It's not about the specific degree the leaders hold. Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered, and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society.

The US, on the hand, is obsessed with individual rights, and any sort of collective action that threatens those rights is extensively litigated.

This is really what Wang's thesis boils down to, and which of course it's an oversimplification, there is a kernel of truth in there.

> society can be engineered

and the hidden implication is that there's a correct trade off to be made (because engineering is about trade offs).

So what happens to those people whose gotten the bad end of the deal? If china builds a damn, the villages downstream gets moved (with small compensation that is not commensurate with the value of the dam being made).

It's also why the high speed rail in california is costing so much in the US vs something similar in china.

That's better than a culture that sees every transaction solely in terms of corporate profit and doesn't consider the existence of trade offs at all.

The result is that far more people get far worse deals far more of the time. Healthcare, the jobs market, education, climate damage, grift in high places - it's all the same issue, and a lot of the problems are rooted in denial of reality on spurious "economic" grounds.

>Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered, and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society.

Isn't that a trait of the left in general?