At the beginning of New China, the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the government attached great importance to the establishment of an independent industrial system of their own and industrialization, in order to cope with the extremely difficult situation that the domestic economy was on the verge of collapse and foreign hostile forces were suppressing our country. Higher engineering education faced the important mission of directly cultivating talents for industrial construction at the forefront of transformation and development of the whole higher education. Based on the economic situation in the early days of the People's Republic of China, the international environment, the condition of higher education, and the strategic decision made by the Party Central Committee to give priority to the development of heavy industry, we elaborate the process of the initial formation of China's higher engineering education system from the perspective of the transformation, establishment, adjustment and tracking of the frontiers of engineering technology in engineering universities. The forepart takes Tsinghua University and Harbin Institute of Technology as examples, to introduce the situation of the new people's regime in taking over and transforming the old universities. Taking Dalian Institute of Technology and Military Engineering College of the Chinese People's Liberation Army as examples, we show the course of our Party's founding of engineering universities before and after 1949. The latter part discusses the process of establishing a group of engineering colleges with distinctive industry characteristics and optimizing the regional layout of engineering colleges through the adjustment of colleges and departments and the relocation of Jiaotong University to western China. Through the establishment of the University of Science and Technology of China and the establishment of computer, semiconductor, radio electronics, automation and other majors, we present the efforts made by the universities to track the frontiers of engineering science and technology.

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