Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China's New Class

EAST-WEST CENTER SERIES ON Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific

SERIES CO-EDITORS

John T. Sidel, London School of Economics

Geoffrey M. White, East-West Center

and University Of Hawai’i

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kellee S. Tsai, Johns Hopkins University

Sheila A. Smith, Council on Foreign Relations

Peter Xenos, East-West Center

A Series Sponsored by the East-West Center

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

John T. Sidel and Geoffrey M. White, Series Co-Editors

A collaborative effort by Stanford University Press and the East-West Center, this series focuses on issues of contemporary significance in the Asia Pacific region, most notably political, social, cultural, and economic change. The series seeks books that focus on topics of regional importance, on problems that cross disciplinary boundaries, and that have the capacity to reach academic and other interested audiences.

The East-West Center is an education and research organization established by the U.S. Congress in 1960 to strengthen relations and understanding among the peoples and nations of Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Center contributes to a peaceful, prosperous, and just Asia Pacific community by serving as a vigorous hub for cooperative research, education, and dialogue on critical issues of common concern to the Asia Pacific region and the United States. Funding for the Center comes from the U.S. government, with additional support provided by private agencies, individuals, foundations, corporations, and the governments of the region.

Rise of the Red Engineers

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

Joel Andreas

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Andreas, Joel.

Rise of the red engineers : the Cultural Revolution and the origins of China’s

new class / Joel Andreas.

p. cm. -- (Contemporary issues in Asia and the Pacific)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804771108

1. Elite (Social sciences)--China--History--20th century. 2. Social classes--China--History--20th century. 3. Power (Social sciences)--China--History- -20th century. 4. Engineers--China--History--20th century. 5. China--History--Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976. I. Title. II. Series: Contemporary issues in Asia and the Pacific.

HN740.Z9E413 2009

305.5’24095109045--dc22

2008043089

Typeset at Stanford University Press in 9.75/13.5 Janson Text

For my mother, Carol Andreas (1933–2004), who made me care about social injustice and set me on the path of exploring its causes.

Table of Contents

EAST-WEST CENTER SERIES ON Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific

A Series Sponsored by the East-West Center - CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE - Building Socialism (1949–1966)

Chapter One - Political Foundations of Class Power

Chapter Two - Cultural Foundations of Class Power

Chapter Three - Cradle of Red Engineers

PART TWO - The Cultural Revolution (1966–1968)

Chapter Four - Political Versus Cultural Power

Chapter Five - Uniting to Defend Political and Cultural Power

PART THREE - Institutionalizing the Cultural Revolution (1968–1976)

Chapter Six - Supervising the Red Engineers

Chapter Seven - Eliminating the Distinction Between Mental and Manual Labor

Chapter Eight - Worker-Peasant-Soldier Students

PART FOUR - The New Era (1976–Present)

Chapter Nine - Rebuilding the Foundations of Political and Cultural Power

Chapter Ten - Triumph of the Red Engineers

Chapter Eleven - Technocracy and Capitalism

Conclusion

Reference Matter

Appendix 1 - Tsinghua University Faculty, Production Workers, and Students, 1949–1992

Appendix 2 - List of Interviewees

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

When I first visited Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1997, my aim was to learn about the battles that took place there three decades earlier during the Cultural Revolution. I had heard about the hundred day war between student factions at Tsinghua and knew that one side was led by Kuai Dafu, a student whose name had become synonymous with the rebellious spirit of the period. My curiosity about the Cultural Revolution was inspired by a larger interest in the transformation of China’s class structure since the 1949 Revolution, but it only gradually occurred to me, as I interviewed Tsinghua employees and alumni, that in addition to being an important site of Cultural Revolution battles, the university had for decades been at the epicenter of conflicts surrounding the emergence of a new class of technocratic officials.

Before the Cultural Revolution, Tsinghua—as China’s leading school of engineering and technology—had been charged with training Red engineers. Technocratic visions flourished at the university and students believed they would lead the country’s transformation into an industrialized socialist republic. These visions were always controversial. They were at odds with the Chinese Communist Party’s programmatic commitment to eliminate class distinctions, including those based on the differences between mental and manual labor, and they were foreign to most of the party’s cadres, who were peasant revolutionaries who celebrated traditions born of rural warfare and harbored a deep distrust of the educated elite. Simmering tensions came to a head during the Cultural Revolution. Tsinghua became a prominent target and after factional fighting was suppressed, Mao Zedong dispatched a team of workers and soldiers to the university and charged them with eliminating elitist educational practices and preventing the school from becoming an incubator of a bureaucratic class. For nearly a decade, the campus served as a celebrated site for implementing radical experiments in education and governance. Then, after Mao died and the radical policies of the Cultural Revolution were renounced, the university emerged as the premier training ground for the type of technically competent and politically reliable cadres required by a new regime committed to a technocratic vision of China’s future. Tsinghua graduates climbed quickly to the top of party and state hierarchies.

Most of my interviewees had spent decades at the university, first as students, and then as professors or administrators, and they had experienced firsthand much of this tumultuous history. As I came to see that the university had been at the center of all of the key conflicts that ultimately produced a technocratic order, I realized the value of closely examining the history of an institution on the ground level, where policies were implemented and social relations transformed. That is how my investigation into the origins of China’s technocratic class became centered on Tsinghua University. I have asked the university to bear quite a burden, as ultimately I was interested not only in the origins of the technocratic officials who rule China today, but also in the fate of the twentieth-century Communist experiment. I have tried in this account of China’s premier engineering school to capture crucial elements of the trajectory of communism in power, which began as a radical social leveling project and ended as an immense bureaucratic enterprise with an elaborate social hierarchy.

I was fortunate that Tsinghua was a relatively open place. Campus apartment blocks were filled with individuals—working and retired—who were willing to share their experiences and perspectives with me, and campus libraries were filled with materials that provided a rich documentary history of the institution. Altogether I spent twenty months at the university, mostly between 1997 and 2001, gathering data from both retrospective and contemporary sources. The most important retrospective sources were interviews with nearly one hundred people, including graduates, teachers, staff, workers, and administrators (a list of interviewees is included in Appendix 2); I sought individuals who came from a variety of social origins and had different political perspectives. Retrospective published sources included memoirs, biographical sketches of prominent professors and school leaders, a university gazetteer compiling historical data, and official and semiofficial school histories. I also consulted scholarly books and articles about the university’s history. Contemporary sources included official university newspapers and magazines, newspapers and pamphlets published by contending student factions, articles about the university that appeared in national newspapers and journals, as well as statistical yearbooks and administrative and political reports produced by the university. Documents were obtained from libraries in the United States and China (including libraries at Tsinghua University and its attached middle school), the Tsinghua University archives, used-book markets, and the personal collections of interviewees and others.

All accounts—retrospective and contemporary, oral and written (including the statistics recorded in official documents)—reflect the biases of the producers and the times. Contemporary and retrospective sources have complementary strengths and weaknesses. Public expression in China has been and continues to be constrained by the prevailing ideology of the period and by political considerations. During the first decades of communist power, unorchestrated political debate was possible only during two brief moments, the 1957 Party Rectification campaign and the early years of the Cultural Revolution, and even then although debates were sharply contentious they generally remained within narrow political boundaries. On the other hand, these materials recorded the political discourse of the period and interpreted events from a period perspective. Data produced retrospectively—such as interviews, memoirs, and histories—are freed from past constraints and incentives, but are subject to new sets of constraints and incentives. Moreover, individuals’ recollections after several decades of profound social change have to be treated with caution. Memories of past events, motivations, and ideas not only fade with time, but they also undergo a conscious or unconscious metamorphosis as subsequent events and political and ideological changes (official, collective, and personal) make their imprint. I have, therefore, carefully compared a wide variety of sources to reconstruct historical events, including the contentious viewpoints that animated them. One advantage of focusing on a single school is that it was possible to get many different perspectives on the same events.

I have chosen to use Tsinghua, rather than the standard pinyin transliteration, Qinghua, because the former is the official preference of the university today and is therefore ubiquitous in foreign-language references to the school. The decision to use an older transliteration reflects the university’s effort to recover and celebrate its prerevolutionary past, one manifestation of the reconciliation of new and old elites narrated in this book. Based on pronunciation, English speakers unfamiliar with pinyin and other conventional romanization systems might choose to spell the name Chinghua.

This book has been more than a decade in the making and many more people have helped me over the years than I can acknowledge here. I am particularly grateful to all the people who took the time to tell me their stories. Many generously spent hours—even days—detailing their understandings of events, and some searched for photographs and documents to illustrate their points. (With the exception of Kuai Dafu, I have not used their real names in this book.) The people at Tsinghua University’s Education Research Institute provided a congenial base for my studies, as well as a regular source of information and dialogue. I particularly want to thank Wang Xiaoyang and Wang Sunyu, who were my hosts while I was at the institute. Librarians and archivists at the institute and elsewhere at the university provided great assistance locating materials.

Tang Shaojie, who has spent many years studying the Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua, first encouraged me to make the university a research site, and I have learned a great deal from his research and from our conversations over the years. I greatly benefitted from the help and wisdom of three people in particular, Dai Jianzhong, Wu Ciaxia, and Xu Hailiang, who participated in the Cultural Revolution and have spent the years since investigating and reconsidering the events of that era in light of subsequent events. They generously provided me with many documents, and each played an important role in shaping my understanding (although none will completely agree with my interpretations). Michael Schoenhals, Richard Siao, and Wang Youqing also provided important documents that I otherwise would never have encountered.

My approach to studying the development of a dominant class in postrevolutionary China was shaped especially by mentors and colleagues at UCLA. I learned a tremendous amount from Rogers Brubaker and Michael Mann, who provided masterful examples of how to study history from a sociological perspective and continually offered insightful advice. Ivan Szelenyi’s influence is especially obvious, as he steered me toward the conceptual framework of multiple types of capital and contending elites, and his work provided an exceptionally intelligent foil for my own. Rebecca Emigh, Philip Huang, William Roy, Gi-Wook Shin, Donald Treiman, and Yan Yunxiang all provided valuable counsel. Perry Anderson, Robert Brenner, Susanne Chan, Eileen Cheng, Steven Day, Clayton Dube, Jon Fox, Margaret Kuo, Mara Loveman, Mark Lupher, Meng Yue, Dylan Riley, Song Shige, Elizabeth VanderVen, Wang Chaohua, Wu Shengqing, and Wu Xiaogang read drafts of chapters or papers and gave me helpful advice. I particularly appreciate the help of Cong Xiaoping, who in addition to reading chapters, helped analyze documentary materials and provided insights from her own experience.

Over the years, many other people have offered valuable comments, criticisms, and suggestions on portions of this book in its various stages, among them Cui Zhiyuan, Arif Dirlik, Fred Engst, Joseph Esherick, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Han Dongping, Andrew Kipnis, Li Lulu, Lu Aiguo, William Parish, Peng Yusheng, Suzanne Pepper, Stephen Philion, Paul Pickowicz, Dorothy Solinger, Su Yang, Saul Thomas, Tian Liwei, Jonathan Unger, Andrew Walder, Lynn White, Wu Lili, Wu Yiching, Yan Hairong, Yin Hongbiao, Zhan Shaohua, Zhao Dingxin, and Zheng Xiaowei.

Since I have been in Baltimore, my colleagues at Johns Hopkins, including Rina Agarwala, Giovanni Arrighi, Marta Hanson, Melvin Kohn, Tobie Meyer-Fong, William Rowe, Beverly Silver, and Kellee Tsai, have helped me bring this book to a conclusion, offering practical advice and encouragement. I owe a special debt to Kellee for her critical support and suggestions. For research and editing assistance, I thank Laila Bushra, Angela Huang, Huang Lingli, Li Meng, Li Yuyu, Sun Haitao, Wang Yingyao, and Yue Yin.

I was able to spend many months in China due to research fellowships provided by the Fulbright-Hays program of the U.S. Department of Education, Peking University, UCLA, and the Social Science Research Council. Support for writing was provided by UCLA and the Spencer Foundation.

Members of the editorial board of the Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific series, and anonymous reviewers, helped shape the final form and content of this book by urging me to strengthen a number of weak points and add a more elaborate analysis of recent developments. Elisa Johnston at the East-West Center and Stacy Wagner at Stanford University Press have done a wonderful job in shepherding this book from initial manuscript through page proofs.

I am grateful to Springer Media, the Contemporary China Centre at the Australian National University, and the American Sociological Association for allowing me to use material that originally appeared in my articles, Battling over Political and Cultural Power During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Theory and Society 31 (2002), Institutionalized Rebellion: Governing Tsinghua University During the Late Years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, The China Journal 55 (2006), and The Structure of Charismatic Mobilization: A Case Study of Rebellion During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, American Sociological Review 72 (2007).

Finally, I want to thank Peter Andreas, who has been both a steadfast little brother and my principal mentor in the academic world, and my wife, Ay Vinijkul, who has been my companion and most important supporter through the long process of completing this book (and who will be as happy as I am that it is finally finished).

Joel Andreas

Baltimore, Maryland

April 2008

Introduction

China today is ruled by Red engineers. This term, which dates from the 1950s when China was embarking on Communist-style industrialization, was condemned during the Cultural Revolution and has not been revived since. In the 1980s, however, the Red engineers who received academic and political training at elite technical universities in the 1950s and early 1960s began moving into positions of power. They systematically replaced the first generation of Communist cadres, initially at the lower and middle levels, and then during the 1990s at the very highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Today, eight out of nine members of the Standing Committee of the party’s Political Bureau were trained as engineers.

China’s Red engineers, not by coincidence, resemble the officials who staffed the upper levels of the state machinery in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe prior to 1989. The Soviet Union provided a model for China and other countries where Communist parties came to power, and for decades it was led by men who had degrees in engineering or agronomy, including Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin, Andrei Gromyko, Yuri Andropov, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Red engineers in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere ruled socialist societies that in many ways resembled the technocratic vision of Henri Saint-Simon. In the early nineteenth century, Saint-Simon’s followers had envisioned an industrial order that would transcend the avarice of capitalism by converting the means of production into public property and conducting economic planning based on scientific principles. Although they saw inheritance and private property as unjust and inimical to progress, theirs was a supremely elitist vision, in which a talented and enlightened group of industrial leaders, scientists, and engineers would govern society.¹

Of course, the Chinese Communist Party, like the Russian Bolsheviks, had originally championed a Marxist rather than a Saint-Simonian vision of socialism. Marx adopted the basic premises of Saint-Simonian socialism, but rejected its hierarchical character. While Saint-Simon endeavored to establish a society ruled by the talented, Marx sought to eliminate all class distinctions, including the distinction between mental and manual labor, and while Saint-Simon set out to organize a movement of the educated elite and recruited an enthusiastic following among graduates of Paris’s prestigious École Polytechnique, Marx called on the proletariat to serve as the revolutionary vanguard because, he reasoned, they had little to lose by doing away with the existing class hierarchy.² It was Marx’s ideas, with their egalitarian thrust, rather than those of Saint-Simon, which eventually galvanized the momentous socialist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, the Communist parties that took power in Russia, China, and other countries espoused a particularly radical interpretation of Marx’s ideas that committed them to mobilizing the most downtrodden classes, seizing state power by force, crushing the resistance of the old elites, and ruthlessly eliminating all class distinctions. After they came to power, these parties did, indeed, radically change the class order, but in the end they did not do away with class distinctions. The class hierarchy based on private property was destroyed, but a new hierarchy based on political and cultural power emerged, with a class of party technocrats on top.

In this book, I seek to explain how and why the Chinese Communists ultimately replaced Marx’s vision of a classless society with one worthy of Saint-Simon. One possible explanation is that victorious Communist parties, despite their class-leveling rhetoric, always intended to build a technocratic society. This view has been put forward most cogently by George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi in their seminal book, Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Konrad and Szelenyi argued that Communist parties, their claims to represent the proletariat notwithstanding, were actually the vanguard of the intelligentsia. The Communists’ fundamental goal, they wrote, was to fulfill intellectuals’ long-held ambition to displace aristocrats and capitalists and take the reins of society into their own hands by substituting public for private property and planning for the market. Konrad and Szelenyi were among a wave of scholars in the 1960s and 1970s who emphasized the technocratic nature of Soviet and Eastern European elites, and they produced a brilliant insider’s account of how power was distributed and wielded in Soviet-type societies.³ Although they were personally involved in the New Class project they described, they subjected it to an unsentimental analysis of interests, revealing the connections between class power and the celebration of knowledge and science. The tension in their narrative is provided by contention between the Communist vanguard, who stubbornly tried to maintain the prerogatives of political power, and the wider intellectual class, who sought to make knowledge the principal basis of class power. This struggle revolved around the competing claims of political capital (party membership and political connections) and cultural capital (knowledge and academic credentials). Konrad and Szelenyi predicted that the rational premises of socialist planning would ultimately lead to the triumph of cultural capital, fulfilling what they claimed was the true essence of the Communist mission.⁴ Their argument was provocative and compelling, and it profoundly influenced scholarly discussion about the class structure of socialist societies.

Although the technocratic characteristics of China’s New Class fit Konrad and Szelenyi’s theory to a tee, its history does not. One dramatically incongruous element in this history was the harsh attacks on intellectuals during the first decades of Communist power in China. For over a quarter century, the Chinese Communist Party worked tenaciously to eliminate the class distinctions that separated intellectuals from workers and peasants. In their most radical moments, the Chinese Communists systematically discriminated against members of the old educated classes, eliminated entrance examinations and filled university classrooms with villagers who had not attended high school, denigrated the value of abstract knowledge, sent intellectuals to live in villages to be reeducated by peasants, and strived to level educational differences by providing nine or ten years of education to everyone—children of intellectuals, workers, and peasants alike—and then sending them to work. These hardly seem like policies invented by champions of the intelligentsia. Moreover, China’s program of cultural leveling was not unique. The Bolsheviks made Marx’s goal of eliminating the distinction between mental and manual labor into a central tenet of their program, and in the early years of Soviet power—especially during the period of cultural radicalism that accompanied the First Five Year Plan (1928–32)—they pursued radical education policies similar to those later implemented in China. Konrad and Szelenyi’s brief explanation for early Communist policies hostile to the educated elite—that they were part of a costly but indispensable detour necessary to build the strong state technocracy required—do not seem adequate.⁵ It is even more difficult to fit into Konrad and Szelenyi’s theory Mao Zedong’s efforts to undermine the bureaucratic power of party officials. These efforts included harsh campaigns against cadres’ privileges and abuse of power, which reached a crescendo during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when Mao called on workers, peasants, and students to overthrow local party authorities in order to prevent Communist officials from becoming a bureaucratic class.

In this book, I tell the story of the rise of China’s New Class. In order to explain the incongruities noted above, this account diverges from Konrad and Szelenyi’s theory in two ways. First, I do not insist that Communist cadres, most of whom were peasant revolutionaries with relatively little education, play the role of vanguard of the intelligentsia. Instead, I develop an analytic framework that I believe more accurately describes much of the conflict that followed the 1949 Revolution: contention and cooperation between a new political elite and an old educated elite. The new political elite was largely composed of peasant revolutionaries and the old educated elite was mainly made up of members of the dispossessed propertied classes. Although there was overlap between the two groups, for the most part their social origins were distinct, they had discordant value systems, and they relied on different types of resources. Members of the first group controlled the reins of political power but had little education, while members of the second group faced severe political handicaps but possessed substantial cultural resources. The New Class in China, I argue, was the product of a violent and contentious process that ultimately culminated in the convergence of these old and new elites.

Second, I take seriously Communist efforts to eliminate class distinctions. While Konrad and Szelenyi treated the emergence of a technocratic class as the achievement of Communist class-building strategy, I treat it as the failure of Communist class-leveling efforts. If the New Class was simply the product of deliberate construction, the process need not have taken so many harrowing twists and turns. I will argue that Communist parties fundamentally changed course, abandoning the road of class leveling and taking instead a technocratic road. They were converted from enemies into champions of cultural capital, a transformation that Konrad and Szelenyi obscured in their endeavor to portray the Communist movement from its inception as a technocratic project of the intelligentsia. Thus, I will argue that Konrad and Szelenyi’s boldest claim—that victorious Communist revolutionaries deliberately built a technocratic order ruled by an educated elite—does not hold true. If we remove this supposition of intention, however, it becomes possible to ask a more interesting question: Why—despite forceful efforts to the contrary—did the Communist project result in the creation of a new dominant class of Red experts? Answering this question is the chief purpose of this book.

There are powerful reasons to conclude that this result was inevitable. Every Leninist state that survived for a significant length of time eventually gave rise to a technocratic class order, and the technical requirements of economic planning provide a ready functional explanation for the consistency of this outcome. Some, therefore, might be inclined to close the case without further investigation. It is always wise, however, to examine cautiously claims of historical inevitability and functional necessity, especially when one is investigating the origins of a system of social differentiation in which group interests are involved. Even though I am not convinced by Konrad and Szelenyi’s account, I share with them an inclination to explain history as the product of conflicts between interested parties. Moreover, we can learn a great deal by studying the problems encountered by the Communist class-leveling projects of the twentieth century. Marxist revolutionaries vowed not only to eliminate private wealth, but also to redistribute political and cultural power to the masses, and their radical democratic and egalitarian rhetoric was converted into farreaching social experiments. By carefully scrutinizing these experiments and identifying the reasons they failed, we can inform future redistribution efforts, which will undoubtedly run into some of the same problems.

Research Strategy

I chose to investigate China because it is an extreme case. China had much in common with other states that implemented the Soviet model; what makes the Chinese case stand out is the Cultural Revolution. As the following chapters will show, the Cultural Revolution was a determined effort to undermine the political and cultural foundations of an emergent stratum of Red experts. Scholars investigating other Leninist states have appropriately compared political campaigns and policies in these countries to aspects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but no other state experienced such a protracted, tenacious, and disruptive effort to prevent the emergence of a technocratic class. If we want to know whether the rise of such a class was inevitable, it makes sense to study China.

This book is based on a case study of a single educational institution, Tsinghua University in Beijing. Tsinghua is China’s consummate trainer of Red engineers. It is the country’s premier engineering school, and the university’s party organization is renowned for grooming political cadres. Today, Tsinghua graduates occupy key positions in the upper echelons of the party and state bureaucracies, and one-third of the members of the Political Bureau’s Standing Committee, including Secretary General Hu Jintao, are alumni.⁶

China’s Red engineers have been cultivated by two highly selective credentialing systems, one academic and the other political, both of which were modeled after Soviet institutions. The academic credentialing system consists of a pyramid of increasingly selective schools, starting with primary schools and culminating in a small number of elite universities. The political credentialing system is the party’s recruitment apparatus, consisting of a parallel hierarchy of increasingly selective organizations. In primary school, young people compete to join the Young Pioneers, and in secondary and tertiary school they compete to join the Communist Youth League and then the Communist Party. Because of both technical requirements and ideological inclinations connected with industrialization, Tsinghua and other elite engineering schools are located at the pinnacle of both credentialing systems.

I chose to study a university because I wanted to be able to closely examine the struggles surrounding the academic and political credentialing systems, and I selected Tsinghua because it was a singularly important battlefield. Whether policy veered to the Left or the Right, the university served as a model for other schools to follow. During the decades after 1949, Tsinghua grew into a sprawling multifaceted institution that encompassed elite primary and secondary schools, numerous factories, onsite programs to train workers, peasants, and worker-peasant cadres, and satellite schools in remote work sites and villages. All of these programs served as showcases for highly contentious social experiments. Conducting a detailed case study allowed me to analyze, from a ground-level perspective, how both the academic and political credentialing systems actually functioned, how they changed, and how the conflicts over them unfolded. I was able to observe how radically different education policies were implemented, and follow the construction of the party and Youth League organizations at the university, as well as their collapse during the Cultural Revolution and their subsequent reorganization. By closely following changes in a particular institution, I was able to develop a much richer and more concrete story than if I had simply studied conflicts among top party leaders, the evolution of national policy, and countrywide statistical trends.

In this book, I am attempting—in the words of Michael Burawoy—to extract the general from the unique.⁷ Tsinghua is hardly a typical Chinese university; it is located at the apex of the education system, and other schools never had the resources—and often did not have the inclination—to fully implement the exemplary policies and programs developed at Tsinghua. In the following chapters, I will often point out ways in which Tsinghua was peculiar or unique. Nevertheless, the battles at the university were emblematic of wider conflicts, and we can learn much about these conflicts by examining how they played out at Tsinghua, which was always at the epicenter. China was also hardly typical of Leninist states. Countries that implemented versions of the Soviet model have so much in common, however, that it is worthwhile developing a common theoretical framework. Students of the early history of the Soviet Union and other countries in which Communist parties came to power by means of indigenous revolutions will surely recognize a family resemblance in many of the contradictions, conflicts, and policies described in the following pages. After carefully analyzing the Chinese case, with all of its irreducible peculiarities, it will be possible to compare cases, and draw more general conclusions.

PREVIOUS SCHOLARSHIP

The territory covered in this book has already been partially charted by others. Four genres of scholarly literature, in particular, extensively overlap my efforts. Central elements of this book—two elite groups and two credentialing systems—each figure prominently in one of these four genres. The first two are concerned with Communist cadres and intellectuals, while the third and fourth examine China’s education and political systems. Scholars writing in the first genre have recounted how a party of poorly educated peasant revolutionaries was transformed into a party of technocratic officials.⁸ Although most Communist cadres received at least a modicum of technical training after 1949, the basic story told in this genre of scholarship is of a generational change that takes place after an epochal decision in 1978 to emphasize technical over political qualifications. Remnants of the old elite classes remain in the background and the class origins of the new technocratic elite receive little attention. Scholars writing in the second genre have recounted the troubled relationship between Chinese intellectuals and the Communist regime.⁹ During the Mao era, this is mainly a story of conflict, in which the Anti-Rightist movement and the Cultural Revolution loom large. Intellectuals are employed by the party/state, but are also persecuted by it; they are offered opportunities to serve, but only on Communist terms, and they must choose whether to collaborate and try to influence policy or resist. Some intellectuals join the party, and during the reform era conditions improve greatly, but the protagonists remain unchanged: intellectuals on one side and the party/state on the other. Although conflict is central to these accounts, group interests scarcely register; instead, the battles are typically about protecting space for scientific endeavor, intellectual autonomy, and humanistic ideals against the imposition of party/state dictates.

Scholarship on the Chinese education system has analyzed radical changes in education policy, while scholarship on the political system has investigated the evolution of the party system, including its breakdown during the Cultural Revolution.¹⁰ Some scholars have explored the ways in which each of these systems has served as a mechanism of class differentiation, but the main analytical interest of most work on the education system has been the efficacy of policies in terms of conventional educational goals (quality and quantity of training), and the main analytical interest of most work on the political system has been the efficacy of policies in terms of conventional political goals (political and social control).

While the present account has benefited greatly from insights derived from scholars writing in all four genres, my research agenda is different, and it has led me to tell a story that has not been told by the works in any of these genres. Although the first two genres illuminate much about the trajectories of one or the other of the two elite groups at the center of this book, neither captures the contentious process of inter-elite convergence described in the following pages. The third and fourth genres tell us a great deal about each of the two credentialing systems at the center of this book, but they largely miss the interaction between them. Works on the education system mention the political system in passing, and works on the political system mention the education system in passing, but their analytical interests are typically confined to one realm or the other. This book is about both systems, and its analytical interest in each is the same: how the system reproduced class differentiation. Moreover, I am particularly concerned with the links between the two systems, and the political struggles chronicled in this book almost always involved both systems and both elite groups.

A fifth genre, with a narrower scope, has analyzed the social bases of contending local factions during the Cultural Revolution.¹¹ These accounts highlight conflict between intellectuals and party officials, and between children of the two groups. Moreover, they identify educational and political admissions policies—some of which benefited children of intellectuals, while others benefited children of party officials—as key objects of contention and determinants of factional alignment. Thus, a central theme of the present account—interelite conflict over academic and political credentialing policies—fits well into this genre, and my analysis of student factional struggles at Tsinghua during the Cultural Revolution (see Chapters 4 and 5) will engage these accounts in detail. While they stressed inter-elite conflict, however, I highlight strong manifestations of inter-elite unity even at the height of the battles of the Cultural Revolution, and I present these battles as part of a longer process of inter-elite convergence.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

I use the conceptual framework Pierre Bourdieu developed to analyze class distinctions based on different types of capital.¹² Although Bourdieu mainly employed his tripartite framework—economic, cultural, and social capital—to analyze the class structure of a stable capitalist society, others have found it just as useful for analyzing radical changes in class structure. Szelenyi and others have been able to cogently describe the transitions to and from socialism in terms of changes in the relative importance of these three types of capital.¹³ Communist regimes eliminated economic capital by abolishing private property in the means of production, and although control over these means of production still mattered, access to control was no longer provided by private ownership, but rather by cultural and social capital. Because Eastern European societies were dominated by Communist parties, the key form of social capital was political. As a result, class position was largely determined by an individual’s stock of cultural and political capital.¹⁴

When Bourdieu spoke of cultural capital, the assets he had in mind—educational credentials and knowledge that provide access to advantageous class positions—are largely the same as those that many economists and sociologists discuss under the rubric of human capital.¹⁵ The two terms, however, signal different analytic interests. While theorists of human capital investigate how returns on investment facilitate individual and social progress, Bourdieu investigated how individuals and groups use the institutions that underpin cultural capital to reproduce class privilege and power. Political capital, in Bourdieu’s framework, is also about privilege and power. He conceived of political capital as a form of social capital, which he defined as the actual or potential resources which are linked to the possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition—in other words, to membership in a group—which provides each of its members with the backing of a collectively-owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit.¹⁶ In the countries of the Soviet bloc, Bourdieu agreed, the most important form of social capital