Politics, Market and Economic Assistance: A Historical Case Study on the International Harvester Company's Engagement with China during the Republican Period

In 1945, P. W. Tsou, the resident representative of the Chinese Minister of Agriculture and Forestry in the United States, proposed the Agricultural Engineering Program for China to the International Harvester Company (IHC). This program provided Harvester Fellowships to sponsor twenty Chinese students to study agricultural engineering in the U.S. In addition, this program instituted the Committee on Agricultural Engineering, led by J. Brownlee Davidson, the founder of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers, to direct teaching, research, and promulgation of agricultural engineering in China. This program did not help the IHC exploit China’s agricultural engineering market, nor did it set an example for the Nationalist government to stabilize rural China via promoting agricultural engineering. Yet the individuals cultivated through this program chose to remain in mainland China following the Revolution of 1949. They became the first generation of agricultural engineers in the People’s Republic of China.

Dr. Ruisheng Zhang (张瑞胜) earned his Ph.D. degree in history from Purdue University in the United States. He was an International Exchange Program-endowed postdoctoral fellow in the History Department at Tsinghua University. Currently, Dr. Zhang is a lecturer in the School of History at Beijing Normal University. He writes bilingually on research topics, including the transnational history of science and technology, agricultural history, and environmental history. His work has been published in Agricultural History, Rural History, and Environmental History. Additionally, he is a recipient of several research grants and fellowships from different countries and regions, including the National Social Science Fund of China. His first book, A Study of China-US Transnational Agricultural History, 1925-1949 (Hong Kong: Chung Hwa Book Co., 2025), examines the important cooperation of China and the United States in agricultural technology, education, and trade during the first half of the twentieth century.