Building socialism at Chinese People's University: Chinese cadres and Soviet experts in the People's Republic of China, 1949--1957

In 1949, the leaders of the victorious Chinese Communist Party decreed the founding of Chinese People's University [“Renda”] as a “new-style, regular university” to absorb the “advanced experience” of the Soviet Union in building socialism. Over seven years, from 1950 to 1957, a contingent of approximately 80 Soviet experts instructed Chinese instructors and graduate students at the new university in such specialties as Political Economy, Factory Management, and Archives. From 1950 to 1954, Renda occupied a unique, Party-decreed position at the pinnacle of Chinese higher education. By the late 1950s, however, Renda had largely lost this position as the “advanced Soviet experience” the university was called upon to study and transmit was increasingly called into question.; In order to understand the fate of the Party's project of creating a new, Soviet-style university, this dissertation analyzes the developmental trajectory of Renda in its formative period of “learning from the Soviet Union.” Rather than seeing the 1950s as a relatively uncomplicated and successful period of learning from the Soviet Union, this dissertation shows that difficulties were encountered from the very beginning. One of the main problems the administration of the new university encountered were deep social divisions among poorly-educated “old cadres” and “young intellectuals” at the school. Factional divisions in the administration and on the faculty complicated the school's mission in the 1950s. “Study of the Soviet Union” was not uniformly embraced by all in this decade, and this became an issue in the increasingly harsh political campaigns of the 1950s.; Chinese People's University did, however, have significant effects on Chinese higher education through its training of a new academic elite and its promotion of a new, Soviet-style academic culture. Certain Soviet-style institutional innovations first introduced at Renda became characteristic features of Chinese academia. The Soviet experts' teaching of a new generation of young academics at Renda helped to inculcate an “orthodox professional academic ethos” characterized by respect for established ideological authority together with professional academic skills. In specialized fields like Finance and Accounting, young instructors assimilated Soviet templates that remained basic to the fields well past the 1950s. The long-term effects of the “new university” on the formation of a Chinese socialist academia were thus considerable.