Xi Jinping never practiced as a chemical engineer, however, being an anointed princeling destined for officialdom (and of course, he had to delay his education because of the CR). Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin are better examples, actually having worked as engineers for a number of years before becoming politicians.

Hard to use princeling in the sense to convey privilege here. His father was sentenced to labor camp during the Cultural Revolution and he himself worked in forced labor for seven years:

"The father was detained and imprisoned and spent 16 years in a labor camp, plunging the family into poverty. During the Cultural Revolution, a 15-year-old Mr. Xi was banished to a poverty-stricken village in northern China where, for seven years, he labored with peasants, eating corn chaff bread and sleeping in a flea-infested bed."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/opinion/chinas-heir-appare...

Yes, but he was quickly rehabilitated after Mao’s death, and anyways, everyone was in the same boat.

Xi is the canonical example of his so named “lost generation:” forced to leave high school early, sent down to the country side, rehabilitated and given basically an cursory education as a legacy admit to Tsinghua. He is the first Chinese leader since Mao who can’t speak a word of English, less educated than his predecessors, more autocratic (vs. Hu), less outspoken (vs. Jiang) and more on ideological message.

China is run by politicians not technocrats, but they are measured on success more than populist vote which has some interesting trade-offs.

They must have degrees in grafting because that seems to be the only real engineering going on in the upper circles.