Lawyers

Hoisted from comments in Naked Capitalism: ‘By 2020 all nine members of the Chinese Politburo’s standing committee had trained as engineers.’

In the US, there are over 1.3 million lawyers, so about 4 for every 1,000 people. In fact-

‘In terms of absolute numbers, the American legal profession was the largest in the world as of 2015, and it is thought to be the largest in the world in proportion to domestic population.’ (Wikipedia)

A common law system requires legions of lawyers while a civil law systems require legions of clerks as the first argues about every facet of the process, while the latter just checks if laws where broken and if so, assigns a predefined penalty.

China uses civil law. Civil law lawyers are trained to see that the process is fair and legal, not to argue what the process should be, so they don’t really make good politicians.

One other US vs. China comment: some of the dominant donors on the right are engineers--the raise-by-a-Nazi Kochs. Yes, the Koch's nanny was a member of Hitler's party.

But Charles and David Koch are engineers of extraction (actually chemistry, but predominantly petroleum). Petroleum engineering remains one of the areas in which the US maintains international dominance. Herbert Hoover was another engineer of extraction (mining), so perhaps that's a common thread in US politics too.