The Contradictions of Dam Building in the People’s Republic of China

Scholars often characterise dam building as an instance of high modernism par excellence. Such characterisations typically imagine dams as gargantuan projects that involve government elites drawing on technoscientific expertise to re-engineer the physical environment to serve a political regime’s developmental objectives. This article complicates this high modernist understanding of dam building through an investigation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The article highlights two tensions that shaped the regime’s dam building efforts, from the PRC’s founding in 1949 into the 1980s. First, contrary to our impressions, dam building in the PRC was defined as much by investments in small hydropower as it was by the pursuit of mega-sized projects. This counterintuitive reality was, in turn, undergirded by the consistent contradiction that existed between the regime’s limited administrative and technical capacities and its promethean visions of taming all of China’s rivers, ending their history of floods, and turning them into a massive source of power for industrialising the nation. Through an examination of Li Peng as a representative elite in the hydropower sector, the second part of this article demonstrates how political agents navigated this contradiction and devised ways to build dams under a governmental regime that repeatedly reevaluated whether foreign or local expertise, mental or manual labour, or big or small dams should take priority in bringing hydraulic modernity to China. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .