Technology and Culture

In this detailed and thorough study, Thorben Pelzer recounts the experience of the first American-trained Chinese civil engineers in China from 1905 to 1945. His main argument is that these engineers built their profession and self-image against their inability to live up to their professional values and serve the state, which resulted in structural discontent. Each of the seven chapters—with the exception of the first, which introduces the protagonists with short biographies of five of them, namely Wang Jingchun, Yang Baoling, Tan Zhen, Xue Zhuobin, and Ling Hongxun—illustrates one aspect of this discontent throughout the period studied.

The Chinese engineers trained in the United States were politically motivated to change a corrupt and inefficient political system, as they had experienced new forms of socialization and activism and were committed to building a new modern nation using sciences and technology. Back in China, they were confronted with two major contradictions: though central to all engineering projects, their role and identity were not recognized because they had no decision-making power. Furthermore, local politics and a recurring lack of finances limited their actions.

In the case of the Shandong Grand Canal improvement scheme, the money collected from Japan and the United States was rapidly spent on a plethora of board staff, incompetent leading American engineers, and delayed surveying amid sporadic warfare in Shandong. The project was abandoned when no further funding was found. In Manchuria, Wang Jingchun, a civil engineer specializing in railway administration, tried to put his theories about the benefits of railway development into practice while serving as codirector of the Chinese Eastern Railway. But his planned reforms to increase railway management efficiency and diminish debt couldn’t be implemented in a territory where too many nations and competing interests were entangled. Ling Hongxun, another U.S.-trained engineer, worked in ministries, private industrial companies, and academic institutions before becoming chief engineer during the war against Japan and building railways and highways in South—and later Northwest—China. While working on all these assignments, Ling felt it was difficult to bear all the responsibilities with neither autonomy nor real authority.

Pelz devotes two chapters to the Association of Chinese and American Engineers, founded in 1919, which played an important role in structuring the profession in China and giving U.S.-trained Chinese engineers job opportunities (through networking in commissions like the Chinese International [End Page 1002] Famine Relief Commission, ministries like the Ministry of Communications, and other official positions or projects). This professional association was mainly supported by politicians in Beijing but lost its influence when the Guomindang took power in Nanjing. After the fiasco of the Salaqi canal project, aimed at irrigating plain fields between Hohhot and Baotou in 1929–32, the ACAE engineers’ reputation was further damaged.

This study is based on the argument that recent historiography about state and engineering institutions under the Nankin era (Koll, Kirby, etc.) doesn’t give an accurate view of the actual roles played by engineers (p. 12). The author, following the individual itineraries of a few young Chinese men from China to American universities and back to China, delivers a quite convincing argument that actors cannot be reduced to institutions and that professionalization, identity, and status are complex, interactive, and need political support to be built up.

Pelzer has consulted an impressive amount of private and work correspondences; private, institutional, and administrative archives; and private papers and technical journals from the United States and China. His use of the Chinese engineers relational database that he built with colleagues testifies to the fact that all these databases are actually useful and serve precise purposes. Only some footnotes relating to the database are not always easy to understand. I also commend the clear and documented description of the political background of the period, which was extremely complicated between the rise and fall of warlords’ cliques and political alliances made and unmade.

The author’s choice of discontent as the thread binding the...