Rise of the Red Engineers

The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China's New Class

Joel Andreas

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804771108
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

PART ONE

Building Socialism (1949–1966)

Chapter One

Political Foundations of Class Power

On December 15, 1948, Communist troops advancing on Beijing arrived at the vicinity of Tsinghua University in the northeastern outskirts of the city. The day before, the university’s president, Mei Yiqi, had hastily left the campus and headed south to Nanjing, which for the moment remained in the hands of the retreating Nationalist government. Almost everyone else at the university, however, decided to stay. Most members of the Tsinghua faculty were from families of more than modest wealth and social standing, and many were certainly apprehensive about the Communists’ declared aim of radically redistributing wealth and alarmed by their brutal reputation. After years of war, however, many were also hopeful that a new regime would bring order and more honest government, and some were even sympathetic with the Communists’ promises of creating a more egalitarian society. To whatever extent they sympathized with the Communist Party, they knew they would have to accommodate themselves to the new order it would establish. The Communists were headed toward a decisive victory in the civil war, they had broad popular support, and they brooked no opposition.

On December 17, a delegation of Communist soldiers came to the Tsinghua campus to meet with representatives of the faculty, staff, and students; the purpose of the meeting was to make arrangements to safeguard university facilities. On one side of the meeting were erudite, well-groomed intellectuals; on the other side were battle-hardened peasant revolutionaries. The Communist delegation was headed by Liu Daosheng, a peasant from Hunan Province who had joined the Communist movement in 1928 and had served as a revolutionary soldier through the grim days of the Long March and the epic guerrilla war against the Japanese. Liu was now a political commissar in a massive army that had just crushed the Nationalist forces assigned to defend Beijing. The Tsinghua delegation was headed by Zhou Peiyuan, scion of a wealthy landowning family in Jiangsu Province whose father had been a scholar-official under the Qing dynasty. Zhou had graduated from Tsinghua in 1924 and had studied physics at the University of Chicago and under Albert Einstein at Princeton, before returning to teach at his alma mater.¹ The delegations and their leaders were in many ways typical of the two very distinct groups who would face each other in the top echelons of Chinese society during the first decades of Communist power.

Red-over-Expert Power Structure

The CCP was founded by intellectuals, but during two decades of armed insurrection in the countryside it became a party of peasants. Its ranks were filled by poor villagers who took up arms in the anti-Japanese and civil wars, and even most of its leaders were of rural origin and had relatively little education. Robert North and Ithiel Pool, who analyzed changes in the party’s top leadership during the decades it was fighting for power, documented how it was transformed by rural warfare. “Specifically, what was taking place was a rise in peasant leadership,” they wrote. “The rise of Mao to power and the emergence of Soviet areas in the hinterland were accompanied by the replacement of intellectuals of middle-class and upper-class backgrounds by sons of peasants.”² When the CCP took over China’s cities, it was able to deploy a formidable corps of battle-tested cadres to take control of government offices, factories, and schools. These cadres were young, but many of them already had years of administrative experience in rural Communist base areas populated by millions of people. Almost all of them were from the countryside and few had much formal education. In 1949, 80 percent of the party’s membership was of peasant origin and the great majority were illiterate or had only a grade-school education.³ Those who had risen in the party’s ranks were usually not from the poorest rural families, but rather from households that were moderately well-off by village standards and could afford to send at least one child to school; even the best educated among them, however, had rarely gone beyond middle school.⁴ Although many of the top Communist leaders were born into elite families and had joined the party while studying at universities, even at the highest levels of the party a far greater number had come from more humble village origins and had risen to leadership positions by demonstrating their organizing abilities and military prowess.

During its first decade in power, the CCP eliminated the main foundation supporting the power and social standing of the old elite classes by systematically confiscating their productive property. This was accomplished through a series of mass political movements, which began in the countryside with Land Reform, a violent campaign in which Communist cadres mobilized poor peasants to humiliate, beat, and often kill landlords, and then redistribute their land. Landlords and rich peasants were not only dispossessed of their land and often their homes, but they were also reduced to social pariahs. The subsequent collectivization drive was less violent, but the result was more profound, eliminating private ownership of land altogether.⁵ In urban areas, the state took over large enterprises, and small enterprises were combined into cooperatives. The process was largely peaceful, but fundamentally coercive. Communist cadres mobilized workers against their employers in a series of campaigns to combat tax evasion, corruption, waste, and counterrevolutionary activities, establishing Communist control within each enterprise and paving the way for state appropriation.⁶ The fate of the urban elite, however, was not as dire as that of the rural elite because the CCP could not dispense with their expertise. The new government offered nominal compensation and management positions to entrepreneurs who cooperated, and the great majority of the managerial, professional, and technical staff in government offices, economic enterprises, schools, and other institutions remained in their posts. Members of the old urban elite nevertheless emerged from the early Communist campaigns greatly debilitated. They had been deprived of much of their property and were in a weak position politically. They retained other assets, however, that were highly valuable in a country that was largely illiterate—their education and expertise.

As the CCP took control of urban institutions, newly arrived Communist cadres were charged with supervising incumbent managers and specialists. In the parlance of the party, Reds were supervising experts. Bo Yibo, one of the CCP’s senior leaders, described the encounter in his memoir. “It was natural that after we entered the cities, our core leadership in various fields was made up of cadres of worker and peasant origins who had just left the battlefields,” Bo wrote. “These cadres mostly had a low educational level. They did not have much contact with the intelligentsia in the past, and did not know or understand the latter’s professional expertise, mentality and working style.”⁷ The Communist victory had created a situation in which two very different groups coexisted uncomfortably at the top of the postrevolutionary social order: a new political elite, largely made up of peasant revolutionaries, and an old educated elite, largely composed of members of the dispossessed propertied classes.⁸ Although there was overlap between the two groups, on the whole, they were of very different origins and had very distinct cultures and values. They also relied on different types of class resources—the former on political and the latter on cultural capital. Although practical considerations dictated cooperation, the first decades of Communist rule were marked by sharp conflict between the two groups.

ESTABLISHING COMMUNIST POWER AT TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY

In the education sector, the contrast between old and new elites was less pronounced because the party usually sent cadres with more education to take charge of schools. Nevertheless, at Tsinghua University the differences—in terms of social origin and level of education—between the newly arrived Communist cadres and the university faculty were quite obvious. Tsinghua’s professors were a highly sophisticated and cultured group that included some of China’s leading scholars. According to a survey conducted in 1946, over half the 134 professors and associate professors at the university had doctoral degrees, impressive in any country at that time and especially so in China. Almost all of them had studied abroad, mostly in the United States, and nearly half had degrees from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell, University of Chicago, or Columbia.⁹ The exceptionally strong foreign educational credentials of the Tsinghua faculty were a product of the university’s history. Founded in 1911 by the United States using funds extracted from the Chinese government as part of the Boxer indemnity, Tsinghua was originally built as a preparatory school to train students to study at American universities.¹⁰ The school was later taken over by the Chinese government and reorganized as a university, and during the 1930s and 1940s it ranked as one of China’s leading institutions of higher education with a particular strength in science and technology. It continued to enjoy close relations with American universities, sending graduates to the United States for postgraduate training and then hiring them upon their return.

At that time, education was highly correlated with wealth, a fact amply demonstrated by the family origins of the Tsinghua faculty. When Communist officials conducted a survey of the class backgrounds of the university’s professors, over 60 percent were classified as having originated from landlord or capitalist families, 27 percent were from professional or other middling categories, and less than 2 percent were from working-class or poor and lower-middle peasant families (a category that comprised over 80 percent of the population).¹¹ The group’s impressive academic credentials and elite family origins were combined with political credentials that—in the post-1949 environment—did not help their standing. Not one was a member of the Communist Party, and many of them had ties to the defeated Nationalist Party. These connections, which had been assets under the old regime, were now severe political liabilities; those who had been members of the Nationalist Party—or even its youth organization—would now regret the association.

The team of Communist cadres that arrived to take over Tsinghua in 1952 was led by Jiang Nanxiang, a former Tsinghua student who shared the elite social origin of the university faculty (his family had owned a substantial amount of land in Jiangsu Province). Jiang had led student protests at the university against Japanese aggression in 1935, was expelled from the university for his protest activities, and then became a full-time cadre in the underground Communist movement. Before he returned to Tsinghua in 1952, at age thirtynine, he had become a national deputy secretary of the Communist Youth League and he had many years of experience in the Communist underground. The party cadres Jiang brought to Tsinghua were in general younger, less well educated, and of humbler family origin. Many demobilized soldiers were assigned to administrative positions at the university. These worker-peasant cadres were typically of poor rural origin and the best educated among them had attended special accelerated middle schools established to train Communist cadres.

Jiang, who became university president and was later named secretary of the school party committee, was the dominant figure at Tsinghua for the next fourteen years. He eventually assembled a stable group of party committee leaders, all of whom had stellar revolutionary credentials. Two of Jiang’s deputy party secretaries, He Dongchang and Ai Zhisheng, were former Tsinghua students who had been leaders of the underground party organization at the university. The other four deputy secretaries were Communist veterans Jiang had brought in from outside. Of the veteran cadres, only Li Shouci, who had also been active in the anti-Japanese protests at Tsinghua in the mid-1930s, was highly educated. Moreover, at Tsinghua even Jiang and Li’s educational credentials carried less authority because they did not have graduate degrees and they had been trained in the humanities instead of science and engineering.¹² The other three deputy secretaries, Liu Bing, Gao Yi, and Hu Jian, were of peasant origin and had only been to primary or middle school before joining the Communist movement (although they had received further training in party schools).¹³

On the whole, the Tsinghua faculty, who had run the university before 1949, did their best to accommodate themselves to the new regime. All were required to participate in political study meetings, in which they were urged to reform their thinking by breaking with “bourgeois ideology” and tendencies to “worship America.” The Jiang administration appointed several sympathetic faculty members to leadership positions; a number of prominent professors, including Qian Weichang, Liu Xianzhou, Zhang Wei, and Chen Shihua, were made deputy university presidents and given positions on Tsinghua’s administrative committee, formally the university’s top governing body. Senior professors were also appointed as department directors, positions that traditionally had been vested with great power. As the CCP built branches in every university department, however, the real locus of power at all levels shifted to the school party organization.

The Institutional Foundations of Political Capital

With the conversion of the means of production into public property, access to advantageous class positions was no longer provided by economic capital (private property), but rather by political and cultural capital. Advantageous positions—whether in rural communes, state-owned and collective factories, schools, hospitals, or government offices—were now defined as cadre posts, and access to them required academic or political credentials. The former were more important for obtaining positions as technical cadres and the latter were more important for obtaining positions as political or administrative cadres. Academic credentials were distributed by the education system (discussed in Chapter 2), while political credentials were distributed by the party’s recruitment apparatus.

THE PARTY ORGANIZATION

The value of political capital was underpinned by the extraordinary power of the Communist Party’s organization, which commanded a bureaucratic apparatus extending from the top to the base of Chinese society. The party not only precluded political competition, but it also organized the entire populace around its political infrastructure. Rural villages were reorganized as collective production brigades and urban society was reorganized into Communist-style work units, all of which were led by a party committee or branch. Tsinghua was restructured in this fashion, and an examination of the university’s structure will shed light on the nature of the party’s power.

Communist leaders built a party organization at Tsinghua that paralleled the university’s administrative hierarchy, and party committees and branches became the centers of decision making at all levels. Students, teachers, and other employees were all organized into small groups, and each group had a nucleus of party or Youth League members at the center. Teachers were assigned to “teaching and research groups” defined by academic specializations, students joined permanent classes, and university workers were organized into small teams. In addition to collectively organizing teaching, study, and work, these group...