Beginning in 1881, thousands of Chinese civil engineers studied in the United States, acquiring the skills and experience necessary to construct railways, roads, and canals in China. In Engineering Trouble, Thorben Pelzer traces the lives and work of these engineers during the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike prior works that have focused on technocratic institutions or engineering accomplishments, Pelzer offers a valuable look into the minds and experiences of educated engineers who sought to modernize China.
Repeatedly, as Pelzer shows, Chinese engineers attempted to build or renovate civil infrastructure during the Republican era (1911–1949), but unstable political and economic circumstances hampered their work. Inability to achieve their goals resulted in personal discontent among engineers who saw their efforts stymied by official corruption and foreign imperialism. The resulting discontent, as Pelzer stresses, formed a crucial part of these embattled engineers’ professional identity.
In seven chapters, the book traces the education and work of civil engineers (Ling Hongxun, Peng Binglu, Tan Zhen, Wang Jingchun, Xue Zhoubin, Yang Baoling, and Zhang Jichun), who trained in the United States and returned to China to pursue their careers. The first chapter focuses on these engineers’ educations in the United States, examining how they formed nationalist, cosmopolitan, and democratic views while uniting around the goal of modernizing China’s infrastructure. The second chapter traces the planned rebuilding of the Grand Canal by American and Chinese engineers between 1915 and 1922. When the Grand Canal project failed to advance beyond surveys due to warlord interference and lack of funding, the engineers became frustrated and disillusioned with China’s political instability.
The third chapter focuses on Wang Jingchun’s attempts to lead the Chinese Eastern Railway. This joint Sino-Soviet railway was originally a Russian imperial enterprise, and the collision of Chinese and Soviet priorities stymied Wang’s attempts to run an efficient transportation system, leading to his resignation in 1924. Thereafter, Pelzer devotes two chapters to the rise and fall of the Association of Chinese & American Engineers (ACAE), a professional organization that helped form engineers’ identities as members of a transnational educated cohort bound together by shared values. Despite attempts to promote professional and technical standards, the ACAE collapsed in the face of anti-foreign nationalism during the Nanjing decade (1928–1937). In Guizhou, as Pelzer discusses, strong warlords enabled road construction, thus forcing engineers to compromise their democratic values to achieve their professional goals. Likewise, the case of Ling Hongxun, who designed railroads and roads for the KMT in 1932–1945, illustrates how the KMT party-state employed fear and intimidation to force engineers into unwanted or difficult assignments. This state terror enabled technical successes but bred a new form of discontent among the engineers.
The chief strengths of this book derive from the author’s diverse source base and novel research methodologies. Pelzer uses diaries, memoirs, engineering documents, and contemporary journals to analyze the mindsets of the engineers. His detailed research and concise writing bring the engineers to life for the reader. The author and his colleagues have also compiled the online Chinese Engineers Relational Database (https://home.uni-leipzig.de/cerd/), which is a remarkable resource and should prove useful for future research.
Pelzer’s sociological and historical approach makes it possible to analyze the contradictions and paradoxes that defined the engineers’ thinking. They favored democratic institutions but sought the support of a strong centralized state. They favored egalitarianism and claimed that their work benefitted all classes but jealously guarded their privileges while gatekeeping their profession. The engineers emphasized that their professional autonomy transcended political divides but depended on the state for funding and support. By exposing these contradictions and complexities, the book transforms heroic engineers into nuanced historical agents.
Pelzer engages with prior studies by Elisabeth Köll and William Kirby, arguing that their institutional approach neglects the work of the individual engineers. According to Pelzer, engineers cannot be understood through technocratic institutions but must be analyzed in terms of their personal and professional histories. Instead of focusing on the achievements and failures of engineers during the Republican era, Pelzer departs from earlier historiography by using their trials and tribulations to unpack the nature of professionalization, status, and identity. As he demonstrates, civil engineers saw themselves as well-educated, competent professionals dedicated to building a technologically advanced, democratic, and egalitarian China. Yet Pelzer misses an opportunity to elucidate the larger significance of these engineers and their place in Republican China. The reader is left wondering, for example, whether their experiences of frustration and discontent alienated the engineers from the KMT or led them to abandon service to that regime.
Overall, Pelzer has conducted impressive research on the lives, work, and professional identities of Chinese engineers. He illuminates the contradictory personalities of engineers while exposing how their professional identity formed. His database is also a groundbreaking example of applying modern social sciences methodologies to Chinese history.
