Rise of the Red Engineers is a powerful and lucid book in the fields of Chinese studies, sociology, and comparative politics. Tackling the phenomenon that “China today is ruled by Red engineers,” that is, those who received academic and political training at elite technical universities, Joel Andreas aims to understand the reasons behind it. In his own words, “I seek to explain how and why the Chinese Communists ultimately replaced Marx's vision of a classless society with one worthy of Saint-Simon” (p. 2). Contrary to the New Class theory's argument that the Communist parties were the vanguard of the intelligentsia, Andreas maintains that it is not true that the victorious Communist parties always intended to build a technocratic society. The key research question thus becomes: Why—despite forceful efforts at class leveling—did the Communist project result in the creation of a new dominant class of Red experts? Andreas focuses on a single educational institution, Qinghua University, to get at his research question. The choice is a compelling one: Qinghua is located at the pinnacle of both the academic and political credentialing systems, the key institutional foundations of the technocratic order.

In broad strokes, the story can be told as follows. In the first years after the 1949 revolution, economic and cultural capital were concentrated in the hands of the old elite classes while political capital lay with the new Communist elite. The regime first redistributed economic capital, dispossessing the old elites and converting the means of production into state and collective property. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) then turned to redistributing cultural capital to further undermine the advantages of the old elite, an endeavor that reached its apex during the Cultural Revolution; however, a principal target of the Cultural Revolution, at Mao's instigation, was the concentration of political capital in the hands of the new Communist elite. Andreas argues that Mao's simultaneous attacks on both groups unintentionally helped forge inter-elite unity. After Mao's death in 1976, the new leadership renounced class leveling and facilitated the consolidation of a new technocratic class with roots in both the old and new elites, combining their political and cultural assets.

The book is divided into four chronological parts, the first covering 1949 to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the political and cultural foundations of class power at Qinghua, where, following the CCP's victory, the university's party organization became the new locus of power while the cultural foundations of the old educated elite were assaulted. Chapter 3 recounts the emergence of the Red engineers. The CCP's determination to combine Redness and expertise became a formula for class conciliation and promoted elite convergence by encouraging the new political elite to accumulate cultural capital and the old educated elite to accumulate political capital. But the prevailing political culture presented stubborn obstacles to realizing this vision, which was also strongly opposed by Mao.

Part 2 recounts the early years of the Cultural Revolution. Chapter 4 focuses on the struggles at Qinghua's attached middle school, which, after Mao made targets of both new political and old educated elites in 1966, quickly split into two antagonistic factions based on family origin. The factional struggles at Qinghua University, the subject of chapter 5, were quite different. Here, the divide was between radicals who attacked the status quo and moderates who defended it. To be noted, Red Guard factionalism is hardly a new topic, and similar interpretations of factionalism in urban middle schools and at Qinghua University have been made, but Andreas's study moves one step further to explain why factionalism in urban elite middle schools and universities was so different. At urban elite middle schools, the vast majority of students came from either old educated elite families or the new political elite. However, at Qinghua University, nearly 40 percent of students came from peasant or worker families, which prevented the polarization of the campus into two camps based on elite identities. Andreas concludes that although the Cultural Revolution in these schools began with an eruption of inter-elite conflict, it ended up in a process of inter-elite conciliation.

Part 3 brilliantly covers the later years of the Cultural Revolution when Mao attempted to institutionalize the radical class-leveling program that had led him to launch the movement. Chapter 6 describes how the introduction of the workers’ propaganda team into Qinghua, due in part to its “sycophantic” character, truncated the significance of the mass supervision it was meant to coordinate. Chapter 7 analyzes the impact of Cultural Revolution education policies, which significantly diminished class hierarchy in the cultural fields. Chapter 8 focuses on the recommendation system, which, though it did severely disrupt the transmission of cultural capital across generations and facilitated dispersion of educational attainment, failed to dislodge mechanisms for the reproduction of political capital.

Part 4 examines the establishment of a technocratic order after Mao's death in 1976 and its subsequent evolution. Chapters 9 and 10 recount how the academic and political credentialing systems were rebuilt to select and groom a stream of Red experts to staff the upper levels of the state bureaucracy, and trace the convergence of old and new elites into a consolidated technocratic class. Chapter 11 considers the consequences of the economic reforms that began in the 1990s, which have left China's Red engineers presiding over a peculiar variety of capitalism.

In his conclusion, Andreas compares the Chinese and Soviet Communist experiments to understand why, despite forcefully pursuing class leveling, both regimes ended up dominated by technocratic elites. For Andreas, pragmatism rather than ideology is the key in explaining this technocratic turn, a pragmatism underpinned by important elite interests. Ultimately, elites protected their vested interests, though whether their persistence reflects universal human nature, the resilience of tradition, or the functionality of national development, Andreas does not say.

It is to his great credit that Andreas takes the Communist class-leveling project seriously, and he pays respect to the historical actors empathetically. He never pretends that Qinghua is typical, but by effectively situating Qinghua in the national context, his case study yields convincing larger implications. If one were to nitpick, it could be said that part 4 is not as strong as the others, that chapter 11 is somewhat under-sourced, and that Andreas's resistance to the narrative of Communist technocracy's inevitability still leaves one wanting a more explicit discussion on the matter of elite motivation.

As someone who grew up in China in the 1980s and 1990s and whose father is a Red engineer trained at Qinghua University, I feel keenly about the matters raised here. Communist China was never a classless society, and, because of the vested interests of its elite groups, it will not become one. Andreas compelled my own serious reflection, and I greatly appreciate his empathic and thoughtful work.