Water conservancy under the People's Commune: the construction, characteristics and heritage values of the Red Flag Canal, China (1959–1969)

This article examines the Red Flag Canal, constructed in central China’s Henan Province between 1959 and 1969, as a representative water conservancy project of the People’s Commune period (1958–1983). From a planning-history perspective, it moves beyond interpretations that reduce the canal to either a political symbol or a centrally planned state project. Drawing on local gazetteers, construction chronicles, technical reports and drawings, visual materials, field investigation, and oral history interviews, the article reconstructs the canal’s planning and construction process and analyses the spatial, organizational, and technological characteristics that emerged through it. It argues that the Red Flag Canal was an institutional spatial project shaped through the interaction of state policy, county-level initiative, commune organization, technical personnel, local craftsmen, and grassroots labour. Rather than being predetermined by centralized planning, its form and operation developed through repeated adjustments to changing institutional, material, environmental, and technical conditions. Reconstructing this process also shows how the canal’s heritage values were historically produced through planning and construction, providing a basis for linking the history of socialist spatial production with the contemporary interpretation of infrastructural heritage.