The Transformation of Engineering Disciplines at Tsinghua University and the Soviet Influence Therein (1952–1960)

In the early 1950s, China turned to the Soviet Union for help in restructuring colleges and departments around the nation. Tsinghua University (also simply referred to as “Tsinghua”) went from an American-style multi-college comprehensive university to a Soviet-style polytechnic university, with a total of sixty-five Soviet experts invited to work there between 1952 and 1960. Tsinghua University reformed the existing engineering disciplines and established new departments such as engineering physics and automatic control, thus creating a new system of primary and secondary disciplines. By 1960, Tsinghua University no longer provided a “general education” and focused instead on “orienting its various disciplines toward the process of industrialization.” The Soviet experts were involved with the various new departments and research groups, where they offered new courses, wrote textbooks, built laboratories, and trained graduate students and young teachers, playing an important role in the transformation of Tsinghua. Similar transformations of colleges and departments during the 1950s in China were not uncommon and indicate a major shift in the history of Chinese higher education.