ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Mobilizational Technocracy: Permafrost and the National Science Campaign on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway in Late Mao- and Hua Guofeng-era China, 1974-1978

• In Event: The Authoritarian Anthropocene: Twentieth-Century Party States and the Mobilization of Earth and Climate Knowledge

English Abstract

This paper traces permafrost science’s development in the People’s Republic of China along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway engineering corridor between 1974 and 1978. Since its planned construction in 1956, the railway was intended to undergird the Tibetan Plateau’s transformation into the industrializing Maoist state’s largest resource frontier. But permafrost—or perennially frozen soil—curtailed the Maoist promise of overcoming environmental limits through mass labor and grassroots knowledge.

Utilizing archival sources, internal-circulation publications, and oral histories, this paper traces how permafrost instead forged a technocracy that, under the National Science Campaign on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway (1974–1978), mobilized scientific expertise across the entire country to overcome technical bottlenecks impeding the Tibetan Plateau’s extractive development. This paper further argues that the late Maoist and subsequent Hua Guofeng regime of “socialist scientific cooperation” transformed the Tibetan Plateau into not only Chinese, but also global polar engineers’ new scientific frontier. By framing common cold-region engineering challenges facing the North and Third Poles, the Ministry of Railways entangled Maoist China's extractive ambitions with contemporaneous resource and infrastructural developments across the circumpolar North. In so doing, this mobilizational technocracy harnessed and domesticated global polar engineering expertise in its “pitch battle against permafrost” on the Tibetan Plateau.

Ultimately, this paper foreshadows how the misfit of high-latitude (polar) engineering knowledge to high altitudes, and the PRC’s peculiar experiences of infrastructure development on the “Third Pole,” not merely placed the PRC as a beneficiary, but also legitimated Chinese scientists as crucial contributors alongside their Russian, Canadian, and US counterparts in global permafrost science.

Author

• Jason Chan, Harvard University