To reflect on when people complain that the Cabinet is full of Oxbridge lawyers

[fivemack]

The Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party

Name	Went to university	Studied
Hu Jintao	Tsinghua	Hydraulic engineering
Wu Bangguo	Tsinghua	Electron tube engineering
Wen Jiabao	Beijing Institute of Geology	PhD in geomechanics
Jia Qinglin	Shijiazhuang Industrial Management School (Hebei, 200km from Beijing)	Industrial enterprise planning
Li Changchun	Harbin Institute of Technology	Electrical engineering
Xi Jinping	Tsinghua	Chemical engineering
Li Keqiang	Peking University	LLB; PhD in economics
He Guoqiang	Beijing Institute of Chemical Engineering	Inorganic chemistry
Zhou Yongkang	Beijing Petroleum Institute	Geophysical survey and exploration

What I don't know is whether there's ever been a US or UK cabinet with this high a concentration of engineers.

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Is that the complete list, or are there others?

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

There's a Politburo of twenty-something, which has a standing committee of nine, and apparently most power lies in the latter.

It's not clear what education all of the others have, but a quick sampling brings up an engineer, a couple of non-university-educated, and (unexpectedly) someone with a degree in philosophy...

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

It's Charlie Stross' Technocratic movement brought to life.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Do you mind if I nick this?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Go ahead. It does suggest that, if you want another half-dozen Heinleins, wait twenty years and learn Chinese.

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

I'm willing to bet the old Soviet Union's politburo was up there too back in the day...that's Stalinism for you. Pretty big on big (applied) science ;)

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Chasing biographies of Soviet politicos from forty years ago is sufficiently tiresome that I'd like only to do this once; when would be the most engineer-ridden kind of date? I would guess either mid-Brezhnev or early Khrushchev; October 1961 or March 1976.

I started doing the exercise for the current Indian cabinet, but that has twenty-nine members - good old-fashioned Ministries of Steel, Ministries of Mines, Ministries of Non-Resident Indians - and their biographies are not necessarily on-line