China owes a lot to its engineers

DAN Wang of Stanford’s Hoover History Lab has attracted widespread attention with his book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. He argues that China is an “engineering state” while the US is a “lawyerly society”. The characterisation is not new. The Economist quotes Bill Clinton as saying during a visit to China in 1998: “You have too many engineers, and we have too many lawyers…let’s trade!”

China’s engineering achievements hit you in the face if you visit the country today, as this writer did last month after more than a decade. No matter how much you have read about China, the physical experience of its massive airports and railway stations, boulevards and bridges, high-rises and bullet trains is almost overwhelming — especially as it is combined with visible mastery of urban planning and high-quality construction of public facilities. This is an orderly society that has built infrastructure (and built it superbly) on an unprecedented scale.

And it has been done by engineers. As was true of the Soviet Union in its mid-20th century heyday, so with China today: its political leadership has been dominated by engineers. Li Cheng and Lynn White found that a stupendous 80 per cent of the governors, mayors and party secretaries in provinces, major cities and autonomous regions were technocrats.

It wasn’t always so. The early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party were products of the liberation struggle. Engineers came into their own only with the third generation of leaders, chosen by Deng Xiaoping. This cohort was led by Jiang Zemin, an electrical engineer, along with others like Zhu Rongji, Hu Jintao and now Xi Jinping, who has studied both chemical engineering and law.

Wan Gang, a victim of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, managed to go to Germany for a PhD and then joined Audi. A Chinese minister visiting the Audi headquarters met him and later invited him to return to China. Wan became an early advocate of electrical vehicles and, as the only non-Communist member of the Chinese government, pushed research in electric vehicles (EVs). That helped China establish its leadership in the business. Also, Xu Guangxian graduated from Columbia University and returned to Peking University before setting up a lab for the research of rare earth materials — which too China now dominates. Xu is considered the father of China’s rare earths industry.

It’s not just that expats returned. Within China, STEM students account for a much larger share of the graduates emerging from China’s increasingly high-quality universities each year, compared to any other country. They find a place in Chinese decision-making echelons, which does not happen in the US or India, although India has the second largest number of STEM graduates. As for the US, the Congressional Research Service reported in 2022 that the number of scientists and engineers in the 117th Congress was the same as of radio talk-show hosts! Lawyers and business people had the largest presence.

India’s experience, too, has been that its scientists and engineers can ‘build’ if given the responsibility. The early examples are M Visvesvaraya in civil engineering and dam construction, Homi Bhabha in atomic energy, MS Swaminathan in agriculture, Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan in the space programme, and Verghese Kurien, a mechanical engineer who led the milk revolution. Among the other engineers who built factories and organisations were Mantosh Sondhi (steel), V Krishnamurthy (electrical machinery) and DV Kapur (power generation). In their wake came people like ‘Metro Man’ E Sreedharan.

It is engineers who built India’s software services industry, starting with FC Kohli, who studied electrical engineering at Queen’s in Canada followed by systems engineering at MIT. Larsen & Toubro is a company with technological depth, built by two Danish engineers and later by AM Naik. Mukesh Ambani, who has built the world’s most complex oil refinery, is a chemical engineer. Nandan Nilekani, who emerged from Infosys, has engineered several elements of the digital public infrastructure.

There aren’t enough such examples. Perhaps that is because India’s early leaders were lawyers (Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar). And though Nehru strongly advocated the scientific mindset as he strove to build the ‘temples’ of modern India, the government’s administrative culture was and is generalist in its ethos, with subject expertise considered secondary to administrative ability.

Meanwhile, in an irony noted by many, India has produced among the world’s best economists and also the world’s worst macro-economic policies. But it was economists who took the lead under PV Narasimha Rao (a lawyer by training) in the 1991 reforms. Some of those economists had switched to economics only after studying physics!

Change is now coming. The share of engineers among new recruits to the Indian Administrative Service has risen sharply from about 30 per cent two decades ago to over 60 per cent now. But without career streaming, they too might become generalists.

Such a transition is yet to show in the political leadership, though Narendra Modi believes in the power of technology. Among his senior colleagues, Rajnath Singh and Amit Shah studied science subjects (physics and biochemistry), but the focus of the RSS (whose members dominate the government) is on cultural transformation. Nirmala Sitharaman is an economist, while Piyush Goyal is a chartered accountant. Nitin Gadkari is not an engineer, but Ashwini Vaishnaw is.

An analysis of 36 Union ministers inducted in 2021 showed a preponderance of lawyers, people with business degrees, doctors and two who had been in the IAS. There were said to be several engineers, but no count was given. In the Congress, the only engineer of note is Jairam Ramesh, who studied at IIT (Bombay) and Carnegie-Mellon. But Arvind Kejriwal, an IIT graduate who became Delhi’s chief minister, shows the risks of what could happen when an engineer becomes a politician.

India’s business world, meanwhile, is dominated by those from the traditional trader or money-lending castes that have historically emphasised cash management — like the Birlas’ traditional partha system of accounting. This is doubtless a great strength in business, and it would be grossly unfair to dismiss them as bean-counters, in American parlance. They are, after all, successful entrepreneurs. But financial goals have to support rather than override the larger purposes of a business. In India, that has not always been the case.

Relatively speaking, businessmen from the Parsi, Brahmin, Lingayat and Punjabi khatri communities have focused more on engineering from the very beginning (Tata and Godrej, TVS and Kirloskar, Kalyani and Mahindra), while the prosperous coastal belt in Andhra Pradesh has produced leaders in construction. In the professional class, the best engineers go abroad or acquire management degrees and then go into consulting, finance, or marketing because these pay better.

What we don’t have are world-beating first-generation engineer-entrepreneurs like Lei Jun, who studied computer science before founding Xiaomi, and Wang Chuanfu, who studied metallurgy and founded BYD, the world’s largest maker of plug-in EVs. Perhaps the Indian ecosystem does not support such entrepreneurs. The question is, who is best placed to understand the needs of such an ecosystem?

It goes without saying that there is no magic-bullet solution to the multiple inadequacies of the Indian system. Even engineers cannot produce magic solutions, but they are trained to do rational problem-solving and systemic thinking, whereas lawyers focus on tackling the opposition in court. And, let’s face it, China has made major mistakes in finance and economic structuring. But putting capable engineers in charge may well put an end to our usual tolerance of shoddy work and celebration of jugaad.

As India struggles to build a competitive manufacturing sector and quality physical infrastructure, we could consider how much of an “engineering state” it needs to become, and what leadership role engineers should play in politics and the administration, as well as in business and industry.

TN Ninan is a senior journalist and the former Editor of Business Standard.