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Building a Hydraulic Engine: Late Development, Water Nationalism, and China’s Gezhouba Dam

Thu, March 30, 10:30am to 12:00pm, The Drake Hotel, Astor

Abstract

Starting in the early twentieth century, Chinese leaders began to recognize the potential to generate massive amounts of hydroelectric energy from the Yangzi River. This paper examines how Chinese government elites endeavored in the mid-twentieth century to construct a mega-dam in the Three Gorges region to power national industrialization. The paper shows how domestic resource constraints structured government efforts to build hydraulic infrastructure in the region to transform the Yangzi River into a potent source of national economic strength.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Guomindang (GMD) government came to envision the Three Gorges as a gargantuan hydroelectric motor. Short on funds and technical personnel, the GMD partnered with American advisors to erect a dam that would realize the regime’s hydropower dreams. However, the GMD was not able to realize their developmental visions due to widespread economic and political instability that lasted until the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rose to power in 1949. In the 1950s, the CCP continued to draft plans to build a huge dam that would re-engineer the Three Gorges into a hydro-powered engine of national development. Like its predecessor, the CCP still faced significant economic shortages. To compensate for the lack of domestic industrial capital, the Communist Party sought assistance from Soviet technical personnel. However, this international socialist project ended abruptly with the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s. Left with only its limited technical resources, the CCP leadership decided to make a virtue out of China’s large population and mobilized hundreds of thousands of workers in the the 1970s to construct the Gezhouba Dam. This developmental strategy finally fulfilled Chinese government aspirations to make the Yangzi River into a hydraulic dynamo of national power.

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