For years, China and the US had two different philosophies when it came to tech. While the US focused on making managers and CEOs wealthy to encourage them to generate tech ideas, China concentrated on churning out engineers.

According to Bloomberg, between 2000 and 2020, China inflated its engineering ranks from a modest 5.2 million to 17.7 million.

Investors are waking up to the fact that this so-called “engineer dividend” might be worth more than a mountain of Evergrande debt and a few dozen ghost cities.

DeepSeek, China’s latest entry into the AI arena, should have been expected. When nearly half of the world's top AI researchers obtain their undergraduate degrees in your universities, it’s not so much a surprise as a statistical inevitability.

By comparison, the US barely scrapes together 18 per cent of that intellectual pool while shelling out tons of cash to mint new millionaires – who arguably don’t create new ideas.

Researchers in China cost roughly one-eighth of what their US counterparts demand. While American engineers are too busy Googling their worth on LinkedIn, their Chinese equivalents are already shipping products. Almost half of China's engineers are under 30, compared to 20 per cent in the United States who are over 30.

Of course, this miracle didn’t fall from the sky. President Xi Jinping invested substantial resources and political will in higher education. Meanwhile, in the US, education standards have declined as parents focus on book burnings or obsess over toilet issues.

In 2000, only 10 per cent of high school graduates attended university. Now it's 40 per cent, and most of them are elbowing each other to study engineering.

While the US bickered over TikTok bans and fumbles with semiconductor subsidies, China is quietly building a generation of tech workers who are young, hungry, and not burdened by six-figure student loans.