Author: Joel Andreas File Type: pdf ReviewIn providing this thought provoking analysis [Andreas] has not only made a contribution to our understanding of China in the second half of the twentieth century but also helps us to think about why the Chinese Communist project, inaugurated with such idealism in 1949, went wrong and therefore what future idealists might need to think about as they embark on their own revolutions.Peter Wood, Hong Kong Economic JournalThis is an essential book for specialists seeking to understand the murky issues of class in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) since 1949 it is also highly engaging and accessible to non-specialists.Sigrid Schmalzer, American Historical Review_Rise of the Red Engineers_ provides an exciting sociological analysis of Maoist and post-Maoist China .... The book would work well for graduate courses in political sociology, comparative and historical sociology, and socialism and postsocialism.Johanna Bockman, American Journal of SociologyJoel Andreas has written a very fine analysis of the emergence of Chinas current ruling group.Thomas P. Bernstein, Political Science Quarterly_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 Maos programs by their own stated goals... Andreas signal achievement is in using complex human stories to construct a compelling and tightly packaged argument that pushes us to think about the world in new ways. He succeeds because his goal is to explain what happened and why, rather than to give the entire Mao era a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Everyone interested in contemporary China and modern Chinese history should read this book._China Journal_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 groupsthe poorly educated peasant revolutionaries who seized power in 1949 and Chinas old educated elitecoalesced to form a new dominant class. After dispossessing the countrys 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, Maos attacks on both groups during the Cultural Revolution spurred inter-elite unity, paving the wayafter his deathfor the consolidation of a new class that combined their political and cultural resources. This story is told through a case study of Tsinghua University, whichas Chinas premier school of technologywas at the epicenter of these conflicts and became the partys preferred training ground for technocrats, including many of Chinas current leaders.

Author: Carsten Strathausen File Type: pdf Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stephan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and reality effect of photography and film. Poetry around 1900 self-reflectively celebrated its own words as both transparent signs and material objects, Strathausen says. In Aestheticism, this means that language harbors the potential to literally present the things it signifies. Rather than simply describing or picturing the physical experience of looking, as critics have commonly maintained, modernist poetry claims to enable a more profound kind of perception that grants intuitive insights into the very texture of the natural world. **