Just the Facts; Best Country to be a technocrat--China is led by a group of engineers who love projects, not lofty ideas.(Cover Story)

Byline: Sarah Schafer

Wu Jisong, a compact man with glasses and an easy smile, holds one of China's most difficult jobs. In a nation beset with droughts, Wu is in charge of making sure there is enough water not only for people to drink but for the textile and other industries that drive the country's rapidly growing economy--and guzzle natural resources at a troubling rate.

A mathematician whose business card bills him as a Ph.D. in the "technological economy," Wu likes to think of his challenge in numerical terms. He knows, for example, that China needs an extra 40 billion cubic meters of water annually. He also knows that the country's agriculture sector wastes about six times more water than the U.S. farming industry. Rather than give him a headache, the data soothe him. "If the thoughts are clear, then there is no pain," Wu says. "We just go step by step."

He's in the right country. China has some of the world's most daunting technical challenges--and perhaps the greatest number of high-ranking technocrats to deal with them. This is a nation of micromanagers: nearly all 24 members of the Politburo, the country's ruling body, have technical degrees from universities with names such as the Beijing Petroleum Institute, the Harbin Military Engineering Institute and the No. 1 Ordnance Technical School. Each of the nine members of the Politburo's Standing Committee is an engineer by training. And President Hu Jintao and other top pols are graduates of Beijing's Tsinghua University, China's MIT. Wu himself is the No. 2 person in China's Bureau of Water Resources and a member of the National People's Congress. He worked on the plan for the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest construction project.

In the 1980s, when the Middle Kingdom began opening up to the world, the country lagged far behind in science and technology. The government decided to recruit brainiacs at every level to catch up. The technocrats hatched ambitious programs in such areas as satellite communications and cell-phone production that have helped the country move quickly beyond making shoes ...