Social engineering

Yesterday Jasper Becker, publisher of Asia Weekly and the author of Dragon Rising (among many other titles), gave an informal talk about the 17th National Party Congress (which as Bradley mentioned, began today) , at a dim sum brunch hosted by the Yale Club of Beijing. At some point he pointed out that China’s leadership is unique in that all nine members of the politburo come from an engineering background (President Hu Jintao, FYI, has a degree in hydraulic engineering),as opposed to the lawyer types you’ll find amongst politicans in the West and elsewhere (Tony Blair, Bill Clinton). (Random fact of the day: “Little Bush,” as the Chinese call him, is the first American president to hold a Masters in business administration.)

Growing woozy under the influence of too much dim sum, my mind started to wander and I began to recall my college days, in particular the great divide within the student body between the engineering students and the humanities students. The engineering students took more classes than us arty-wordy people (5 per semester instead of 4) and had to trek much farther to an outlying corner of the campus (called the Engineering Quad, or E-Quad) for those classes. The remoteness of the E-Quad meant that they also tended to eat apart from us, closer to the E-Quad; study in a different library; and otherwise live very different lives. The humanities kids would regularly ascribe all sorts of broad statements to the engineering kids, usually involving their fashion choices and/or proficiency in the social sphere. You’d tell someone about a comment someone had made in class that you disagreed with, and would add that the source of the offending quote was “an engineering person,” as if that explained everything about this alien creature’s way of thinking.

Taking that thought and baking it halfway through, perhaps the dichotomy between China and the rest of the world can be thought of as another form of that age-old divide between numbers versus words, or qualitative versus quantitative. One glance at the Beijing skyline is certainly enough to make you start asking questions about someone’s sense of fashion. And doesn’t the thought of a kid holing up at home on a Friday night immediately make you think of all kinds of analogies involving an impenetrably opaque government?

Or, maybe I’m reading way too much into things. But I guess that’s what happens when you major in English.

- Eveline Chao