Rise of the Red Engineers explains the tumultuous origins of the class of technocratic officials who rule China today. In a fascinating account, author Joel Andreas chronicles how two mutually hostile groups-the poorly educated peasant revolutionaries who seized power in 1949 and China's old educated elite-coalesced to form a new dominant class. After dispossessing the country's propertied classes, Mao and the Communist Party took radical measures to eliminate class distinctions based on education, aggravating antagonisms between the new political and old cultural elites. Ultimately, however, Mao's attacks on both groups during the Cultural Revolution spurred inter-elite unity, paving the way-after his death-for the consolidation of a new class that combined their political and cultural resources. This story is told through a case study of Tsinghua University, which-as China's premier school of technology-was at the epicenter of these conflicts and became the party's preferred training ground for technocrats, including many of China's current leaders.
"Rise of the Red Engineers is a welcome contrast to scholarship on contemporary China that dismisses the Mao years as crazy or as irrelevant to the reform period. Andreas takes the ideology and policies of the Mao era seriously and judges the results of Mao's programs by their own stated goals ... Everyone interested in contemporary China and modern Chinese history should read this book."
China Journal
"Joel Andreas focuses on China's premier technology university as the keystone of this effort, explains why the university erupted in violence during the Cultural Revolution, and analyzes the shifts in status today of the political, technocratic, and moneyed elites. This is one of the very best books about China that I have read in recent years."
Jonathan Unger, Director, Contemporary China Center, Australian National University
"Andreas provides a sweeping sociological history of Tsinghua University, told through the lens of class formation and the politics of social mobility. ... This book is absorbing reading for those interested in the tortuous course of the Chinese revolution."
Andrew G. Walder, the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor of Sociology, Stanford Unive
