The Three Gorges Dam: Building a Developmental Engine for China and the World

Date(s)： 2024/06/18

Time： 15:00~17:00

Venue： Archives 3rd Conference Hall

Host： Prof. Sheng-hsiung Su ( Associate research fellow, IMH, AS)

Speaker：Prof. Covell F. Meyskens（美國海軍研究所副教授）

Organizer： Chiang Kai-shek Research Group

Abstract:
 
In 1919, the father of modern China Sun Yat-sen first proposed building a dam in the Three Gorges region that would discipline the Yangtze River’s unruly waters and transform its flows into an 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 repeatedly came up short until the 1990s due to geopolitical pressures, internal strife, and the state’s limited resources. Nevertheless, 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 hydropower organizations that have gone on to reshape the environmental, political, and socioeconomic infrastructure of rivers worldwide. This talk will chart out how the Chinese state mobilized domestic and international resources to build the Three Gorges Dam, focusing especially on the early twentieth century.
 
講者簡介：
Covell F. Meyskens is Associate Professor of History at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. His research examines the geopolitical, socioeconomic, and environmental dimensions of security and development in modern Chinese history. 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 on the Three Gorges Dam. His work has been published in positions: asia critique, Cold War History, Twentieth Century China, Journal of Modern Chinese History, and New York Times.

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