [spared from paying income tax](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor314). China has also failed to levy a broad property tax, leaving the bulk of rich city dwellers’ wealth untouched. It relies more heavily on consumption taxes, which are regressive because they burden the poor more than the rich."

"Xi has forcefully pushed back on the idea that China needs more generous welfare. In a major speech in 2021, he said, “⁠[Even when we have reached](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor318) a higher level of development . . . we should not go overboard with social transfers. For we must avoid letting people get lazy from their sense of entitlement to welfare.” Worrying that welfare could make the people lazy is one of those instances when a Communist Party leader sounds like Ronald Reagan.⁠"

"Mao Zedong was not an engineer. He was a librarian at Peking University who then helped found the Communist Party, after which he became a warlord. After he established the People’s Republic in 1949, Mao’s stature became nearly godlike. He spent much of his time reading literature and philosophy, leaving the details of running the state to technocratic deputies like Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Chen Yun. Mao’s gifts in military leadership as well as poetry collided in a folksy slogan he was fond of repeating: *Ren duo, li liang da*. With people come power."

"An obsession with technology has spawned what is perhaps the most interesting online movement in China. In the heavily censored realm of the Chinese internet, where no group is allowed to be very organized, one set of intellectuals has made themselves heard. They are loosely affiliated writers who refer to themselves as the Industrial Party. Their views are simple to summarize: that nation-states ruthlessly compete with each other; that science and technology are the decisive forces in this Darwinian competition; and that therefore the state must be organized around the pursuit of science and technology. They patriotically view the Communist Party as the world’s most capable political organization for this pursuit."

"And which types of technologies the United States should pursue is also worth meditating on. Should it really go all in on artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and other things that the Communist Party mocks as the fictitious economy? Or should it pursue the sorts of heavy industry that have long fallen out of fashion among American elites and out of favor among American investors?"

"SINCE the arrival of the socialists in power in France, Michelin has become even more secretive. Roger Quillot, the senator-mayor of Clermont-Ferrand, is at the Ministry of Urban Planning and Housing. Pierre Dreyfus, the former president of Renault — Citroën’s former enemy — is at the Ministry of Industry on Rue de Grenelle. The communist Charles Fiterman, Minister of Transport, intends to favor the SNCF at the expense of road transport. The Communist Party demands to include Michelin on the next list of nationalizable companies. François Michelin, who apparently had little affinity with previous Elysée teams, now resides on his lands, erecting new walls. Last June, before his shareholders, he once again expressed concern about “the gap that often exists between industrial and economic reality and the perception that political circles have of it.” Once again, he went to war against “the scarcity of savings and especially the abusive use of credit, not for the creation of means of production but for financing that is not a source of wealth, such as state deficits, consumer credits, excessive working capital of companies.”"

"Deng Xiaoping then sent tens of thousands of Chinese, officials and members of the Communist Party, to Singapore so they could make the most of Singapore’s achievements. China openly used the city-state as a cadre school to train numerous Chinese leaders, for example, by sending Jiang Zemin as early as 1980, who was the Vice President of the Commission for Foreign Investments and later the Mayor of Shanghai, to eventually become the head of state in 1993 and Deng Xiaoping’s successor. From 1985 to the 1990s, the Chinese government did not hesitate to recruit Dr. Goh Keng Swee, one of Lee Kuan Yew’s lieutenants and often considered the architect of Singapore’s economic development, as an economic advisor."