China’s ‘Engineer Dividend’ Is Paying Off Big Time
Graduates from lower-tier universities and smaller cities are coming up with dazzling innovations.
The G1 Humanoid from Unitree Robotics. Its founder, Wang Xingxing, only managed to attend a local university in Shanghai.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergDeepSeek has changed how the world sees China. Worries over the country’s “3D” problem — that deflation, debt and demographics are structurally hampering growth — have melted away. Instead, investors are talking about how the world’s second-largest economy can take on the US and challenge its technological dominance.
There is the prevailing sense that China’s “engineer dividend” is finally paying off. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of engineers has ballooned from 5.2 million to 17.7 million, according to the State Council. That reservoir can help the nation move up the production possibility frontier, the thinking goes.