# Technocracy and Technostructure in Nationalist China

Thorben Pelzer

► To cite this version:

Thorben Pelzer. Technocracy and Technostructure in Nationalist China. Christian Henriot. Modern China in Flux: Networks, Mobility, and Transformation, De Gruyter, pp.99-134, 2025, 9783111374437. 10.1515/9783111374437-004. hal-05059054

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# Technocracy and Technostructure in Nationalist China: Expert Rule or Rule over Experts?

## Introduction

In 1924, a young Chinese man received his degree in mining engineering from Pittsburgh University. He was part of a wider movement that, beginning about two decades earlier, had Chinese students seeking education abroad, especially in the United States. Like many, the young man had picked a practical field of study to help his home country.<fnref n="1" /> Before returning to China, he decided to work in the local Pennsylvania mines to gain additional experience. He admired the management system he observed: work processes were constantly measured, assessed, and improved. The American system emphasized efficiency, waste reduction, and practical results. The young engineer realized that not just his professional training but also the associated mindset would prove beneficial to reconstructing the Chinese Republic.<fnref n="2" />

The young man was Chen Lifu (陳立夫) (1900–2001). Chen eventually became one of the most influential techno-scientists in the government. He ultimately led the Ministry of Education, where he attempted to implement the doctrines of efficient scientific management. At first glance, Chen's credentials, way of thinking, and position inside the government make him a likely candidate for the designation “technocrat.”

Literature emphasizes the high influence engineers wielded in the early twentieth century. Studies describe the arrival of professional engineers as a new status group. Hailed as efficient reformers and rational “heroes,” they became a vital

**Note:** This article was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) grant SFB-1199 “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition.” I thank Cécile Armand, Christian Henriot, and Nora van den Bosch for providing or inspiring some parts of the code used for the analysis in this chapter.

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<footnote n="1">1 Thorben Pelzer, *Engineering Trouble: US–Chinese Experiences of Professional Discontent, 1905–1945* (New York, Leiden: Brill, 2023), 24–51; Weili Ye, *Seeking Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900–1927* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 50–80.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Li-fu Ch'en, *The Storm Clouds Clear over China: The Memoir of Ch'en Li-fu, 1900–1993*, with the assistance of Sidney H. Chang, and Ramon H. Myers (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1994), 18–25, 148.</footnote>
technical elite in capitalist and state-led economies, putting their mark on modern
construction and infrastructure.<fnref n="3" /> However, according to political scientists, it took
another 50 years and multiple political upheavals until a “technocratic turnover”
inside the highest ranks of the Chinese government occurred. The number of
engineers in power peaked during the 1990s when Jiang Zemin (江澤民) (1926–
2022) – himself an electrical engineer – led the country. When his successor Hu
Jintao (胡錦濤) (b. 1942) assumed power, 34% of the Central Committee, 75% of the
Politburo, and 100% of the Standing Committee were trained engineers.<fnref n="4" /> Was this
emphasis on rationalist governance ideals, reflected by the choice in personnel,
a new phenomenon, or does the much earlier ascent of engineers like Chen Lifu
point to the existence of a first technocratic moment in the Republican period?

After all, the rise of highly influential technological government institutions
in the 1930s, most prominently the National Resources Commission (Guojia ziyuan
weiyuanhui 國家資源委員會), points to an early emphasis on technocratic forms
of governance. Two well-received publications, “Engineering China” and *Engineer-
ing the State*, discuss professional engineer involvement in these state institutions.<fnref n="5" />
In contemporary discourse, the concept of “engineering” is often (mis)used meta-
phorically, for instance, in the terms “social engineering,” “political engineering,”
and “financial engineering.” Used colloquially, the term does not necessitate the
involvement of actual, professional engineers. Nonetheless, the focus on the activ-
ity of “engineering” in the historical analysis of “technocracy” has led to the con-
ception that actual, professional engineers played a significant role in steering the
Nationalist state and that these engineers formed an influential group within the
political elite. But how influential were engineers in the Republican era? Was the

<footnote n="3">3 On the rise of engineers in the early twentieth century, see, e.g., Frank Uekötter, “Techniker an der Macht: Der Ingenieur-Politiker im 20. Jahrhundert,” *Historische Zeitschrift* 306, no. 2 (2018): 399; William E. Akin, *Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900–1941* (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1977); Lino Camprubi, *Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime* (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014); Edwin T. Layton Jr., *The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession* (Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, [1971] 1986); Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker, “Scientists, Engineers and National Socialism,” in *Science, Technology and National Socialism*, ed. Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Cheng Li and Lynn T. White III, “The Sixteenth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party: Hu Gets What?” *Asian Survey* 43, no. 4 (2003): 581.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 David Allen Pietz, *Engineering the State: The Huai River and Reconstruction in Nationalist China, 1927–37* (New York, London: Routledge, 2002); William C. Kirby, “Engineering China: Birth of the Developmental State, 1928–1937,” in *Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond*, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000).</footnote>
influence confined to significant individuals, or did it extend to the profession as a whole?

To approach this question, I first discuss and problematize existing notions of technocracy and technostructure and argue why a distinction between (1) a professional and (2) a political elite is productive. I expect the findings to substantiate the necessity of distinguishing between (1) the principles of technocracy, (2) bureaucrat-technocrats, and (3) the rule of technicians when discussing the influence of the engineering profession. I then utilize a data-driven approach to identify the so-called technostructure from the perspective of Republican-era engineers. I use a large prosopographic dataset to analyze engineer involvement within this technostructure. Then, I analyze the engineers' career patterns to substantiate what role their biographies played in arriving at different positions of influence and becoming part of an elite. Finally, I focus on the set of engineers who assumed political offices and locate them in the larger network of the engineering profession to identify particularly influential sub-communities within the engineering scene.

The aim of the chapter is not to cast doubt on the importance of large technical government institutions like the National Resources Commission, nor to deny the significance of individual prominent engineers. The quantitative approach also remains agnostic about the extent to which engineers may have influenced government decisions through their daily practice without holding offices. The study can, however, present an idea about the extent to which engineers, as a profession, penetrated the state organizations and, consequently, what role these institutions played in their careers. The article thus evaluates, on the one hand, the prevalence of engineers within the technical state institutions and, on the other hand, the importance of these institutions for the engineering profession. I argue that although the paradigms of engineers shaped the technostructure, the participation and influence of the profession were less comprehensive than previously thought.

Methodology

To shed light on the level of involvement of professional engineers within the Nationalist government institutions, the chapter applies network and sequence analysis to the Chinese Engineers Relational Database (CERD), which contains the individual biographies of over 17,000 professional engineers who were active in the Republican period (1912–1949).<fnref n="6" /> The database features engineers as defined by

<footnote n="6">6 Thorben Pelzer, Elisabeth Kaske, and Hailian Chen, “Chinese Engineers Relational Database (CERD),” Zenodo, https://home.uni-leipzig.de/cerd/.</footnote>
either a degree in engineering from a higher educational institution, as members
of a professional engineering society, or otherwise historically documented to have
nominally worked as an “engineer” (gongcheng si 工程司 or gongcheng shi 工程師).
For its sources, the database heavily relies on a Who’s Who of engineers, which the
government started compiling in the late 1930s and published in 1941,<fnref n="7" /> and further
complements the register by at least a dozen other, often earlier, sources such as
society membership directories, college yearbooks, and other Who’s Who-type
books.<fnref n="8" /> The database includes the career steps of the respective engineers, includ-
ing the name of the workplace and, where available, the time they were employed
and a description of the capacity in which they worked.

Tests attest to a reasonable level of completeness of CERD records. For the early
decades, the number of individuals cataloged in CERD closely matches the esti-
mated number of engineering graduates based on government statistics, in some
years even slightly surpassing the estimated amount.<fnref n="9" /> For the years 1930 to 1936,
for which concrete government figures are available, professional biographies
included in CERD still attest to an annual average of 75% of the overall number
of engineering graduates claimed by the government. CERD still lacks sufficient
information about professional assignments during the last decade of Nationalist
rule and especially about engineers working under the collaborationist regimes.
It does, however, feature a near-complete record of earlier, more established engi-
neers – who are more likely to have worked in high-ranking positions and are thus
of particular relevance to this study.

To feed CERD with information about high-ranking offices for the whole
Republican period, external data is superposed on top of the professional biog-
raphies. A dataset of individuals working in high-ranked government positions,
originally published in book form at the Academia Sinica,<fnref n="10" /> includes individuals

<footnote n="7">7 Ziyuan weiyuanhui 資源委員會, Zhongguo gongcheng renminglu. 中國工程人名錄 (Changsha: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1941).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 For a list of sources, see Pelzer et al., CERD.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 When comparing CERD figures with Nanjing-era government statistics (Directorate of Statistics, ed., Zhonghua minguo tongji tiyao: Minguo sanshiliu nian ji. 中華民國統計提要民國三十六年輯 (Nanjing: Directorate of Statistics, [1947] 2010), 92) and assuming an exponential growth of the latter, numbers of concurrent engineering students listed in CERD (version 1.7) are slightly higher than expected for 1912–1924 and slightly lower than expected for 1925–1937. The level of completeness drastically decreases for post-1937, but it is unlikely that wartime and post-war engineering students reached influential positions in their professional careers before the end of the Republican era.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Pengyuan Zhang 張朋園 and Huaiyu Shen 沈懷玉, eds., *Guomin zhengfu zhiguan nianbiao 1925-1949*. 國民政府職官年表 (1925-1949) (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1987). Cleaned, tabulated OCR-version by the author of this chapter.</footnote>
with positions at institutions of special interest for this chapter: the Ministry of Economics (1938–1949), the Ministry of Communications (1926–1949), the Ministry of Railways (1928–1937), the National Conservancy Bureau, later operating as the Irrigation Ministry (1941–1949), and the connected Huai, Pearl, Yellow, and Yangzi River, Huabei, Northeastern, and Taihu Irrigation Commissions (1927–1948), as well as the Capital, Chongqing, and National Construction Commissions (1928–1938, 1940–1943), the National Economic Council (1931–1937, 1946–1948), and the post-war National Resources Commission (1946–1949). This dataset will be referred to as Zhang/Shen and discussed in greater detail later in this chapter.

The chapter explores the merged CERD–Zhang/Shen dataset through network and sequence analysis. Social network analysis (SNA) utilizes network science – the study of interconnected vertices or nodes – to explore social structures. In this case, links are established between engineers, colleges, and workplaces. To suit the fragmentary nature of the information available in CERD, the data is analyzed through an undirected, unweighted, two-mode network.<fnref n="11" /> The engineers form connections through their shared college or workplace. Workplaces are linked with each other, where hierarchical information about their organizational structure is available. The design of the network analysis intentionally ignores the position and time of employment and remains agnostic to the nature of the actual relationship between closely aligned engineers. The emphasis lies on institutional links and structural patterns, for example, the transfer of a large cluster of graduates from the same college to a shared workplace. To address potential shortcomings of SNA, especially in identifying patterns *within* careers instead of between them, the analysis is complemented by sequence analysis (SA). SA, as a sociological method, derives from DNA and RNA analysis in bioinformatics. When applied to computational social history, SA serves to identify patterns and clusters within the biographies of a larger cohort. The process is exploratory and depends on the availability of longitudinal data and the editorial decision on categorizing the biographical observations to a limited set of career states. In this specific case, SA is used to situate an engineer’s transition to a higher professional or political position in the context of his age, educational background, and previous job assignments. This way, SA can uncover patterns independent from and potentially outside the scope of the nexuses identified through classic SNA. Taken together, the two methods provide a new, comprehensive insight into the scope and limits of engineer involvement inside the Republican-era government institutions.

<footnote n="11">11 See Stephen P. Borgatti, "Two-Mode Concepts in Social Network Analysis," *Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science* 6 (2009): 8279–91.</footnote>
Technocracy and Technocrats

Works of Chinese history have discussed different aspects of scientific manage-
ment, technocratic administration, and expert rule. While these dimensions share
common features, such as the belief in rational principles, they refer to different
phenomena on closer examination. The term “technocracy,” which can be applied
to all these phenomena, remains ill-defined. Problematically, the definition has also
changed over time, and it is not always clear which historical notion the authors
refer to. The existing notions of technocracy and technocrats can be roughly broken
down into the following three connected but distinct ideas:

1. *As a set of principles for industrial management and governance:* In the Republican era, industrialists attempted to introduce scientific management in their factories based on the technological principles of rationality and efficiency. The industrial reform movement directly inspired the introduction of expert management in the USA.<fnref n="12" /> The underlying principles were practiced by industrialist Frederick W. Taylor (1856–1915), informed by economist Thorstein B. Veblen (1857–1929), and promoted by engineer Howard Scott (1890–1970). Their attempt to introduce scientific management inside government institutions comes closest to the original, rather than the colloquial, meaning of the term “technocracy.” In Republican China, not just the industrial sector but also the government itself tried to institutionalize a scientific mode of management, for instance, through the Commission for Studying Administrative Efficiency (*xingzheng xiaolü weiyu-anhui* 行政效率委員會, founded 1934) and the Central Planning Board (*zhong-yang shejiju* 中央設計局, founded 1940).<fnref n="13" /> The “Triple System of Administration” (*xingzheng sanlian zhi* 行政三聯制, 1940) and the state-led economy directed through five- and ten-year plans (*jianshe jihua* 建設計劃)<fnref n="14" /> likewise signified the efficiency-oriented planning inside the technological state institutions.

2. *As bureaucrats who advocate technocratic principles:* In the decades following the original technocratic movement, sociologists redefined technocracy to refer to a “special mutation of bureaucracy.” These bureaucrats, also called “technocrats,” were conceived as forming a “scientific-technological elite”

<footnote n="12">12 See Stephen L. Morgan, “Transfer of Taylorist Ideas to China: 1910s–1930s,” *Journal of Management History* 12, no. 4 (2006); Akin, *Technocracy and the American Dream*, 1–45.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Morris L. Bian, *The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change* (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 153–67.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Linsun Cheng 程麟蓀, “Zhongguo jihua jingji de qiyuan yu ziyuan weiyuanhui,” 中國計劃經濟的起源與資源委員會 *Shi’eryi shiji* 82 (2004): 90–92; William C. Kirby, “Continuity and Change in Modern China: Economic Planning on the Mainland and on Taiwan, 1943–1958,” *The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs* 24 (1990): 125–32.</footnote>
arranged inside a “technostructure” of “technical administrators, economists, engineers and related” experts.<fnref n="15" /> This elite advocates principles of technocracy in the government apparatuses, including the state-owned industrial sector.<fnref n="16" /> The actors legitimize themselves and their reforms through their expert knowledge, although they do not necessarily assume government positions in which they enact these reforms.<fnref n="17" /> One of the potential translations for technocracy in Chinese, “technological bureaucracy” (jishu guanliao zhuyi 技術官僚主義), relates to this phenomenon. Among China historians, Bian appears aligned with this definition, understanding technocrats as “technical or professional expert[s] in an administrative or a managerial position [emphasis added].”<fnref n="18" />

3. *As professional technicians inside government offices:* In contrast to the focus on expert bureaucrats, there is a tendency in Chinese historiography to discuss “technocracy” more literally as a government of experts. The most common Chinese translation for technocracy, “rule of specialists” (zhuanjia tongzhi 專家統治), points in this direction. Primarily discussed as a phenomenon of PRC-era cabinets, the focus lies on an elite of techno-scientific experts (“red engineers”) that form the government legislature and/or executive.<fnref n="19" /> Li and White address the different definitions of technocracy and argue that, although a wide range of notions exists, only representatives of this third category should be referred to as technocrats “in a narrow sense.”<fnref n="20" /> “Engineer-politicians,” a term coined by historian Uekötter,<fnref n="21" /> also relates to this latter category.

To distinguish between engineers influencing politics through their professional practice on the one hand and engineers inside government offices on the other hand, this chapter analyzes all engineers working inside technical government institutions but puts special emphasis on those engineers who clearly assumed political offices. Despite making this distinction, the actual political influence of engineers may not have relied on holding such a political office. Chief engineers, for example, may have

<footnote n="15">15 Roger Williams, *Politics and Technology* (London, Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1971), 24.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Bian, *The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China*, 92–100.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Thorstein Veblen, *The Engineers and the Price System* (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1921), 69–71.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Bian, *The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China*, 277.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Cheng Li and Lynn T. White III, “China’s Technocratic Movement and the World Economic Herald,” *Modern China* 17, no. 3 (1991); Hong Yung Lee, *From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 254–89; Joel Andreas, *Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 233–60.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Cheng Li and Lynn T. White III, “Elite Transformation and Modern Change in Mainland China and Taiwan: Empirical Data and the Theory of Technocracy,” *The China Quarterly* 121 (1990): 19–22.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 Uekötter, “Techniker an der Macht.”</footnote>
influenced the layout of state infrastructure by altering the route of a new railway,
highway, or waterway during a field survey without having sat at the initial plan-
ning desk at the Ministry.<fnref n="22" /> Kirby argues that the “economic bureaucracy,” includ-
ing engineers and other experts, may have acted increasingly autonomously from
political decision-making institutions.<fnref n="23" /> In contrast, many sociologists argue that, for
professional engineers, gaining political influence meant surrendering professional
autonomy.<fnref n="24" /> The statist economy of the Nationalist state, especially the command
economy of the wartime years, had chief engineers gradually transform from the role
of autonomous contractors to actors inside the state commissions.<fnref n="25" /> Within these, the
distinction between professional and political office was not always clear-cut. None-
theless, making a distinction on the theoretical level is productive for the analysis, as
it presents some idea about whether the nature of engineer involvement inside the
technological state institutions was more on the practical side – in chief positions out
in the field, in the factory, or laboratory – or more on the theoretical and ultimately
decision-making side of operations.

Locating the Technostructure

As already sketched out above, in the Nationalist era (1928–1949), powerful state
institutions gradually incorporated industries rather than merely contracting and
cooperating with them. Historians generally agree that the “technical elite” or
“technical intelligentsia” significantly influenced the wartime economy through
these institutions.<fnref n="26" /> The institutions constituted the majority of what Kirby calls

<footnote n="22">22 On route controversies, see e.g. Elisabeth Kaske, “Sichuan as a Pivot: Provincial Politics and Gentry Power in Late Qing Railway Projects in Southwestern China,” in *Southwest China in a Regional and Global Perspective* (c. 1600–1911), ed. Ulrich Theobald and Cao Jin (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Pelzer, *Engineering Trouble*, 150–68. On route planning, Chi-Keung Leung, *China: Railway Patterns and National Goals*, Research Papers 195 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Department of Geography, 1980); Hongxun Ling, *凌鴻勛, “A Decade of Chinese Railroad Construction (1926–1936),” in *The Strenuous Decade: China’s Nation-Building Efforts, 1927–1937*, ed. Paul K.T. Sih, Asia in the Modern World Series 9 (New York: St. John’s University Press, 1970).</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 Kirby, “Continuity and Change in Modern China,” 132.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 David E. Apter, *The Politics of Modernization* (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, [1965] 1969), 161.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25 See Xiucheng Le, “The Struggle for Autonomy from the State: Professionalization of Engineering in China” (PhD, Cornell University, 1989); Pelzer, *Engineering Trouble*, 175–229.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 Margherita Zanasi, *Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China* (Chicago, Lon-
don: Chicago University Press, 2006), 190–92; Marie-Claire Bergère, *The Golden Age of Chinese Bour-</footnote>
the “state industrial sector.”<fnref n="27" /> This sector steadily grew as state commissions incorporated an increasing number of capitalist enterprises. Among these influential commissions (weiyuanhui 委員會) were the National Construction Commission (NCC, founded 1928), the National Economic Council (NEC, founded 1931),<fnref n="28" /> the various hydraulic commissions,<fnref n="29" /> and, gradually growing in importance and scale, the National Resources Commission (NRC, precursor founded 1932, reformed 1935).<fnref n="30" /> Apart from these commissions, technical experts worked at the regular ministries. Naturally, engineers, as well as geologists, agriculturalists, and scientific managers, worked at the Ministries of Agriculture,<fnref n="31" /> Communications, Industry, and Railways.

By the end of 1946, a year after reunification, the state counted 203,239 central government employees.<fnref n="32" /> The breakdown of human resources available under government disposal greatly varies between the sources. While Kirby cites 33,000 “staff” and 230,000 workers for the NRC alone,<fnref n="33" /> the Directorate of Statistics presents considerably lower numbers.<fnref n="34" /> In any case, engineers must have constituted only a fraction of the overall technical staff, as the total number of engineers known to the state – let alone employed by it – was only around 16,000.<fnref n="35" /> In other

<footnote>geoisie: 1911–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1986] 1989), 291; Kirby, “Engineering China,” 153.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 Kirby, “Continuity and Change in Modern China,” 126.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28 Zanasi, *Saving the Nation*, 81–102.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29 David Allen Pietz, *The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 86–115; Pietz, *Engineering the State*, 41–60; Shirley Ye, “The Grand Canal in Republican China,” *Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient* 62, no. 4 (2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30 Yi Xue 薛毅, *Guomin zhengfu ziyuan weiyuanhui yanjiu*. 国民政府资源委员会研究 (Beijing: Shehuikexue wenxian chubanshe, 2004); Kirby, “Engineering China,” 150–153; Youkui Zheng 鄭友揆, Linsun Cheng 程麟麟 and Chuanhong Zhang 張傳洪, *Jiu Zhongguo de ziyuan weiyuanhui 1932–1949: Shishi yu pingjia*. 旧中国的资源委员会 1932–1949. 史实与评价 (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1991).</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31 For agriculturalists – in the Republican period not yet considered part of the engineering discipline – see Chapter 4 by Wu Jen-shu and Yeh Wei-chun in this volume.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 Directorate of Statistics, *Zhonghua minguo tongji tiyao*, 134.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33 William C. Kirby, “The Chinese War Economy,” in *China’s Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937–1945*, ed. James C. Hsiung and Steven I. Levine (Armonk, London: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 205.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34 Directorate of Statistics, ed., *Zhonghua minguo tongji tiyao: Minguo ershisi nian ji*. 中華民國統計提要民國二十四年輯 (Nanjing: Guojia tushuguan, [1935] 2010), 71; Zhaocheng Ceng 曾昭承, ed., *Zhonghua minguo tongji tiyao: Minguo ershijiu nian ji*. 中華民國統計提要民國二十九年輯 (Chongqing: Directorate of Statistics, [1940] 2010), 201–7; Directorate of Statistics, *Zhonghua minguo tongji tiyao*, 134.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35 Xuetong Li 李学通, “Jindai Zhongguo gongcheng zhuanye rencai tongji yu jiliang fenxi: Yi ‘Zhongguo gongcheng renminglu’ wei hexin de kaocha,” 近代中国工程专业人才统计与计量分析 – 以《中国工程人名录》为核心的考察 *Zhongguo keji shi zazhi* 39, no. 2 (2018): 133.</footnote>
words, even though professional engineers were an important building block for staffing the statist economy, the majority of technicians working in the state institutions drew their expertise from something other than a degree in engineering. Consequently, the translation of the standardized job designations of low-ranking, mid-level, and high-ranking technician (jizuo 技佐, jishi 技士, and jizheng 技正) as assistant, associate, and chief “engineer” is misleading,<fnref n="36" /> as many but not all individuals employed at these payroll levels were professional engineers.<fnref n="37" /> The category “technician” (zhiyuan 職員) included jobs as diverse as accountants, lawyers, and generic department staff; the latter often only holding a diploma from a middle, high, or vocational school,<fnref n="38" /> none of which met the level of qualification and area of expertise engineers defined for themselves through their professional societies. Hence, to assess engineer involvement inside the commissions, rather than relying on the total number of individuals working in specific ranks of government institutions, the study must rely on employment information contained in biographies of confirmed professional engineers. Therefore, the involvement of engineers in the state apparatus will be assessed via information contained in CERD.

This assessment will result in a network of individuals and institutions that shall be called, for the purpose of this analysis and from the perspective of the engineers, the technostructure. In the literature, “technostructure” refers to a group of influential technicians who collaborated, but not necessarily identified, with the political system.<fnref n="39" /> In his classic monograph on the industrial state, Galbraith proposed the term to describe a collective entity that brings “specialized knowledge, talent or experience to group decision-making.”<fnref n="40" /> The phenomenon

<footnote n="36">36 E.g., Bian, *The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China*, 245–46.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37 Individuals with these titles range from agriculturalists to bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education, in the Ministry of the Interior and inside the military, to geologists, medical experts, and maritime customs inspectors (Academia Sinica Archives. “Jinshisuo renming quanwei jiansuo xitong,”近史所人名權威檢索系統, accessed June 16, 2023, https://archdtsu.mh.sinica.edu.tw/imhkmc/imhkm; National Chengchi University, “Zhonghua minguo zhengfu guanzhi ziliao ku,”中華民國政府官職資料庫, accessed June 16, 2023, http://gpost.lib.nccu.edu.tw/; Ribai Lin 林日白, “Jinian dizhi gushengwu gongzuozhe Xu Deyou, Chen Kang, Ma Yisi xunnan 70 zhounian,”紀念地质古生物工作者许德佑、陈康、马以思殉难70周年 *Dicengxue zazhi* 2 (2014): 253–54; Dingding Xu 徐丁丁, “Kang Ri zhanzheng shiqi zhongyang fangyichu de qingmeisu shizhi gongzuo,”抗日战争时期中央防疫处的青霉素试制工作 *Zhongguo keji shi zazhi* 34, no. 3 (2013): 350).</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38 See, e.g., Executive Yuan Irrigation Commission, Zhiyuan mingce ji timing lu. 職員名冊及題名錄, 1941–1946, 25-27-006-03, Modern History Archives, Academia Sinica.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">39 John Kenneth Galbraith, *The New Industrial State* (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, [1967] 1985), 64–74; Bergère, *The Golden Age of Chinese Bourgeoisie*, 291.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40 Galbraith, *The New Industrial State*, 74.</footnote>
does not necessitate a specific political or economic system: although Williams envisioned the “technocomplex” as consisting of government-supported enterprises,<fnref n="41" /> Aron and Faunce argue that industrial society is based on the introduction of rationalism rather than specific politics.<fnref n="42" /> In the context of Chinese history, Bergère adopted Galbraith’s notion of the technostructure in her analysis of the Republican-era Chinese bourgeoisie. She described the technostructure as a “relatively independent” group including technical, banking, and economic experts who “collaborated with the political system but did not identify” necessarily with the central power.<fnref n="43" />

The intangibility of the abstract term leads to conceptual issues when trying to quantify the “technostructure” of a given system or to analyze the involvement of one specific group of actors – here, the engineers – within it. To identify the part of the abstract technostructure that was, from the perspective of professional engineers, of importance as a workplace, the analysis sets off with a sequence of etic and emic steps: first, a list of names of government institutions was compiled from secondary literature. Apart from the ministries and commissions mentioned above, the list included divisions temporarily subsumed under the (super-)Ministry of Economy and institutions incorporated or otherwise associated with the National Resources Commission.<fnref n="44" /> In the next step, string matching located these institutions and subdivisions within CERD. Finally, a vertical search within CERD identified additional sub-offices of the institutions that were not explicitly listed in the sources. The outcome thus conceptualizes the technostructure as a network of workplaces with a documented connection to a government institution and with at least one documented employment of a professional engineer.

<footnote n="41">41 Williams, *Politics and Technology*, 22.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">42 Raymond Aron, *The Industrial Society: Three Essays on Ideology and Development* (New York: Simon and Schuster, [1966] 1968), 93–142; William A. Faunce, *Problems of an Industrial Society* (New York, St. Louis, San Francisco: McGraw-Hill, 1968), pp. 17–18, 167–71; Williams, *Politics and Technology*, 11–13.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43 Bergère, *The Golden Age of Chinese Bourgeoisie*, 291.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44 Compiled from Quanguo zhengxie wenshi he xuexi weiyuanhui 全国政协文史和学习委员会, ed., *Huiyi Guomindang zhengfu ziyuan weiyuanhui*. 回忆国民党政府资源委员会 (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1988), Annex; Zhang and Shen, *Guomin zhengfu zhiguan nianbiao 1925-1949*; Academia Sinica, “Jingji bu dang’an.” 經濟部檔案, https://archives.sinica.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/e05.pdf.</footnote>
Engineers inside the Technostructure

From the perspective of professional engineers, the technostructure primarily manifested itself in six large clusters: The Ministry of Communications, the Ministry of Railways with its attached railway offices as individual sub-clusters, the various water conservancies, the National Construction Commission, the National Economic Council, and the National Resources Commission (Figure 1). Of all engineers with at least one recorded employment, 43.8% worked for at least one institution identified as part of the technostructure at least once in their life. The number may appear lower than expected; however, CERD mainly contains employment data for work commenced before 1941. More engineers gradually started working at the identified technostructure institutions through the 1940s when information about professional careers cuts off.

When surveying which engineering sub-discipline – civil, electrical, mechanical, mining, or chemical engineering – predominated at each of the institutions and their subdivisions, it becomes clear that the various government offices did not attract the different engineering subdisciplines in equal proportions. Rather, depending on the tasks and function of the respective institution, different brands of engineers assembled around them (Figure 1, Table 1). The Ministry of Railways and its associated regional railway offices attracted primarily civil engineers and, at the branch machine shops, mechanical engineers. Civil engineers also dominated the NEC, whose tasks concentrated on national infrastructure, especially highways. As expected, the Ministry of Communications featured a high number of electrical engineers, as it oversaw the regional telegraph and telephone bureaus.

Each of the sub-disciplines was in the process of developing its own identity, for instance, through its own engineering associations and journals. Engineers of different fields also graduated from different colleges because not every school offered a major in every sub-discipline. For instance, the Ministry of Communications allocated its own programs for the different sub-disciplines between the engineering colleges under its control in Beijing, Shanghai, and Tangshan to streamline its resources.<fnref n="45" /> As a result, rather than speaking of engineering in a general manner, it makes sense to distinguish between the respective influences of the different academic and professional engineering sub-disciplines, each bringing their own *habitus* and professional networks to a specific subset within the broader technostructure.

<footnote n="45">45 Thorben Pelzer, “Enter the Pragmatic Engineer: Ling Hongxun at Jiaotong University, 1920–1927,” *History of Education* 53, no. 2 (2024): 260–65.</footnote>
<table><caption>**Table 1:** Subdisciplines of engineers working in the main technostructure complexes.</caption><thead><tr><th>Technostructure complex</th><th>Civil</th><th>Electrical</th><th>Mechanical</th><th>Mining</th><th>Chemical</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Ministry of Railways</td><td>1,042</td><td>178</td><td>466</td><td>62</td><td>18</td></tr><tr><td>Ministry of Communications</td><td>240</td><td>461</td><td>129</td><td>40</td><td>24</td></tr><tr><td>Conservancies†</td><td>230</td><td>6</td><td>3</td><td>6</td><td>–</td></tr><tr><td>National Resources (NRC)</td><td>66</td><td>158</td><td>96</td><td>189</td><td>38</td></tr><tr><td>National Construction (NCC)</td><td>51</td><td>114</td><td>36</td><td>36</td><td>8</td></tr><tr><td>National Economic (NEC)</td><td>144</td><td>4</td><td>9</td><td>8</td><td>6</td></tr></tbody></table>

† Institutions concerning rivers and canals often changed their affiliation. At different times, they belonged to, i.e., the Ministries of Communications, Irrigation, or Economy, the National Conservancy Bureau, or the National Economic Council.

The NRC, often portrayed as the epitome of engineers inside the government, largely relied on mining engineers for its mining and metallurgy business and electrical engineers for its powerplants. Statistically, mining engineering constituted a minor sub-discipline within the larger professional engineering field, accounting for just 11.1% of total engineering degrees between 1912 and 1937. Although the NEC and NRC can be seen as tools of political meddling by different political factions, and the latter eventually prevailed over the former,<fnref n="46" /> the two institutions were not alike from the perspective of professional engineers. As their areas of responsibility diverged, they required different skill sets from their employees and, therefore, attracted engineers from different sub-disciplines. If some engineers profited from the powerful position of the NRC, this influence was limited to just a minority within the broader profession: When recruiting engineers and not, as was often the case, geologists,<fnref n="47" /> the NRC primarily recruited mining and electrical engineers. The NRC sub-divisions rarely required the skills that most engineers, who had predominantly studied civil engineering, offered (Table 1).

To gain a better understanding of the different engineering clusters that influenced different parts of the technostructure, the CERD biographic data is used for a social network analysis. The network analysis includes all engineers with at least one recorded employment inside at least one institution identified as part of the technostructure. All workplaces, including private ones and those overseas, are included in the analysis to account for potential connections outside the technostructure. The analysis utilizes a two-mode network, meaning individuals are not connected directly to one another, but rather through shared colleges or workplaces.

<footnote n="46">46 Zanasi, *Saving the Nation*, 190–92.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">47 Grace Yen Shen, *Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 125–26.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1:** Technostructure institutions with engineer involvement, highlighting the dominant engineering sub-discipline. Each node represents a division or sub-division (such as a specific railway line and its various machine shops). Larger node sizes indicate a larger number of employed engineers (non-proportional). Colors mark the predominant engineering subdiscipline (green circle: civil engineering, coral star: mechanical engineering, yellow square: electrical engineering, cyan triangle: mining engineering).</figcaption></figure>

The result of this social network analysis, when looked at in its complete state, is a detailed mesh that is too complex and wide to describe and discuss meaningfully. The structures hiding underneath the tens of thousands of connections become clearer when identifying sub-clusters within the larger network. The Louvain method is an algorithm used in the detection of smaller communities that share common charac-
teristics.<fnref n="48" /> When looking at the ten largest clusters identified through this method, one can identify communities (not necessarily actual social groups) that gravitate towards a specific college or a particular institutional complex (Table 2). The largest networks feature a geographic bias stipulated by their shared alma mater, namely the Jiaotong colleges in Beijing (Figure 2), Shanghai (Figure 3), Tangshan (Figure 4), and Beiyang University in Tianjin (Figure 5). Their later employment appears somewhat determined by geographical vicinity and the sub-discipline dominant at the respective college. Beijing Jiaotong University graduates often found work at the Beijing-era Ministry of Communications and its annexed telephone and telegraph administrations, as well as at the nearby Beijing–Hankou Railway. Shanghai Jiaotong University often recruited its own graduates as new lecturers and professors. Graduates of Tangshan University, with its long history as a railroader training school, spread across the different national railway lines. Meanwhile, the Beiyang University cluster has a strong hydraulic focus, with graduates working at different water conservancies and river commissions. Other communities gravitate towards a common employer, such as the National Resources Commission (Table 2, #9), or form provincial clusters with a local railroad as a main point of reference (#6 and #7).

Apart from these centers of gravitation, the clusters unveil mobility patterns between colleges and workplaces. For instance, graduating from Tsinghua University brought with it a likely employment at the Ministry of Railways. Former students of the Nanjing-era Central University often ended up working at the Central Electrical Equipment Factory. Meanwhile, the War Ministry drew from graduates of Berlin Technical University and Tongji University, a Shanghai-based institution with its own German history. A deeper dive into student and workplace mobility is a story for another time.<fnref n="49" /> What is important for the analysis of the technostructure is the realization that rather than understanding the rise of particular engineers within government institutions as the story of a general rise of the engineering profession, the SNA gives reason to understand the profession as a set of different sub-networks with varying levels of access to responsible roles in influential state institutions.

The distribution of engineers within state institutions depended on their professional specialization. The engineers formed clusters based on their shared college and workplace experiences. The social network analysis demonstrates that, at least implicitly, the different parts of the engineering profession formed rather distinct clusters within the larger technostructure. The question remains how these clusters may have, to varying degrees, exerted technocratic control, especially in

<footnote n="48">48 Vincent D. Blondel et al., “Fast Unfolding of Communities in Large Networks,” *Journal of Statistical Mechanics* 10 (2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="49">49 See Thorben Pelzer, “Engineers on the Move,” forthcoming.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Figures 2 and 3:** Subgraphs of the four largest technostructure communities. **Node color indicates type (Green circle: college, blue square: workplace, red rhombus: individual). Node size indicates degree centrality. Labeled are the five largest nodes by eigenvector.**</figcaption></figure>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figures 4 and 5: Subgraphs of the four largest technostructure communities, continued.</figcaption></figure>
the form of political offices. In other words, if engineers assumed political power at a considerable level at all, the question is whether this observation holds true for all kinds of engineers or if the phenomenon was largely limited to specific communities within the larger engineering profession.

<table><caption>**Table 2:** Largest communities within the CERD network. *Louvain detection, binary weighting.*</caption><thead><tr><th>Order [1]</th><th>Central nodes, eigenvector centrality [2]</th><th>Size</th><th>Diameter</th><th>Density</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1,106</td><td>Beijing Jiaotong University (as college), 1.00<br>Ministry of Communications, 0.54<br>Beijing-Hankou Railway, 0.22</td><td>1,716</td><td>10</td><td>0.0028</td></tr><tr><td>1,071</td><td>Shanghai Jiaotong University (as college), 1.00<br>Shanghai Jiaotong University (as workplace), 0.38<br>Nanjing-Shanghai-Hangzhou-Ningbo Rwy, 0.10</td><td>1,722</td><td>10</td><td>0.0030</td></tr><tr><td>857</td><td>Tangshan Jiaotong University (as college), 1.00<br>Gansu-Haizhou Rwy, 0.22<br>Zhejiang-Jiangxi Rwy, 0.22</td><td>1,257</td><td>10</td><td>0.0034</td></tr><tr><td>796</td><td>Beiyang University (as college), 1.00<br>North China Water Conservancy, 0.31<br>Yellow River Commission, 0.16</td><td>1,153</td><td>12</td><td>0.0036</td></tr><tr><td>687</td><td>Central University (as college), 1.00<br>Central Electrical Equipment Factory, 0.62<br>Huai River Water Conservancy, 0.32</td><td>969</td><td>10</td><td>0.0041</td></tr><tr><td>530</td><td>Hunan-Guizhou Rwy, 1.00<br>Hunan University (as college), 0.72<br>Hunan-Guizhou Rwy Engineering Dept., 0.24</td><td>722</td><td>14</td><td>0.0052</td></tr><tr><td>529</td><td>Beijing-Liaoning Rwy, 1.00<br>Beijing-Liaoning Rwy Tangshan Workshop, 0.14<br>Zheng Daqiang, 0.12</td><td>674</td><td>12</td><td>0.0048</td></tr><tr><td>448</td><td>Ministry of Railways, 1.00<br>Tsinghua University (as college), 0.62<br>Nanjing-Jiangxi Rwy, 0.50</td><td>531</td><td>12</td><td>0.0053</td></tr><tr><td>445</td><td>National Resources Commission, 1.00<br>Gansu Oil Fields, 0.18<br>NRC Sichuan Xikang Copper Administration, 0.16</td><td>582</td><td>10</td><td>0.0059</td></tr><tr><td>389</td><td>Tongji University (as college), 1.00<br>Department of War, 0.82<br>Berlin Technische Hochschule (as college), 0.41</td><td>481</td><td>12</td><td>0.0064</td></tr></tbody></table>

[1] The number of involved nodes (in contrast to “size,” the number of edges).

[2] Eigenvector centrality has been used to reduce the effect that different levels of completeness of the biographical entries (e.g., different numbers of events) have on the network statistics (cf. degree centrality).
Elite Sequencing

What is so far missing from the picture is the career stage of the engineers con-
nected via the network analysis: were they part of a professional or political elite,
or did their involvement at a respective government institution merely constitute
their everyday job, perhaps generously remunerated but not coming with any note-
worthy political influence? Furthermore, it is possible that engineer-politicians
were influential within specific clusters of the technostructure but did not play a
part in steering the state at the top level. Conversely, it may also be possible that
engineer-politicians were highly politically influential on the highest state levels
but, despite being engineers on paper, never played an important role in the larger
professional engineering scene. To assess the centrality of engineer-politicians
within the professional network, they must first be identified.

As CERD does not hold enough information about political offices, a second dataset, the Zhang/Shen list of leading Republican-era officeholders, in the following limited to only the ministries and commissions with substantial engineering involvement (see above), was superimposed on the technostructure network. The linking process between CERD and Zhang/Shen relied on a crude name-matching process, as names are the only information that the list of officeholders contains. The linking process, which matched 162 of the 588 names with CERD biographies, is unlikely to underestimate the number of involved engineers. More likely, the process slightly overestimates involvement due to the possibility that some of the individuals matched are false positives, i.e., a match between two distinct individuals bearing the same name. The top results of the linking process were manually checked and cleaned.<fnref n="50" />

The listed offices include positions with representative duties clearly outside
the scope of professional engineering, such as the office of committee member
(weiyuan 委員), state secretary (canshi 參事), and minister (buzhang 部長).<sup>51</sup>
Even within technical institutions, these political offices were usually held by
non-engineers: established leaders of the civil government like the educator Cai
Yuanpei (蔡元培) (1868–1940), career-politician Sun Ke (孫科) (1891–1973), or
diplomat Wang Zhengting (王正廷) (1882–1961) frequently appear on the lists of

<footnote n="50">50 The following algorithmic matches were manually excluded (same name, different persons): Chen Shuren 陳樹人, Geng Jingwen 耿覲文, Li Pan 李蟠, Li Peiji 李培基, Jiang Hao 江浩, Yan Kuan 嚴寬. Also excluded due to lack of available information: Fang Xuefen 方學芬, Wang Lie 王烈, Zhang Naigong 張乃恭.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">51 Wildcard string matching performed with the following terms: *buzhang* 部長, *canshi* 參事, *guwen* 顧問, *sizhang* 司長, *weiyuan* 委員, *zhengwu cizhang* 政務次長.</footnote>
committee members. This makes the occurrence of professional engineers holding
these political offices even more noteworthy.

Apart from these clearly political offices, the Zhang/Shen source includes posi-
tions of technical supervision, such as the office of chief engineer at the various
river conservancy commissions. The fact that engineers held offices specifically tai-
lored to engineers is not surprising. For the sake of the analysis, these positions will
be categorized as influential professional positions with a high degree of responsi-
bility but not as representative political offices.<fnref n="52" /> For the discussion of technocracy,
more interesting than engineers working inside the scope of their profession are
engineers who held political offices not already tendered out to them.

To understand the career development of the engineers located within the
technostructure – including their potential ascent to an “elite” – two steps must
be taken: first, all biographical events must be extracted from the two datasets.
Second, the job positions must be categorized. The first step involves converting the
available list of biographical information – birth, college graduation, and the com-
mencement of different jobs – into time-stamped events. To normalize the career
sequences of the engineers born in different years and decades, the year of birth
acts as year 0. To make up for the granularity of available data, only engineers with
two or more recorded and distinctly timed occupational events between their 16th
and 60th year of age were selected for the sequence analysis (2,323 individuals).
For the second step – the categorization of jobs – the most prevalent job positions
were manually tagged as belonging to a low, college staff, responsible professional,
representative political, or otherwise generic category. Then, string matching des-
ignated all remaining job descriptions to these five categories. Information about
the college from which the engineers graduated – domestic or overseas – was used
to define the career status after the known year of graduation and before the first
known year of employment.

Based on this taxonomy, Ward sequence clustering algorithmically divided the
biographic sequences into five distinct groups (Figure 6).<fnref n="53" /> In accordance with their
most representative and often last known career stage, I have labeled these groups
the generic group, the political elite, the professional elite, the educators, and the
assistants. By differentiating between representative political positions on the one

<footnote n="52">52 Wildcard string matching performed with the following terms: *celiang duizhang* 測量隊長, *changzhang* 廠長, *chuzhang* 處長, *cizhang* 次長, *duanzhang* 段長, *gongwu chuzhang* 工務處長, *gongwu kezhang* 工務科長, *gongwu kezhang* 工務課長, *gongwu zhuren* 工務主任, *jijian* 技監, *jingli* 經理, *jishu zhang* 技術長, *jizheng* 技正, *juzhang* 局長, *kezhang* 科長, *kezhang* 課長, *suozhang* 所長, *xiaozhang* 校長, *zhuren* 主任, *zong gongchengshi* 總工程師, *zong jingli* 總經理.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">53 See Alexis Gabadinho et al., “Analyzing and Visualizing State Sequences in R with TraMineR,” *Journal of Statistical Software* 40, no. 4 (2011).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 6:** Event sequence clustering of professional engineering biographies. Ward method, events at ages 16–60, threshold ≥3 events, marked: last known status.</figcaption></figure>
<table><caption>**Table 3:** Selected sequences by occurrence (threshold ≥2 known employments, n = 2,323).</caption><thead><tr><th>Sequence</th><th>Support [1]</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>(Graduated in China)</td><td>0.610</td></tr><tr><td>(Graduated abroad)</td><td>0.424</td></tr><tr><td>(Graduated in China) → (Responsible position)</td><td>0.317</td></tr><tr><td>(Graduated abroad) → (Responsible position)</td><td>0.298</td></tr><tr><td>(Graduated in China) → (Assistant position)</td><td>0.239</td></tr><tr><td>(Assistant position) → (Responsible position)</td><td>0.169</td></tr><tr><td>(Graduated abroad) → (College position)</td><td>0.148</td></tr><tr><td>(Graduated in China) → (College position)</td><td>0.130</td></tr><tr><td>(Graduated abroad) → (Assistant position)</td><td>0.120</td></tr><tr><td>(Graduated abroad) → (Political position)</td><td>0.071</td></tr><tr><td>(Responsible position) → (Political position)</td><td>0.066</td></tr><tr><td>(Political position) → (Responsible position)</td><td>0.054</td></tr><tr><td>(Graduated in China) → (Political position)</td><td>0.052</td></tr><tr><td>(Assistant position) → (Political position)</td><td>0.033</td></tr><tr><td>(Responsible position) → (Assistant position)</td><td>0.031</td></tr><tr><td>(Political position) → (Assistant position)</td><td>0.003</td></tr></tbody></table>

[1] Here, the proportion of careers that contain the sequence.

hand and leading, responsible positions – even when held inside state institutions – on the other, it becomes clear that a large group of elite engineers focused on a successful professional career office (n = 924) while only a minor community of engineers made the jump to becoming engineer-politicians (n = 131).

Apart from grouping the engineers into these five groups, the event sequences can be screened for common patterns. What becomes clear is the significance of college prestige for a later career, especially the prestige associated with graduating from an overseas university. Overseas graduates were 1.35 times more likely to assume a responsible position and 1.55 times more likely to hold political office (Table 3). In professional theory, the jump from active engineering practice to an occupation focused on bureaucracy and political leadership has been termed an “exit” as the individuals stop being “engineers” as defined by their profession.<fnref n="54" /> Sequence analysis, however, indicates that in Republican

<footnote n="54">54 Michael Burrage, Konrad H. Jarausch, and Hannes Siegrist, “An Actor-Based Framework for the Study of the Professions,” in *Professions in Theory and History: Rethinking the Study of the Professions*, ed. Michael Burrage and Rolf Torstendahl (London, Newbury Park, New Delhi: Sage, 1990), 214; Eliot Freidson, *Professionalism: The Third Logic* (Cambridge, Malden: Polity, [2001] 2007), 168.</footnote>
China, the commencement of a political office did not necessitate an exit from the professional field: individuals who moved from a responsible position to a political office frequently moved back from a representative office to a responsible professional one – or, as the sequence only takes the last known occupational status into account, may have held professional and political positions simultaneously. This phenomenon is also presented visually through the event sequence clustering, where the political sequence is the only one of the five sequences where a category other than the category by which the sequence is identified remains a clearly identifiable part of the sequence well into the fifth decade of the individuals' lives (Figure 6).

<table><caption>**Table 4:** Approximate extent of engineer involvement in the higher ranks of Nationalist institutions, 1926–1949. *Based on the CERD and Zhang/Shen linking process, n=4,846/20,020/29,576.*</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Individuals</th><th>Accumulated years<br>in office total</th><th>Accumulated years<br>in each distinct office</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Resources, post-war</td><td>45.45%</td><td>54.03%</td><td>54.77%</td></tr><tr><td>Communications</td><td>29.59%</td><td>31.08%</td><td>33.13%</td></tr><tr><td>Irrigation</td><td>24.19%</td><td>33.86%</td><td>40.52%</td></tr><tr><td>Railways</td><td>18.18%</td><td>26.82%</td><td>23.77%</td></tr><tr><td>Construction</td><td>17.81%</td><td>18.33%</td><td>23.15%</td></tr><tr><td>Economic</td><td>15.00%</td><td>17.59%</td><td>27.41%</td></tr><tr><td>State Executive</td><td>2.19%</td><td>6.66%</td><td>10.52%</td></tr><tr><td>All other combined</td><td>2.05%</td><td>3.24%</td><td>7.64%</td></tr></tbody></table>

Another complementary attempt to measure the elite involvement of engineers inside state institutions is to take the Zhang/Shen dataset of officeholders and look at how many of the overall number of individuals in leading positions inside each institutional complex can be identified as potential engineers through the CERD name-matching process. Three metrics are being used: the ratio of engineers against the overall number of names listed for each complex; the ratio of how many years these people spent inside the institutions; and the ratio of accumulated years inside the institutions in distinct, often concurrently held positions (Table 4). No matter the metrics used, it becomes clear that with the exception of the NRC, engineer involvement rarely surpassed a third of the leading positions available inside the institutions. In other words, although engineers wielded significant influence inside the technological government institutions, they did not constitute a ruling majority. While thousands of engineers at some point worked inside the technostructure, the leading roles were taken up mostly by non-engineers and only a small engineer elite. The prominent role of these few engineers becomes clear when comparing the different metrics: When
totaling up all years that individuals, both engineers and non-engineers, served inside the institutions in leading positions (Table 4, second and third columns), engineers spent longer times in office than suggested by the ratio in which they were a part of the respective institution (Table 4, first column). In other words, as technical experts, they kept their positions longer than the average bureaucrat.

When looking at the persons at the top level of the government – here, the Executive Yuan, Military Affairs Commission, Presidential Office, and State Council (row “State Executive” in Table 4) – the number of engineers is as low as 2.19%. If this was the basis of assessing technocratic rule, as done when the term is applied to the 1990s and 2000s People’s Republic, this amount is actually lower, not higher, than statistically expected given that between 10% and 20% of Chinese university graduates held a degree in engineering.<fnref n="55" /> When looking at the accumulated metrics, it becomes clear why history presents us with a different impression: Although only every fiftieth high-ranking politician was an engineer, when looking at the accumulated time that people served in leading offices, engineers take up over 10% of the total (Table 4). Of the few engineers who made it, some made it very far and for an above-average amount of time.

## Engineer-Politicians

As a final step, the common characteristics that the more influential engineers shared must be identified. For this, the elite group of engineers – identified above through the sequence analysis and through the metrics applied to the linked Zhang/Shen dataset – are located within the clusters of the previously conducted social network analysis.

Looking at the political elite as identified through the sequence analysis, the professional backgrounds reveal a particular feature: while the distribution of the engineering sub-disciplines inside the technostructure at large mostly reflects the total distribution within the profession, the number of mining and electrical engineers within the political sequence cluster is much higher than expected, and the number of civil and mechanical engineers significantly lower (Table 5).

<footnote n="55">55 Xueben Pan 潘學本, ed., Zhonghua minguo tongji tiyao: Minguo sanshisi nian ji. 中華民國統計提要民國三十四年輯 (Chongqing: Directorate of Statistics, [1945] 2010), 96–97; Ruth Hayhoe, *China's Universities 1895–1995: A Century of Cultural Conflict* (New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1996), 50–53.</footnote>
<table><caption>**Table 5:** Share of the six most prevalent engineering degrees by complex (n=15,578/3,792/128).</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>CERD total</th><th>Technostructure</th><th>Political sequence cluster</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Civil Engineering</td><td>38.75%</td><td>41.98%</td><td>22.31%</td></tr><tr><td>Electrical Engineering</td><td>19.85%</td><td>24.00%</td><td>33.08%</td></tr><tr><td>Mechanical Engineering</td><td>16.64%</td><td>17.93%</td><td>11.54%</td></tr><tr><td>Mining Engineering</td><td>10.38%</td><td>10.21%</td><td>17.69%</td></tr><tr><td>Chemical Engineering</td><td>7.60%</td><td>3.24%</td><td>11.54%</td></tr><tr><td>Textile Engineering</td><td>4.47%</td><td>0.37%</td><td>-</td></tr></tbody></table>

As for mechanical engineers, no high-level government institutions specifically catered towards members of this sub-profession. The primary employers of mechanical engineers inside the technostructure were the railroad bureaus, which were subordinate to the Ministries of Communications and Railways. Boards and other representative positions inside the traditional ministries were less common than in the various government commissions, and the offices of ministers and state secretaries were often occupied by career politicians. While civil engineers (especially when specialized as hydraulic engineers) were at least able to climb the ranks inside the various river conservancies, mechanical engineers remained largely confined to their professional careers. In this sense, practitioners of mechanical engineering, traditionally associated with manual practice in workshops, exhibited a comparably lower prestige, a characteristic they shared with their peers in other countries.<fnref n="56" />

Meanwhile, the number of chemical engineers within the political elite diverges from the share of chemical engineers inside the technostructure due to a large private sector, but only moderately exceeds the share of chemical engineers within the professional field at large. For mining and electrical engineers, the high number of political officeholders largely stems from their involvement with the NRC. Therefore, while the NRC was only of limited importance to the engineering profession at large, for members of those fields of engineering which the NRC primarily attracted, the commission offered an exceptional potential to ascend to the political elite (Tables 4, 5).

<footnote n="56">56 Monte A. Calvert, *The Mechanical Engineer in America, 1830–1910: Professional Cultures in Conflict* (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967).</footnote>
<table><caption>**Table 6:** Share of the seven most common countries of graduation by complex (n = 15,825/3,969/134).</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>CERD total</th><th>Technostructure share</th><th>Political sequence cluster</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Domestic only</td><td>83.60%</td><td>73.77%</td><td>58.09%</td></tr><tr><td>USA</td><td>8.33%</td><td>14.79%</td><td>20.59%</td></tr><tr><td>Japan</td><td>2.97%</td><td>3.7%</td><td>3.68%</td></tr><tr><td>UK</td><td>1.67%</td><td>1.74%</td><td>2.94%</td></tr><tr><td>France</td><td>1.45%</td><td>2.37%</td><td>6.62%</td></tr><tr><td>Germany</td><td>1.07%</td><td>1.84%</td><td>4.41%</td></tr><tr><td>Belgium</td><td>0.77%</td><td>1.54%</td><td>2.94%</td></tr></tbody></table>

As pointed out in the sequence analysis, when looking at the countries in which the engineer-politicians graduated, relatively few students completed their studies at a domestic college (Table 6). But rather than exhibiting a general bias for overseas graduates, the political sequence cluster is particularly dominated by U.S. graduates (20.6%). As for German-educated engineers, the discrepancy between their share in the overall dataset and their share in the political sequence cluster – from 1.1% of all engineers to 4.4% of engineer-politicians – supports the observation that German groups yielded a disproportionately large influence inside Guomindang institutions.<fnref n="57" /> Nonetheless, in total numbers, the European-educated engineers are dwarfed by the prevalence of U.S.-educated professionals. Holding a degree from Japan – a country popular with early Chinese students<fnref n="58" /> – did not significantly increase chances to assume a political office, although this figure may be skewed as the analysis primarily relies on data from the Chongqing government, hence potentially missing information on some engineer-collaborators working for the Japan-aligned wartime regimes.

When looking at the individuals holding offices for the longest period, the list is topped by individuals who, in many cases, are well-known and hold a firm place in Chinese historiography (Table 7). Notably, of the more than 17,000 engineers in CERD, just 144 individuals can be matched with names of persons holding a leading office at a technical ministry or commission. Of these individuals, just 23 persons share half of the total sum of accumulated years in different, often concurrent, positions.

<footnote n="57">57 Zheng, Cheng and Zhang, *Jiu Zhongguo de ziyuan weiyuanhui 1932–1949*, 27–41. See also Iwo Amelung, “Der Gelbe Fluß in Deutschland: Chinesisch-deutsche Beziehungen auf dem Gebiet des Wasserbaus in den 20er und 30er Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts,” *Oriens Extremus* 38 (1995); William C. Kirby, *Germany and Republican China* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984).</footnote>

<footnote n="58">58 Paula Harrell, *Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Fu-ch'ing Huang, *Chinese Students in Japan in the Late Ch'ing Period*, East Asian Cultural Studies Series 22 (Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1982), Translated by Katherine P. K. Whitaker.</footnote>
<table><caption>**Table 7:** Accumulated years in office for engineers in higher ranks of Nationalist institutions, 1926–1949.</caption><thead><tr><th>Years total</th><th>Years at state executive level</th><th>Name</th><th>Lifespan</th><th>Engineering sub-discipline</th><th>Country of graduation</th><th>Social network cluster</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>66</td><td>42</td><td>Kong Xiangxi</td><td>1880–1967</td><td>–</td><td>USA</td><td>A</td></tr><tr><td>56</td><td>–</td><td>Wei Zifu</td><td>1900–1988</td><td>Mechanical</td><td>USA</td><td>Fig. 2</td></tr><tr><td>54</td><td>–</td><td>Li Shutian</td><td>1896–1990</td><td>Civil</td><td>USA</td><td>Fig. 5</td></tr><tr><td>52</td><td>7</td><td>Shen Baixian</td><td>1900–2001</td><td>Civil</td><td>USA</td><td>A</td></tr><tr><td>52</td><td>–</td><td>Chen Moxie</td><td>1887</td><td>Civil</td><td>USA</td><td>other</td></tr><tr><td>49</td><td>7</td><td>Chen Lifu</td><td>1888–1970</td><td>Mining</td><td>USA</td><td>Fig. 5</td></tr><tr><td>43</td><td>7</td><td>Xu Kai</td><td>1882–1938</td><td>Civil</td><td>USA</td><td>other</td></tr><tr><td>43</td><td>–</td><td>Li Yizhi</td><td>1886–1955</td><td>Civil</td><td>Germany</td><td>Fig. 5</td></tr><tr><td>42</td><td>–</td><td>Sa Fujun</td><td>1889–1971</td><td>Civil</td><td>USA</td><td>other</td></tr><tr><td>40</td><td>20</td><td>Weng Wenhao</td><td>1901–1980</td><td>Civil</td><td>Belgium</td><td>B</td></tr><tr><td>39</td><td>8</td><td>Shen Yi</td><td>1898–1969</td><td>Mining</td><td>Germany</td><td>B</td></tr><tr><td>36</td><td>4</td><td>Zeng Yangfu</td><td>1895–1974</td><td>Civil</td><td>China</td><td>other</td></tr><tr><td>35</td><td>2</td><td>Xu Shida</td><td>1897–1979</td><td>Civil</td><td>USA</td><td>Fig. 5</td></tr><tr><td>34</td><td>–</td><td>Lin Pingyi</td><td>1892–1967</td><td>Civil</td><td>USA</td><td>A</td></tr><tr><td>31</td><td>6</td><td>Chen Panling</td><td>1890–1941</td><td>Civil</td><td>China</td><td>Fig. 5</td></tr><tr><td>30</td><td>–</td><td>Zhou Xiangxian</td><td>1885–1960</td><td>Civil</td><td>USA</td><td>other</td></tr><tr><td>29</td><td>7</td><td>Zhang Hanying</td><td>1900–2002</td><td>Civil</td><td>USA</td><td>Fig. 5</td></tr><tr><td>25</td><td>1</td><td>Kong Xianrong</td><td>1890–1941</td><td>unspecified</td><td>China</td><td>Fig. 5</td></tr><tr><td>25</td><td>–</td><td>Song Xishang</td><td>1896–1982</td><td>Civil</td><td>USA</td><td>other</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><caption>Table 7 (continued)</caption><thead><tr><th>Years total</th><th>Years at state executive level</th><th>Name</th><th>Lifespan</th><th>Engineering sub-discipline</th><th>Country of graduation</th><th>Social network cluster</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>24</td><td>8 Mao Yisheng</td><td>茅以昇</td><td>1896–1989</td><td>Civil</td><td>USA</td><td>other</td></tr><tr><td>22</td><td>- Tao Fengshan</td><td>陶鳳山</td><td>1900–1950</td><td>Electrical</td><td>China</td><td>Fig. 2</td></tr><tr><td>21</td><td>1 Fu Dingsheng</td><td>符鼎升</td><td>b. 1897</td><td>unspecified</td><td>Japan</td><td>Fig. 2</td></tr></tbody></table>

Σ 869 (upper half of total)

The concentration of U.S.-educated engineers, already shown for the sequence cluster of engineer-politicians in general, becomes even more evident. Apart from the German-educated engineers Li Yizhi (李儀祉) (1882–1938) and Shen Yi (沈怡) (1901–1980), who primarily accumulated their years in various hydraulic commissions, the prominent Belgian Ph.D. holder Weng Wenhao (翁文灝) (1889–1971, see below), and just four domestic and one Japanese graduate, everyone on the list held an American degree.

Nobody on the list was born after 1901 (Table 7). Having graduated decades before they assumed office, the earlier generation of engineers was probably not in demand for their cutting-edge knowledge about the engineering discipline. Rather, at the time of working in their positions, they were well-established and respectable not only through their profession but also had, presumably, built up their own networks. The U.S.-educated mechanical, railway, and hydraulic engineers on the list may have had different fields to cater to professionally, but they were, by the vast majority, joint members of the Chinese Institute of Engineers and the much more exclusive Association of Chinese and American Engineers, and often held leading positions within the latter.<fnref n="59" />

No matter whether looking at the names included in the political cluster as identified through the sequence analysis (Figure 6) or at the list of accumulated years in office as calculated through the CERD-Zhang/Shen linking process (Table 7), three social network clusters are represented much more inside the elite than inside the overall technostructure: A medium-sized cluster A (fifth row in Table 2) that gravitates around Central University in the capital Nanjing (+2.5% in the sequence, +11.5% in accumulated years); a very small sub-network B (not

<footnote n="59">59 Pelzer, *Engineering Trouble*, 113–44, 174–84.</footnote>
part of the ten largest communities in Table 2), topped by individuals such as
the somewhat-forgotten but highly influential chemical engineer Wu Chengluo
(吳承洛) (1892–1955)<fnref n="60" /> rather than by institutions (+2.3% and +7.1%); and the
hydraulic engineering cluster of Beiyang University graduates (Figure 5, +2.2%
and +9.0%). On the other end of the spectrum, the largest technostructure cluster
(Figure 2) is underrepresented within the elite: the one centered around the old
capital Beijing (–2.9% and –8.1%). None of the top-ranking engineer-politicians
(Table 7) are part of the second and third-largest clusters (Figures 3 and 4), with
graduates of the Jiaotong colleges in Shanghai and Tangshan often becoming lec-
turers or railroad engineers rather than assuming leading roles in government
institutions (Shanghai cluster –4.3% and –13.9%; Tangshan cluster –1.5% and
–5.6%). The over- and underrepresentation of engineer-politicians along respec-
tively lesser and larger subgraphs demonstrates that the emergence of a politi-
cal elite of engineers was a specific phenomenon that did not spread across the
engineering profession equally. Technocracy “in a narrow sense” was not just
confined to a limited number of engineers but also favored a limited selection of
clusters to draw from.

Consequently, the engineers ranking highest as officeholders (Table 7) were
not necessarily the engineers most central to the professional engineering scene.
For instance, the railroad engineers Ling Hongxun (凌鴻勛) (1894–1981) and Yan
Deqing (顏德慶) (1878–1942) may not have accumulated as many years in politi-
cal offices as Weng Wenhao or Chen Lifu, but they occupied a much more central
position in the overall engineering network (eigenvector 0.056 for Ling and 0.016
for Yan, compared to 0.003 for Weng and 0.002 for Chen). They planned and
administered various railway lines and held high professional positions through
which they influenced the infrastructural landscape of the country. The discrep-
ancy between political relevance and professional network centrality underscores
the conceptual difference between engineers situated firmly inside the political
establishment on the one hand and professionally active engineers sporadically
occupying political offices on the other.<fnref n="61" /> Both types can match definitions of “tech-
nocracy” (see discussion above), but they relate to different kinds of careers and
individuals. Professional network centrality did not directly translate into political
influence.

There is a dimension to interpersonal relationships that network analysis
given the limited kinds of information available through the databases, cannot

<footnote n="60">60 Pelzer et al., CERD, 7539.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">61 For thoughts on a division between such camps, see also Apter, *The Politics of Modernization*, 259; Kirby, “Continuity and Change in Modern China,” 130.</footnote>
factor in but may be important in explaining the causes for the rise of a chosen
few engineers (Table 7): private ties outside of college and the workplace. Chen
Lifu, the mining engineer who became a leading politician in Jiang Jieshi's cabinet,
is a prime example. Chen's uncle, Chen Qimei (陳其美) (1878-1916), had been an
early mentor and friend of the generalissimo. Connections between Chen Lifu and
other later engineer-politicians can be drawn at an early stage, predating the start
of their professional careers: When setting sail to study in the United States, Chen's
former classmate in China, the later influential hydraulic engineer Li Shutian (李書
田) (1900-1988), was onboard too. So was Chen's brother-in-law Shen Baixian (沈
百先) (1896-1990), who also ranks high on the list of accumulated years in political
offices (Table 7). Another engineer on the list, Zeng Yangfu (曾養甫) (1898-1969),
was Chen's classmate at Pittsburgh.<fnref n="62" /> These biographical insights do not mitigate
the results of the network analysis, but they indicate the network components may
at times have roots predating professional life and, in the case of family relations,
sometimes even predating the college years.

The influence of engineers within the higher ranks of state institutions, already
analyzed to have been limited to a minority of the professional field, shrinks even
further when looking at only those engineers that made it all the way to the Nation-
alist executive level (Table 7).<fnref n="63" /> Only 36 engineers are documented to have held an
office inside these institutions. Just six of them account for 50% of the total doc-
umented accumulated years that engineers spent in these offices. Two of the six
barely qualify as engineers: Kong Xiangxi (孔祥熙) (1880-1967) had studied mining
but, although later accepted into the Chinese Institute of Mining Engineers, had
already changed his profession to banking before joining politics. Weng Wenhao
was a geologist by degree and profession, not a mining engineer. Nonetheless,
he later received an honorary degree as Doctor of Engineering from Berlin and
was accepted into several professional engineering societies.<fnref n="64" /> Being a commuter
between the two disciplines may have presented him with additional qualifica-
tions to lead the NRC – but his and Kong's cases also show that one has to stretch
the definition of engineering to find engineers in higher political positions at all.
What is mostly left is the unique success story of Chen Lifu, the Pittsburgh “techno-
crat” whose name is well established in connection with the fascist history of the
party.<fnref n="65" /> In conclusion, the political involvement of engineers, outside the techni-

<footnote n="62">62 Ch'en, *The Storm Clouds Clear over China*, 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">63 As described earlier, the state executive here is defined as positions inside the Executive Yuan, the Military Affairs Commission, the Presidential Office, and the State Council.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">64 Pelzer et al., CERD, 70626.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">65 Maggie Clinton, *Revolutionary Nativism: Fascism and Culture in China, 1925-1937* (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 29-35.</footnote>
cal commissions and ministries, was far from anything resembling the “red engi-
neers” cluster that later defined “technocracy” in the sense of the post-reform PRC
cabinets.

Conclusion

This chapter explored the involvement of professional engineers inside the Nation-
alist technostructure through the lens of network and sequence analysis. For engi-
neers, the state institutions, including the ministries, commissions, and attached
enterprises, were of utmost importance as the largest employers of the Nanjing
decade. Given the high level of penetration that the statist technostructure reached
through the Nationalist era, it is not surprising that many engineers at some point
worked for and received their salaries from these institutions.

Apart from the much-discussed NRC and the other newly formed commissions, this chapter has demonstrated that the classical ministries – especially Communications and Railways – remained the gravitational center of the profession, the majority of which were civil engineers, while the NRC primarily drafted mining engineers, a sub-profession that formed a small minority inside the wider engineering scene. The largest chunk of the profession continued to be employed as active engineers with limited autonomy. Although, as a professional collective, engineers may have qualified as “technocrats” in a wider sense, their collective influence on industry and infrastructure is difficult to put in numbers. A quantitative study can estimate, contextualize, and put things into relation, but the influence of engineers through everyday professional practice remains a case for qualitative and often biographical studies.

By dividing job positions into different categories – among them leading profes-
sional and leading political positions – this chapter demonstrated that the number
of politically involved engineers remained low. The cluster of engineer-politicians
was small and drew from just a few minor communities inside the larger profes-
sional network. For most engineers of the largest sub-clusters, political offices were
not part of their career paths. Primarily, the powerful technical institutions were
“technocratic” in utilizing a set of bureaucratic principles that highly valued effi-
ciency and rationalism. When speaking of “technocracy,” it is therefore important
not to mistake the rise of individual engineers for the rise of the profession. The
principles valued inside these institutions may have matched the mindset of engi-
neers, but in most cases, these principles were not administered by the engineers
themselves.
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