Comment by dylanzhangdev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylanzhangdev | Hacker News Reader

我是一个一直居住在中国的中国人，今年快40岁了。个人观点，我觉得这篇文章的最核心的观点已经错了，中国自古以来没有由工程师管理过，一直是官员，在古代是读书人，是士，工匠是贱籍。即使现代，工厂里是官员说了算还是工程师说了算？如果是后者，就没有那么多国企倒闭，没有下岗潮了。你可以去街头随便调查100个人，你问问他们觉得国家是谁在管理？

----------

I'm a Chinese who has lived in China my entire life and am almost 40. Personally, I think the core point of this article is wrong. China has never been run by engineers, but by officials. In ancient times, it was scholars, or literati, while craftsmen were considered lowly. Even in modern times, do officials or engineers have the final say in factories? If it were the latter, there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs. Just go out and survey 100 people on the street and ask them who they think is running the country.

As a Chinese who have a lot of live/working experience in both systems just provide some clarifications for this comment: most Chinese people don't understand the difference between politicians and bureaucrats because as the country invented the bureaucracy thousands years ago there is never a clear difference between them. The parent comment is talking about the country is running by bureaucrats which IMO is irrelevant to this topic.

Bureaucrats with some numeracy skills that can focus on (rather career incentives depend on) hitting central gov quantifiable KPIs and managing public sentiment is about as close to being on engineering spectrum in terms of governance vs demographic systems where governance is referendum on incumbants ability to sell electoral rhetoric (and frequently fail) every X years.

> there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs.

Of course there would, that's how you know cold blooded technocrats are at work. Fucking over irrelevant SOEs and iron rice bowl jobs is sterotypical based analytic trade off. Mind you there's plenty of engineer type doing policy work in the west, they just have a much more sclerotic legal layer to jump through, and frequently, don't.

Go survey 100 diasphora Chinese who lived in PRC and west and ask them how the systems differ.

> "Iron rice bowl" (simplified Chinese: 铁饭碗; traditional Chinese: 鐵飯碗; pinyin: tiě fàn wǎn) is a Chinese term for an occupation with guaranteed job security,[1] similar to life tenure. Traditionally, people considered to have such positions include military personnel, members of the civil service, as well as employees of various state-owned enterprises (through the mechanism of the work unit).

For my fellow westerners.

But there is a difference between officials/managers and lawyers (?)

There are people who think that China is about to replace America as world's obviously dominant superpower, and there are people who think that China is about to collapse, nothing in-between.

China;s history has been one of repeated 300-year to 500-year cycles. But this time is looking more like slow decay everywhere, true.

Collapse? People need to know and understand Adam Smith's remark that "there is a lot of ruin in a nation".

I think it will probably do neither, though as an American we're making a good faith effort to ensure the first.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com