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

Joel Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class (2009) Formats Available .PDF Joel Andreas: “Changing Colours in China” (2008) – An outstanding contribution towards a dialectical understanding of the tumultuous development of China’s economy post-Mao to present-day capitalism. Here, he “traces the path of property relations, social services and income distribution in the PRC since the late seventies.” 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 triumphantly dispossessing the country’s propertied classes, Mao and the Communist Party took radical measures to eliminate class distinctions based on education and, by 1966, the Cultural Revolution, aggravating antagonisms between the new political and old cultural elites. Ultimately, however, such attacks on both groups during the Cultural Revolution spurred an intriguing inter-elite unity, paving the way—after Mao’s death—for the consolidation of a new class that soon 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. -- source link

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