Joel Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class

Abstract

In this timely study, Joel Andreas examines the “red engineers” who were trained at China’s elite educational institutions in the 1950s and early to mid-1960s to be both “red and expert” and then in the early 2000s began to enter the top positions in the Chinese party and governmental leadership. As a group, these red experts still occupy the top leadership positions in China today. In his study, Andreas presents a fascinating account of how China in the early 1950s emulated the Soviet Union’s system of education of the 1920s and 1930s, excluding the radical period of 1928–1931, and of how Mao during the Cultural Revolution rejected this Soviet educational model. Andreas brings to light the intersection of many important themes in contemporary Chinese history, including: the “class-leveling” system, the twists and turns in the efforts to establish a new system of higher education during the Mao era and thereafter, and the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) viewed from the perspective of the post-1949 institutional history of Tsinghua University in Beijing. The book is impressively researched and documented, and the findings and arguments are clearly and cogently presented. Andreas selects as his case study the post-revolutionary history of China’s elite educational institution in engineering, Tsinghua University, which became the “cradle of red engineers” (p. 61) in the 1950s and early and mid-1960s. During his twoyears of on-site research at Tsinghua University in the late 1990s, Andreas interviewed almost one hundred current and former employees as well as alumni, including the infamous student rebel of the Cultural Revolution, Kuai Dafu. The author also relies upon documentary evidence concerning the history of Tsinghua University during this period. The core concerns of the book are the policies and practices of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) aimed at “class-leveling” in post-1949 China. Andreas employs a modified version of the conceptual framework originally developed by Pierre Bourdieu in analyzing changes in the class structure of stable Western capitalist societies. In Bourdieu’s original typology, three types of “capital” are identified: East Asia (2010) 27:399–401 DOI 10.1007/s12140-010-9125-9