After the 1949 Chinese civil war, the Communist authorities condemned excessive study of the humanities and social sciences, considering them wasteful and deleterious to China's industrialization. The Chinese Academy of Sciences was set up the year the Communists came into power. Education was reformed following the Soviet model, and small engineering departments were amalgamated into giant polytechnic institutes such as Tsinghua University and Tianjin University. Education became highly specialized, with students studying subjects like "railway bridge construction."
Since the 1990s the Soviet model has been largely abolished in China, with many universities expanding or merging with others to provide more comprehensive education in parallel with specialized technical training.