Transforming Waters: Hydroelectricity, State Making, and Social Changes in Twentieth-Century China
Abstract
This dissertation argues for the central role of hydroelectric projects in the state making and social changes in twentieth-century China. It advances the idea that hydroelectric technology not only transformed natural rivers into electricity for national industrialization, but also enabled the socialist state to normalize an envirotechnical complex centered on resource extraction. Geographically, this dissertation is basically grounded in two sites: one is Southwest China where many small scale hydroelectric power plants were built from the 1910s throughout 1970s; another is the Sanmenxia hydropower project, with a mega dam and the largest reservoir, on the Yellow River. Meanwhile, it also brings evidence from other parts of the country into discussion. Through the history of hydroelectricity, it examines how Chinese elites responded to the global trend of the rise of “white coal” after World War I, how the Chinese Nationalists and Japanese tried to apply this technology to energize national resistance and imperial dominance respectively, and how the Chinese Communists relied on it to realize its socialist ambitions during the Great Leap Forward. Social processes in the building of hydroelectric power plants, and, more broadly, in the making of the envirotechnical regime, feature prominently in this study. This research reveals local communities’ responses to the changes that hydroelectric technology wrought in their habitat and daily life. Particularly in the case of the Sanmenxia reservoir resettlement, tens of thousands inhabitants were involuntarily displaced to the northwest frontier, extending the social effects of the concrete dam far beyond the river and the reservoir it produced. This narrative employs a range of sources from inside and outside of mainland China. It is a reconstruction of the rise of hydroelectricity in twentieth-century China from an envirotechnical perspective. As such, it seeks not only to perceive Chinese history through the lens of environmental and technological history, but also to provide an alternative to the standard global historical narrative dominated by fossil fuels.