Venue: Room S1, second floor, 28 rue des Saints-Pères - 75007 Paris

 

Organised as part of the CERI China seminar.

 

Speaker:

Covell F. Meyskens, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey

 

Discussant:
Eric Verdeil, Sciences Po-CERI

 

Chair:
Jérôme Doyon, Sciences Po-CERI

 

In 1919, the father of modern China Sun Yat-sen first proposed building a dam in the Three Gorges region that would discipline the Yangzi River’s unruly waters and transform its flows into a hydroelectric engine of national development. Over the course of the twentieth century, Chinese state elites strived to achieve this technoscientific dream and construct a massive hydropower station that would give a huge infusion of energy to national industrialization and boost national scientific prestige by establishing the world’s largest dam. Government efforts, however, repeatedly came up short due to geopolitical pressures, internal strife, and the state’s limited resources. This talk will chart out how the Chinese state mobilized domestic and international resources from the 1920s to the 1980s when the Gezhouba Dam became the first hydropower plant on the Yangzi River. In the process, Chinese officialdom not only formed technocratic organizations that channeled the Yangzi’s liquid power into industrializing the nation, but it also forged a hydropower corporation that has gone on to reshape the environmental, political, and socioeconomic infrastructure of rivers worldwide.

 

 

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Responsables scientifiques : Françoise Mengin et Jean-Louis Rocca