Winner of the 2009 Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice. Rise of the Red Engineers is the fourteenth title in the East-West Center book series, Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific, published by Stanford University Press. How did the Chinese Communist Party, which came to power promising to eliminate class distinctions, including those based on education, end up creating a highly hierarchical society presided over by technocratic officials? Joel Andreas chronicles how the CCP came to abandon class leveling in favor of technocratic policies. After 1949, poorly educated peasant revolutionaries uneasily shared the top echelons of society with members of China's educated elite. These contending elites gradually coalesced, as revolutionary cadres' children gained educational credentials and intellectuals' children joined the ruling party. It was Mao's attacks on both groups during the Cultural Revolution, however, that spurred inter-elite political unity and paved the way--after his death--for the consolidation of a technocratic class that combined their political and cultural resources. This story is told through a case study of Tsinghua University, China's premier school of technology, which was at the epicenter of these conflicts and became the preferred training ground for technocrats, including many of China's current leaders. | Details and ordering information at
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Winner of the 2009 Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice. Rise of the Red Engineers is the fourteenth title in the East-West Center book series, Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific, published by Stanford University Press. How did the Chinese Communist Party, which came to power promising to eliminate class distinctions, including those based on education, end up creating a highly hierarchical society presided over by technocratic officials? Joel Andreas chronicles how the CCP came to abandon class leveling in favor of technocratic policies. After 1949, poorly educated peasant revolutionaries uneasily shared the top echelons of society with members of China's educated elite. These contending elites gradually coalesced, as revolutionary cadres' children gained educational credentials and intellectuals' children joined the ruling party. It was Mao's attacks on both groups during the Cultural Revolution, however, that spurred inter-elite political unity and paved the way--after his death--for the consolidation of a technocratic class that combined their political and cultural resources. This story is told through a case study of Tsinghua University, China's premier school of technology, which was at the epicenter of these conflicts and became the preferred training ground for technocrats, including many of China's current leaders. | Details and ordering information at
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