ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Saving the Fish: International Knowledge, Fish Passes and the Rise and Fall of Maoist Environmentalism, 1966-1982

• In Event: Fishing for Science

English Abstract

Since the construction of the Gezhouba Dam in 1982, dam building activities on the Yangtze River have resulted in the decline of fish populations and the extinction of several sturgeon species. However, such consequences would have been alleviated were it not for a sharp turn in Chinese state’s attitude towards environmentalism and especially fish conservation in the early 1980s. Back in 1964, the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong announced ‘Saving the fish’ as a priority in water management projects. This gave a licence for Chinese scientists and engineers to freely study British, Japanese, American and Soviet literatures on fish conservation in a period when international knowledge flow into China was limited. While foreign fish passes were usually designed for hydroelectric dams, engineers in East China successfully adapted them for numerous barrage dams and tidal barriers in the 1960s and 70s. Initial design for fish passes for the Gezhouba Dam was approved by the national government in 1972. A fish pass was constructed for a hydroelectric dam in Hunan Province in 1977, the first such combination in China. However, the new Chinese leadership that embraced neoliberalism regarded such facilities as a waste of money. Fish passes for the Gezhouba Dam were eventually cancelled in 1982 and no such facilities were constructed in China for nearly three decades. The research explores how modern Chinese environmentalism is rooted in a peculiar combination of Maoism and foreign (mainly Western) knowledge and ideas, and how state policy change could severely disrupt well-established efforts at sustainable development.

Author

• Yichuan Chen