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

In 1919, the father of modern China Sun Yat-sen first proposed building a dam in the Three Gorges region that would discipline the Yangzi River’s unruly waters and transform its flows into a hydroelectric 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, however, repeatedly came up short due to geopolitical pressures, internal strife, and the state’s limited resources. This paper will chart out how the Chinese state mobilized domestic and international resources from the 1920s to the 1980s when the Gezhouba Dam, built in the Three Gorges region, became the first hydropower plant on the Yangzi River. In the process, Chinese officialdom not only formed technocratic organizations that channeled the Yangzi’s liquid power into industrializing the nation, but the Chinese Communist Party also forged one of the world’s largest hydropower corporations which is now reshaping the environmental, political, and socioeconomic infrastructure of rivers around the globe.