Victor Shih

It's just not required.

You just learn a bunch of math.

You learn a lot of engineering if you want to be an engineer.

And then there are some art classes for you to select.

You can select the art classes or, you know, maybe one econ class.

For a while, you know, learning economics was popular.

So in the 1990s, all the engineering students would have taken an econ class.

But people who were trained before that, they were not.

The one class that is still required for everybody is government ideology.

So, in fact, the requirement for government ideology has been ratcheted up in recent years so that now – because I look at all the applications of students from China and I look at what classes they've taken.

Now, once a year, they have to take a class called Situation and Policy, which is basically just the Chinese government's perspective on all kinds of different issues.

But that's not economics.

It's not accounting.

It's not some basic skill.

It's just telling people what the government prefers in a given topic.

So that's a traditional reason.

So you can have some very high-level officials.

Even if they have a PhD in nuclear engineering, they may not know very much about how the market works, how society works, so on and so forth.

The new reason is that we have one very, very powerful figure in the Chinese Communist Party.

such that even if you're a Politburo member, which used to give you some autonomy in the domain that you govern over, that is no longer the case.