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.

As the United States lost its enthusiasm for engineers, China embraced engineering in all its dimensions. Its leaders aren’t only civil or electrical engineers. They are, fundamentally, social engineers. Emperors didn’t hesitate to entirely restructure a person's relationship to the land, ordering mass migration into newly opened territories and conscripting the people to build great walls or grand canals. Modern rulers are here, too, far more ambitious than the emperors of the past. The Soviet Union inspired many of Beijing’s leaders with a love of heavy industry and an enthusiasm to become engineers of the soul— a phrase from Joseph Staling repeated by Xi Jinping— heaving China’s population into modernity and then some.

The Communist Party has relentlessly broken up entrenched interests, partly to prevent rich people from gaining political power and partly to spread material benefits throughout the country. It’s rise suggests that a country can grow powerful when it trains a lot of engineers and puts them to work, even under less-than-great institutional arrangements. In the words of one 1991 paper written by a trio of economists, “Our evidence shows that countries with a higher proportion of engineering college majors grow faster; whereas countries with a higher proportion of law concentrators grow more slowly.” Engineers are part of the reason that China has grown so much wealthier, despite its wavering commitment to secure property rights.

An official like Li Zaiyong might be more interested in building a gleaming hospital filled with sophisticated equipment. Their attention drifts, however, when it comes to installing the trained technicians capable of operating the facility, since the Communist Party is better at rewarding new construction than health outcomes.

The control neurosis of the engineers is the fundamental limit to China’s power. But it will also push China to be an advanced manufacturer with dominant positions in many of the high-tech supply chains of the twenty-first century, with military capacity to match and a good chance to challenge US hegemony in Asia.