The ERC Project “Regionalizing Infrastructures in Chinese History” and the KU Leuven Early Modern History Research Group organized a presentation and discussion with Prof. Covell F. Meyskens (Naval Postgraduate School). The talk, titled The Three Gorges Dam and the Rise of Chinese State Capitalism, t00k place on Monday, March 10, from 2:00 to 4:00 PM at KU Leuven.
About the talk: In 1919, the father of modern China Sun Yat-sen first proposed building the Three Gorges Dam to transform the Yangtze River into an engine of national development. Twentieth-century Chinese elites repeatedly strived to achieve this technoscientific dream and construct a hydropower station that would give a huge infusion of energy to national industrialization and boost national prestige by establishing the world’s largest dam. Government efforts, however, consistently came up short from the 1920s to 1970s due to geopolitical pressures, internal strife, and the state’s limited resources.
This talk will explain how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) worked in the 1980s to overcome domestic shortages by partnering with American-led international organizations to tap into global knowledge networks and industrial supply chains. However, Washington also attempted to link the Three Gorges project to China’s rapid marketization, an idea the CCP rejected as it sought to craft a new state capitalist mode of industrialization. After the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, Sino-American cooperation fell apart over concerns about Chinese illiberalism and the dam’s social and environmental impact. The CCP, nevertheless, still constructed the dam by partnering with international firms and mobilizing the technical, administrative, and fiscal resources Chinese industry had accumulated through state-led development. By building the dam, the CCP not only provided China with a state-controlled motor of national development. It also employed the Three Gorges project to rebrand China after the Tiananmen Massacre as a great power whose state capitalist developmental model could create infrastructural wonders for both China and the world.
About Prof. Covell F. Meyskens: Covell F. Meyskens is Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He has a Ph.D. in International History from the University of Chicago. His research examines the geopolitical, social, and environmental dimensions of national security and economic development in modern China. He is the author of Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China, published by Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on his second book, The Three Gorges Dam: Building a Developmental Engine for China and the World. Meyskens has published book chapters in several edited volumes and refereed journal articles in Cold War History, Twentieth Century China, positions: asia critique, Journal of Modern Chinese History, and the Non-Proliferation Review.