In November 2012, Xi Jinping, an engineer educated at Tsinghua University, became General Secretary of the CCP Central Committee and China's top leader. He was preceded in this role by Hu Jintao, another Tsinghua-trained engineer, who himself succeeded another engineer, Jiang Zemin. Before Li Keqiang, an economist, became the current premier, his most recent predecessors were Wen Jiabao, a geologist, and Zhu Rongji, and Li Peng, both engineers. In the Politburo Standing Committee of both the 16th and 17th Central Committees, eight out of nine members were engineers. Anyone who wants to understand how the top ranks of CCP leadership became dominated by engineers, and in particular by Tsinghua engineering graduates, should read Joel Andreas's excellent book, Rise of the Red Engineers.
Rise of the Red Engineers is one of the most valuable contributions to the China field in recent years. It employs a well-researched social history of Tsinghua University during the Communist era, grounded in extensive field interviews and contemporary documentary sources, to address one the most fundamental questions about post-Mao China: how did a country so deeply in the throes of radical class-levelling during the Cultural Revolution become dominated within a relatively short time by a new class whose background combined technical training in elite schools with high-level Party credentials, wielding a thoroughly technocratic vision of national development?
Andreas takes a convincingly theorized structuralist approach to this question. Using Bordieu's concept of three forms of capital – economic, cultural and political – he argues that during the Mao era, with economic capital eliminated, China became the site of class conflict between a traditional educated elite with cultural capital and a new peasant revolutionary elite with political capital. Within this framework, Andreas builds a compelling challenge to Konrad and Szelenyi's Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, the classic treatment of cultural-political dynamics in Leninist states. Where Konrad and Szelenyi argued, based on their experience of communism in Eastern Europe, that the creation of a Saint-Simone style educated elite to rule a technocratic state was actually the underlying aim of the Leninist founders, Andreas argues that the emergence of a new class in China was neither intentional nor historically inevitable, but a contingent product of conflict and circumstances.
Andreas's argument hinges on his contention that Marxist class-levelling was a fundamental and sustained goal of China's revolutionary cadres. Where others have claimed that the relatively short duration of class-levelling campaigns in the Soviet Union, followed quickly by co-optation and blending of political and educated elites, is evidence of an underlying technocratic vision, Andreas counters that protracted attempts in China to eliminate the institutions of class privilege, culminating in the Cultural Revolution, indicate the genuineness of this objective. It was in fact Mao's simultaneous attacks on traditional educated elites and new political elites alike during the Cultural Revolution that turned both groups against the class-levelling project and led ultimately to their consolidation as a single entity. The creation of the new technocratic class in China, argues Rise of the Red Engineers, was an ironic consequence of the Chinese Communist program to eliminate class altogether.
Andreas's empirical basis for this line of argument is his study of the Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua, which became an iconic battleground for warring Red Guard factions. His evidence includes 98 interviews with former Tsinghua university and middle school students and teachers, along with letters, newspapers and Red Guard publications from the period. A central figure in the narrative is Kuai Dafu, the student Red Guard leader who instigated factional attacks that led to the famed “100-day battle” on campus in which 13 people were killed and hundreds injured. It is through the eyes of the participants in these events that the reader sees the turn against permanent class struggle and the emergence of common purpose between formerly antagonistic groups. (Those interested in a different interpretation of the events at Tsinghua may refer to Andrew Walder's recent study.)
A flaw in the book is the omission of relevant work on the political history of Chinese science (for example by Richard P. Suttmeier, Wang Zuoyue and Alice Lyman Miller), which follows the same tortuous dance of red and expert through the terrain of alternating class-levelling campaigns and retrenchments. The result of this omission is a failure to appreciate the alternate path taken by scientists such as Fang Lizhi, who responded to this experience by becoming an outspoken democracy and human rights advocate. Andreas unfortunately lumps Fang together with his antagonist, regime supporter and fellow physicist Qian Xuesen, as examples of scientists seeking class privilege in the new technocratic order. This construction fails to acknowledge Fang's open criticism of Deng Xiaoping's technocratic regime and the role of at least some intellectuals in promoting democratic, rather than technocratic, change.
Rise of the Red Engineers makes important contributions to several different literatures, including Chinese intellectual history, Cultural Revolution studies, sociology of science and technology, comparative history of Leninist regimes, and political sociology generally. With an historical narrative that follows the entire arc of PRC history, reflected in the Tsinghua microcosm, the book makes a splendid addition to the reading list for any course on contemporary China.
