The Soviet Union Politburo also had a lot of engineers. "43 percent of Politburo members attained higher education credentials during their life, while in a clo

The Soviet Union Politburo also had a lot of engineers. "43 percent of Politburo members attained higher education credentials during their life, while in a close second place, 32 percent of members earned an education in technical engineering." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo_of_the_Communist_Par... FWIW, Brezhnev was a metallurgical engineer. While I think the Soviet Union comparison would be relevant to the article, the only connections I could find are: > At various points in China’s recent past, the entirety of the senior leadership, all nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, had degrees in engineering, and this was engineering of a very Soviet sort. and > ... what the Chinese are interested in is being an engineer of the soul, which is a phrase from Joseph Stalin that Xi Jinping has recently repeated. Note that Stalin's phrase is, more fully, "As comrade Olesha aptly expressed himself, writers are engineers of human souls" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineers_of_the_human_soul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineers_of_the_human_soul and Xi Jinping's is: "In 2018, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, stated that “Teachers are the engineers of the human soul and the inheritors of human civilization. They carry the important task of spreading knowledge, spreading ideas, spreading truth, shaping soul, shaping life, and shaping newcomers. The fundamental task of education must be nurturing capable young people well-prepared to join the socialist cause. Better education and guidance are needed to build the noble ideal of Communism and the common ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics among the students.”" That comes across as less top-down or state-controlled than implied in the text, and more metaphorical.