Dreaming of a Three Gorges dam amid the troubles of Republican China

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Republican-era efforts to turn the Yangzi River into an engine of national development by building the Three Gorges Dam (abbreviated as TGD). Beginning with Sun Yat-sen’s initial proposal in 1919 and ending with a Sino-American attempt in the 1940s, it analyzes how Chinese and foreign actors went about developing such a dream. Every endeavor ran into a similar problem: China did not have the industrial, administrative, or financial capacity to accommodate the gargantuan hydraulic feat, an issue which critics repeatedly raised. Undeterred, the dam’s backers pushed for China to overcome a domestic lack of capital by collaborating with foreign technocrats. A joint venture would purportedly benefit both China and foreigners by not only facilitating trade with inland areas and producing a huge monument to the powers of modern engineering, but also because the dam’s immense electrical output would boost China’s transformation into an industrial powerhouse, one that would increasingly desire foreign goods. Although the Three Gorges Dam was not realized in the Republican Period, Chinese and foreign actors continued to pursue their infrastructure dream in order to fuel national industrialization on both sides of the Taiwan Straits during the Cold War.