Keywords: electricity, infrastructure, centralization, grid in China
Ying Jia Tan’s new book, Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882-1955, seizes on an extraordinary subject: where did China’s electrical industries come from, and why did they develop the way they did? Tan fills an enormous gap in the literature – useful for China historians and modern China political science/environmental policy scholars alike. Much work has been done on the development of the American electrical grid (most canonically, Thomas Hughes’s Networks of Power). Environmental advocates and scientists have argued that electrical infrastructure has shaped the possibilities of renewable transition in America. Tan turns his eyes on China’s grid system, particularly the peculiarities of its development under the militarized and turbulent conditions of the long twentieth century.
Tan’s central thesis is that the development of a fragmented and piecemeal grid into a centrally unified grid occurred under the conditions of militarization and persistent scarcity, leaving residual inefficiencies that continue to haunt China’s attempts at a renewables transition. He traces the connection between the political power and legitimacy and control of electricity through four regimes (the Qing, KMT, CCP on the mainland, and KMT/DPP in Taiwan). He also locates a tension between top-down and centralizing efforts and bottom-up, local or private efforts. Although centralization appears to have won out, the local played surprising roles in shaping the grid and has returned with a vengeance in the era of renewable transition.
Chapter 1 opens with the electrification of Shanghai, starting with electric lights and quickly spreading to cotton mills. Tan focuses on British and Japanese imperialism and economic competition. While Japanese firms sprung up at exactly the right moment to connect to the expanding grid, Chinese cotton manufacturers continued to produce power in-house, often with obsolete equipment. This was due to a lack of capital (a recurring theme throughout the book), but, paradoxically, allowed them to be more resilient to British interference in the market for political reasons. Tan provides significant detail on electricity production statistics and the British-Japanese-Chinese dynamic, almost more than is necessary to establish the fragmented nature of electricity in the Republican period. Furthermore, the difficulty of standardization in China (different voltages and standards of equipment at small and scattered private power plants) could fruitfully be considered a typical (or atypical, depending on various sources) first step in introducing a new, landscape-transforming technology.
Chapter 2 draws on the history of silk manufacturing in Huzhou and illuminates the ways in which local elites kept electricity private. Tan then moves through biographies of two engineers trained in late-Qing and early-Republican era China, which provides a welcome human element and illustrates how China’s technocratic elite conceptualized the privatization/nationalization issue in the context of Sun Yat Sen’s thought and the international relations of that era. The first two chapters introduce private industry forces as major players in creating a fragmentary grid, while the next chapters drop these characters to focus on the state, to somewhat jarring effect. Many scholars have noted the continuities between the NRC-era central planning and early CCP-era planning, a continuity which Tan nicely draws out, but does not manage to establish a similar continuity between early Republican local elites and the post-1949 role of the province (or local elites in Taiwan). For example, the “government-supervised, merchant-managed” model that emerged from the self-strengthening movement could easily be taken as analogous to the technocrat-managed, government-supervised model of the early Mao era, which empowered the state to order all of society in line with electricity needs by framing electricity as fundamentally political.
Chapter 3 takes the reader through a major turning point – centralization and nationalization both by the Japanese and in response to the Japanese threat. Tan provides significant detail on decision-making from the Japanese archives. He analyzes the failure to develop hydropower and the decision to import coal, which set North China’s grid up to be a problem for future regimes. Simultaneously, we follow the KMT through the process of hastily taking apart and reconstructing electrical infrastructure in unlikely spots in Southern China. Tan effectively argues that this process shaped the scarcity and threat mindset as well as the resource-saving ethos of the KMT engineers, who went on to be the architects of the mainland and Taiwanese grid systems. The detail about an electricity plant called Penshuidong (literally, ‘cave spraying water’) being constructed in a cave in the Kunming mountains is particularly evocative.
Chapters 4 and 5 take us to the United States, first discussing the vigorous defence Chinese engineers mounted of China’s voltage standards and autonomy over its power system as a form of economic sovereignty. Then, we look at a case of (failed) cooperation: John Savage’s visionary – but ultimately, impractical and costly – plan for a mega-dam on the Tennessee Valley Authority model (and to some extent theoretically connects it with an imaginary future of unity and boundless energy for the Chinese; it would be fascinating here to compare this to the sociotechnical imaginary of the mega-dam in the USA, for example, by using Richard White’s work on the Columbia River). Tan has hunted down excellent sources on the process of negotiating technology transfer agreements with Westinghouse, in which there are echoes of the economic imperialism of the first two chapters (a biting quote from Westinghouse about the unoriginality of Chinese inventors echoes in modern Western perceptions of Chinese technology). Throughout the book, Tan draws on the concept of the Anthropocene, a new proposed geological era of human influence on earth systems. The discussion at the end of the chapter on dam building as “attempts to overcome geological and hydrographic constraints shaped by deep time” is the first effective integration of this framework.
Finally, Chapters 6 and 7 cover the end of the war and the early Communist regulation of the grid system. Here, Tan most effectively emphasizes power-as-lifeblood, a nice counterpoint to the opening of the first chapter, just a few decades prior, when hardly anyone knew what electricity could do besides make pretty lights. Chen Yun’s slogan “Wherever the People’s Liberation Army goes, the lights will come one” provides a pithy and compelling summary of the chapter: the Communists saw electricity as central to control, both in winning the war and later in unifying the country. Tan chooses to simultaneously follow developments in Taiwan, which nationalized its electricity industry by accident. In China, we follow Yun Zhen, an elite engineer, as he decides to work with Communist forces, a decision Tan argues was vital to the successful Communist conquest of Shanghai and preservation of its power facilities. The fear of catastrophic power loss permeates both Taiwan and China, and Tan contrasts these cases to chilling effect, especially by telling the story of an unfairly executed engineer in Taiwan. The last chapter introduces the early Mao era strategy of load management, pushing near-decrepit equipment to its limits while simultaneously strictly regulating society to manage the flow of power. Peak-load management has continued to be vital in China’s central planning strategy, although further discussion of this point would perhaps be distracting in this chapter, which already juggles the negative effects of this regulation on workers’ health, the integration of a national economy and power system, and the voluntary private sector support for public-private joint management, a sort of bloodless conquest. The conclusion nicely connects the current carbon transition to the events of the book and would be informative for both historians of technology and modern China policy scholars.
Tan is a meticulous historian – the level of detail and completeness which he has managed to extract from a wide variety of sources is admirable. The narration of the lives and views of engineers is particularly striking. The book is somewhat weaker, however, in integrating its theoretical aspect. Most notably, the analysis of China’s entrance into the Anthropocene and transition from organic to carbon economy is purportedly the theoretical backbone of the book but tends to appear only in one tacked-on paragraph at the end of chapters, rather than having the idea integrated into the meat of the analysis. The analysis of obsolescence and residual inefficiencies would benefit from a comparative lens, as would the TVA mega-dams (as mentioned above). Lastly, the book would benefit from more signalling about possibilities for comparative cases (lest we risk succumbing to the China-exceptionalism pitfall) and also the extent to which many of these dynamics are alive and well in contemporary China. These tie-ins would be more effective than the gestures toward the Anthropocene in convincing the reader of the political significance of this history. There is a particularly tantalizing moment when Tan quotes Tajima Toshio as describing the Japanese North China grid as the “prototype for the modern-day Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan power network.” To what extent did the developments Tan describes shape the modern Chinese grid and its inefficiencies and politics? I sincerely hope Tan writes more about the continued evolution of the grid through the reform and opening up period and through to modern-day interprovincial renewable trading deals, both because the Chinese energy system is fantastically important to a global effort and decarbonizing and because the grid in China needs many more histories of this quality.
Annelisa Kingsbury Lee is a junior at Harvard College studying Environmental Science and Public Policy and East Asian Studies. She is interested in the history of energy policy in China, particularly coal policy, and in central-provincial negotiation processes. She is also interested in classical Chinese and spends much of her free time hiking and reading novels.