Reassembling colonial infrastructure in Cold War Korea: the Han River Basin Joint Survey Project (1966-71)

ABSTRACT This article explores how the Han River Basin Joint Survey Team (HJST), consisting of American and Korean engineers, planned the Han River Basin development project in South Korea during the late 1960s and the early 1970s. While much of the existing literature adopts the lens of Cold War geopolitics, arguing that American political and technical elites drove worldwide river basin development to promote an anti-communist alternative, this article reveals a nuanced picture of localized tensions between the authoritarian regime’s political aspirations and longstanding Cold War and colonial legacies. It shows that development of the Han River Basin was planned based on hydrological data and technical infrastructure produced during Korea’s Japanese colonial era. Moreover, it is impossible to understand HJST’s work without taking into account the political aspirations of the South Korean authoritarian regime.