Xi Jinping

"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."

"Xi hurled a series of regulatory thunderbolts at China’s high-flying tech companies, including Didi, the country’s largest ride-hailing company, and Ant Financial, the payments company owned by Jack Ma, China’s best-known entrepreneur. Chinese tech founders (and their investors) were astonished to discover that Xi Jinping could erase a trillion dollars from corporate valuations over the course of just a few months. The leadership thought it was straightforward to reorient the nation’s tech priorities away from consumer platforms and toward science-based industries, like semiconductors and aviation, that serve the nation’s strategic needs. Beijing took years to appreciate how its actions had scared the daylights out of entrepreneurs and investors."

"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."

"Gou set up the officially accredited Foxconn University on the Shenzhen campus, [offering twenty-five majors](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor348), most of which were engineering related. Gou surrounded himself with deputies who worked nearly as relentlessly as he did, driving Foxconn executives to the factories six days a week and then to study sessions on Sundays. In earlier years, they studied engineering principles. One former employee told me that in more recent years, political education has been more prominent, meaning that they have to study the words of China’s top leader. The curriculum transitioned from “Steve Jobs thought” when Shenzhen was freewheeling a decade ago to “Xi Jinping thought” in the more disciplined present."

"CSR in the Chinese context has been a top-down project in which companies support the political agenda of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and government, including poverty reduction (which strengthens party legitimacy), environmental protection (which seemingly has become a personal preference of China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping), and the CCP’s goal of ‘national rejuvenation.’"

"He tried to sound the alarm in Cupertino, but he had little influence or clout. The company was racking up record sales. Whatever problems Xi had expressed when he first entered office had—apparently—been solved. So when Guthrie would show up in Cupertino trying to deliver the message that Xi Jinping was taking China back to the 1990s—an era of “technology transfer” when accessing the Chinese market also meant handing over secrets to a local joint venture partner—he was easy to ignore."

"Even Xi Jinping, who seeks to annex Taiwan and has little reason to flatter its citizens, has acknowledged that China’s forty years of opening and reform “has to be chalked up to our Taiwan compatriots and Taiwan companies.” Taipei calculates that between 1991 and 2022, total business investment from the corporate sector exceeded $203 billion, a huge number by any standard—barring Cupertino’s."

"Apple continues to spur Chinese development of cutting-edge processes, Americans may soon look up and see that China has become self-sufficient in advanced electronics, robotics, and chip fabrication. And from there it may be only a short leap to Xi Jinping’s goal of bringing about “the ultimate demise of capitalism,” as he pledged in 2013."