Consuming Power Under Socialism: Electrification and the Changing of People’s Workspace and Patterns of Life in Rural North China, 1950-1983

• In Event: Sugar, Water, and Electricity: New Origin Stories for Today’s Climate Crisis

Abstract

This paper investigates how electricity shaped people’s workspace and patterns of life in rural North China between the 1950s and 1980s. It sheds light on the exploitation of marginalized communities by the socialist state, which in turn accelerated anthropogenic climate change. In the late 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) initiated the Great Leap Forward, which involved extending power lines to rural areas for agricultural and industrial production. To meet the surging demand for electricity, the CCP hastily constructed a vast amount of precarious, incompatible, and temporary electrical infrastructure within a limited time, mobilizing human labor and utilizing rustic materials due to the scarcity of raw materials and the ineptitude of socialist logistics. Workers and peasants were compelled to change their working schedules to meet the balance of power load and were exposed to the dangers of the current. Additionally, despite having limited knowledge about its proper use, they took advantage of the infrastructure space created by the power lines, utilizing electricity for purposes beyond the CCP’s original intentions. All these factors caused the increasing numbers of electrocutions, accidents, and electricity wastage. By examining the consumption activities and cultural practices related to electricity in rural China, I argue that people in the Global South were more vulnerable facing the energy transition and, more importantly, the incongruity between electrical infrastructure and people’s knowledge regime accelerated climate change in the age of the Anthropocene.

Author

• Hongyun Lyu, University of Toronto