《经济学人》工程vs服务
2025.10.4
中国执政党共产党将于10月20日至23日召开一次大型会议，审议国家下一个五年规划。该规划将涵盖未来十年，并将对更长远的决策产生深远的影响。约370名党的中央委员会成员将出席会议，其中包括部长、省长、将军、一位历史学家，甚至还有一位记者。在约200名拥有投票权的成员中，超过50人拥有工程学位。他们将进行大量的讨论。
与上一轮计划一样，新计划必将涵盖一系列“重大工程项目”，从恢复湿地到改进高性能合金，不一而足。这些举措将吸引全球最大的工程劳动力队伍，据估计，到2023年，中国工程劳动力队伍将超过2000万。中国也希望吸引外国优秀人才。10月1日，中国推出了一项新的“K”签证，允许科学、数学和工程专业的毕业生入境，即使没有雇主担保。这激怒了许多中国本土科技人才，他们对自身资历不足的暗示感到不满。
工程已成为中国的骄傲和力量之源。正如《Breakneck》一书作者王丹（Dan Wang）所说，中国是一个“工程大国”。此书是一本关于中国的新书，内容清晰，内容翔实。无论这个国家被贴上什么样的标签，它真正的投入在于基础设施建设和工业化、桥梁建设和零部件制造，以及一些反乌托邦的社会工程实践，例如之前的独生子女政策和“零新冠”制度。
无论这个国家被贴上什么样的标签，它真正的承诺是基础设施和工业、桥梁和小部件、建筑和制造——以及一些反乌托邦的社会工程实践，例如以前的独生子女政策和零新冠制度。
王先生将中国重塑世界、重塑民众的渴望与美国的惰性进行了对比。他表示，自己现在生活的国家是一个“律师社会，它封锁了所有能封锁的，无论好坏”。他的书让人想起比尔·克林顿的一句话。据说，他在1998年访华时曾感叹：“你们的工程师太多了，而我们的律师太多了……我们换换口味吧！”
中国对工程学的偏爱如今变得更加紧迫。中国希望掌握“制胜”技术，例如先进的芯片制造设备，而这些技术不再依赖从美国及其盟友进口。学生们对此做出了积极回应。在普通本科生中，有36%的人选修了该专业。近年来，即使高校入学人数激增，这一比例仍在上升。中国评论员认为，中国的科技进步代表着“工程红利”，将取代过去几代人获得的人口红利。
但有些经济力量，即使是工程强国也无法抗拒。充斥着工程师的领导层和学生群体，也未能阻止制造业和建筑业在GDP中的占比下降，这是生产力和需求根深蒂固的趋势造成的。克林顿先生开玩笑说中国工程师太多了或许错了。但最近的证据表明，中国确实有太多的建设者和制造者。“‘极速发展’和‘工程国家’这两个标签在今天已经不像在20世纪80年代到21世纪10年代那样贴切了，”美国评论员乔纳森·塞纳在一篇对王先生著作的深刻评论中指出。
长期以来，经济学家一直认为工业化呈“驼峰形”。随着工人从农场转移到工厂，制造业在经济中的占比不断增长。但随着人们变得更加富裕，他们倾向于将支出转向服务业，制造业的比重随之下降。价格变化会加剧这些趋势。由于生产率的快速增长，而经济其他领域却无法与之匹敌，制成品往往变得相对便宜。除非统计人员保持价格不变，否则制成品在GDP中的比重会降低。
工程学的吸引力似乎也呈现出驼峰式的曲线，随着制造业重要性的提升而上升，而随着一个国家的去工业化而下降。该学科似乎在马来西亚等中上收入国家最受欢迎（见图表）。在前苏联加盟共和国等共产主义遗留国家，工程学也同样受到青睐。在包含职业教育的国际数据中，中国并非个例。而且，中国似乎也在本世纪初跨越了一道坎：入读工程专业的普通本科生比例从2001年的36%下降到2004年至2011年的32%以下。
中国领导层一度似乎对这种模式习以为常。其涵盖2016-2020年的“十三五”规划设定了将服务业占GDP比重从2015年的50.5%提升至2020年的56%的目标。甚至领导人本人似乎也体现了这种演变。党内最高层工程师的数量有所下降。他们让位于管理学学生、社会科学家甚至律师。2013年，时任美国智库布鲁金斯学会研究员的李成撰文探讨了律师在中国政治阶层的“快速崛起”。李成写道：“这种持续的精英转型……可能会影响领导层的社会经济和政治政策。”
但事实并非如此。到了本世纪末，中国领导人下定决心，抵制中国经济向制造业转型。在唐纳德·特朗普的第一任总统任期内，出口管制几乎使中国一些最知名的科技公司陷入瘫痪，其中包括中兴通讯和华为。
对此，习近平主席强调，中国必须构建“完整”的工业体系，减少对其他产业的依赖，并增强其他产业对中国的依赖。2021年初批准的五年规划放弃了提高服务业在GDP占比的承诺，而是承诺保持制造业占比稳定。工程专业的学生比例已再次上升。中央委员会委员中的工程师人数也有所增加。
然而，这些政策的转变似乎并未缓解工业困境。中国制造业和建筑业的巨额产出正苦苦寻觅买家。新建住宅滞销于开发商的账簿。工业品出厂价近三年来持续下跌。尽管学生们乐于攻读工程学位，但这并不意味着他们也同样渴望亲自动手。根据招聘机构智联招聘去年的一项调查，只有 8% 的学生希望进入制造业。（超过四分之一的学生则希望进入 IT 行业，这表明他们对“字节”的偏爱远胜于“螺栓”。）根据秦芳及其成都西南财经大学同事 2022 年发表的一篇文章，即使在学习科学或工程学的人中，也只有 37% 的人从事工程相关的职业。
本月晚些时候，党的中央委员会及其庞大的工程师队伍将审议中国的下一个五年规划，届时它必须决定是应对这些趋势，还是顺应这些趋势。最近的政策信号表明，中国领导人可能再次强调扩大服务消费，以应对经济长期存在的需求不足。
如果真是这样，他们可以从毛泽东和江泽民两位前领导人都喜欢引用的道教寓言中寻求安慰。故事中，一位愚公决心用一把镐头铲平两座不便的山。在他将自己和子孙后代奉献给这项任务后，神灵对他的奉献精神报以微笑。他们为他移动了山峰，为前往他村庄的旅人扫清了道路。即使是这项神圣的工程，最终也是为了旅游观光。山峰移动了，取而代之的是服务业的繁荣。
CHINA’S RULING Communist Party will hold a giant conclave to review the country’s next five-year plan from October 20th-23rd. That plan will span the rest of the decade and shape decision-making for far longer. About 370 members of the party’s Central Committee will take part. They include ministers, provincial governors, generals, a historian and even a journalist. Of the 200 or so with voting rights, more than 50 have an engineering degree. They will have plenty to mull.
The new plan, like the last one, is guaranteed to include a feast of “major engineering projects”, from restoring wetlands to improving high-performance alloys. These initiatives will draw on the world’s biggest engineering workforce, which numbered over 20m in 2023, according to one estimate. And China hopes to draw on talented foreigners, too. On October 1st it introduced a new “K” visa that will admit science, maths and engineering graduates into the country even without a sponsoring employer. This has offended many among China’s homegrown tech talent, who resent the implication that their own credentials are somehow lacking.
Engineering has become a source of pride and power in China. The country is an “engineering state”, according to Dan Wang, author of “Breakneck”, a lucid new book about the country. Whatever labels the country attracts, its true commitment is to infrastructure and industry, bridges and widgets, building and making—as well as some dystopian exercises in social engineering, such as the former one-child policy and the zero-covid regime.
Whatever labels the country attracts, its true commitment is to infrastructure and industry, bridges and widgets, building and making—as well as some dystopian exercises in social engineering, such as the former one-child policy and the zero-covid regime.
Mr Wang contrasts China’s urge to remake the world and remould the population with American inertia. The country where he now lives, he says, is a “lawyerly society blocking everything it can, good and bad”. His book is reminiscent of a remark attributed to Bill Clinton. “You have too many engineers,” he is said to have exclaimed on a visit to China in 1998, “and we have too many lawyers…let’s trade!”
China’s predilection for engineering now has fresh urgency. China wants to master “chokehold” technologies, such as advanced chipmaking equipment, that it can no longer count on importing from America and its allies. Students are responding. Among regular undergraduates, 36% sign up for the discipline. The share has been increasing in recent years, even as university enrolments swell. Chinese commentators argue that the country’s advances in technology represent an “engineering dividend” to replace the demographic dividend it reaped in generations past.
But there are some economic forces which even the engineering state cannot bend to its will. A leadership and student body stuffed full of engineers has not prevented manufacturing and construction declining as a share of GDP, the result of deep-seated trends in productivity and demand. Mr Clinton may have been wrong to joke that China had too many engineers. But recent evidence suggests it does have too many builders and makers. “The labels ‘breakneck’ and ‘engineering state’ fit less neatly today than they did in the 1980s through the 2010s,” argues Jonathon Sine, a commentator based in America, in a thoughtful review of Mr Wang’s book.
Economists have long argued that industrialisation is“hum p-shaped ”. As workers move from farms to factories, manufacturing grows as a share of the economy. But as people grow richer, they tend to switch their spending to services, and manufacturing recedes. These trends can be amplified by price changes. Manufactured goods often become relatively cheap, thanks to rapid gains in productivity that are not matched in other parts of the economy. That reduces their weight in GDP, unless the statisticians hold prices constant.
It seems plausible that engineering’s appeal is also hump-shaped, rising as manufacturing gains in importance, then falling as a country deindustrialises. The discipline does seem most popular in upper-middle-income countries like Malaysia (see chart). It also looms large in countries with a communist legacy, like the former Soviet republics. China is not an outlier in the international data, which also include vocational education. And it, too, seemed to have crossed a hump in this century’s early years: the share of regular undergraduates enrolling in engineering fell from 36% in 2001 to under 32% from 2004 to 2011.
China’s leadership once seemed at peace with this pattern. Its 13th five-year plan, covering the years from 2016-20, set a goal of increasing the share of services in GDP from 50.5% in 2015 to 56% in 2020. Even the leaders themselves seemed to embody this evolution. The number of engineers in the highest ranks of the party declined. They gave way to students of management, social scientists and even lawyers. In 2013 Cheng Li, then of the Brookings Institution, an American thinktank, wrote about the “rapid rise” of the lawyers up China’s political ranks. “This ongoing elite transformation… will likely shape the leadership’s socioeconomic and political policies,” Mr Li wrote.
But it did not. By the end of the decade, China’s leaders became newly determined to resist the turn away from manufacturing. In Donald Trump’s first presidency, export controls almost crippled some of China’s most prominent technology firms, including ZTE and Huawei.
In response Mr Xi insisted that the country must build a “complete” industrial system that would make it less dependent on others and others more reliant on it. The five-year plan approved in early 2021 dropped the commitment to increase services’ share of GDP and promised instead to keep the share of manufacturing stable. The percentage of students enrolling in engineering was already rising again. The number of engineers among full members of the Central Committee also rose.
None of this turn in policy, however, seems to have arrested industrial woes. The prodigious output of China’s manufacturing and construction industries is struggling to find buyers. Newly built homes are sitting on developers’ books unsold. Factory-gate prices for industrial products have been falling for almost three years. And although students are happy to enroll in engineering degrees, that does not mean they are equally keen to get their hands dirty. According to a survey last year by Zhaopin, a recruitment agency, only 8% of students want to enter manufacturing. (Over a quarter want instead to go into IT, betraying a preference for bits over bolts.) Even among those who studied science or engineering, only 37% pursue engineeringrelated careers, according to an article in 2022 by Qin Fang and her colleagues at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu.
When the party’s Central Committee, with its big contingent of engineers, reviews China’s next five-year plan later this month, it must decide whether to fight these trends or surrender to them. Recent policy signals suggest China’s leaders may once again emphasise greater consumption of services, as an answer to the economy’s chronic shortage of demand.
f so, they can seek consolation in a Daoist fable that two former leaders, Mao Zedong and Jiang Zemin, both liked to cite. A foolish old man was determined to flatten two inconvenient mountains with little more than a pickaxe. After dedicating himself and his progeny to the task, the gods smiled on his dedication. They shifted the mountains on his behalf, clearing the way for travellers to reach his village. Even this divine engineering project was ultimately in the service of travel and tourism. The mountains moved and a service industry flourished in their place. ■