Engineers go hard in one direction, and if they perceive something isn’t working, they switch with no loss of speed toward another. They don’t suffer criticism from humanist softies. Change in China can be so dramatic because so few voices are part of the political process. To a first approximation, the twenty-four men who make up the Political Bureau (the highest echelon of the Communist Party, usually shortened to Politburo) are the only people permitted to do politics. Once they’ve settled questions of strategy, the only remaining task is for the bureaucracy to sort out the details. But
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