Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955

Front matter

Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882-1955

Ying Jia Tan

© CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

CHAPTER 7 Manufacturing Technocracy 163 CONCLUSION Hauntings from Past Energy Transitions 185

List of Chinese and Japanese Terms 197 Notes 205

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES 1.1. Map of China 2

1.1. Map of Shanghai’s main power station and major textile mills, circa 1929 19

3.1. The Final Days of the Anti-Japanese Resistance (1941) 63 4.1. Products of the Central Electrical Manufacturing Works (1948) 88 5.1. Artist Impression of John Lucian Savage's Proposed Yangtze Gorges Dam 113 5.2. Profile of the Tennessee River (1944) 121 5.3. Map of the Yangtze Gorges site depicting the extent of Savage’s survey 125

6.1. Fushun Power Plant after the Soviet takeover, circa 1945 139

TABLES

3.1. Electrical industries under Japanese and Guomindang control, circa 1939 79

7.1. Power output figures for Shanghai, 1949-1956 174

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It has been a decade since the triple disaster of an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown struck Fukushima in March 2011. This book has grown out of a series of questions arising from that massive catastrophe: Why are high-energy societies so reliant on fossil fuels and nuclear power, despite their risk to human health and political stability? Have East Asian societies experienced large-scale energy crises that can show us how governments and people cope with a cataclysmic collapse of the energy infrastructure? I am indebted to the people and institutions that helped me on my quest to address these questions.

My research into the history of electricity began at Yale in March 2011. After aborting research plans that would have taken me to Japan, I had a long and serious conversation with Valerie Hansen, who suggested that I make a foray into energy history, since it was closely related to my interest in the history of cartography. Valerie guided me through the writing process by setting clear and achievable targets and reminding me to express my ideas clearly and succinctly. Peter Perdue, Frank Snowden, and Bill Rankin were always on hand to provide much-needed intervention in the early stages of this work and helped me develop a sharper thematic focus for this book. Many people at Yale provided encouragement for this project, especially Paola Bertucci, Mary Augusta Brazelton, Ivano dal Prete, Fabian Drixler, Daniel Kevles, Leon Rocha, Naomi Rogers, Richard Sosa, Brian Turner, Courtney Thompson, Jinping Wang, and John Harley Warner.

My colleagues and students at Wesleyan University encouraged me to reimagine and reshape this project. My mentor Bill Johnston repeatedly returned to Fukushima to photograph choreographer-dancer Eiko Otake performing in the area near the damaged nuclear reactor. Besides offering feedback on every draft chapter of the manuscript, Bill inspired me to think of disasters on multiple geographic and time scales, as he tirelessly read through every word of the manuscript. Mary Alice Haddad not only introduced my work to social scientists, but also offered pointed criticism that helped me reorganize the introduction and conclusion. My research apprentice Riyu Ling, who painstakingly assembled the data for this book, reminded me to keep in mind xi xii Acknowledgments a fundamental question: What was electricity used for? During my time as a faculty fellow at the Center for the Humanities, my colleagues Andrew Curran, Axelle Karera, Ethan Kleinberg, Stephanie Koscak, Vijay Pinch, and Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer pushed me to think about how the history of electrification straddled the divide between “grand narrative” and “modest proposals.” I also thank Steven Angle, Joan Cho, Paul Erickson, Demetrius Eudell, Courtney Fullilove, Erik Grimmer-Solem, Valeria Lopez-Fadul, Bruce Masters, Jim Mc- Guire, Don Moon, Peter Rutland, Ron Schatz, Gary Shaw, Victoria Smolkin, Jennifer Tucker, Laura Ann Twagira, and Duffy White for their valuable input on this project.

I am grateful for the financial support that has helped me bring this book to fruition. Funding sources include Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Charles Kao Fund and Summer Travel and Research grants administered by the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale, and the Taiwan Fellowship. A generous postdoctoral fellowship with the D. Kim Foundation in the 2018- 2019 academic year afforded me the time to complete the manuscript. The Office of Academic Affairs at Wesleyan University offered financial support through the Grants in Support of Scholarship. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the History Department for approving my applications for two supplemental grants and a publication subvention from the “Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs (1740-1829) Fund.”

This book draws on sources from archives in China, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. The research would not have been possible without the generosity of many host institutions and archivists. I thank Zhang Baichun and Sun Lie for giving me a home at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences in Beijing, Han Zhaoqing at Fudan, and Cao Shuji at Shanghai Jiaotong University. I am appreciative of the flexibility granted by archivists at Beijing Municipal Archives and Shanghai Municipal Archives. My term as Taiwan fellow in the summer of 2017 was instrumental to the completion of this book. Wen-de Huang and Melodie Wu at the National Central Library made sure that I was well settled in Taiwan. At Academia Sinica, Mike Liu arranged for me to be hosted at the Institute of Taiwan History and gave me unfettered access to a special collection of sources in his research office. I also had the pleasure of discussing my work with Chang Che-chia, Chen Chien-shou, Chiah Sing Ho, Paul Katz, Lin Lanfang, Sean Lei, and Shu-li Wang. At Academia Historica and later Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Ya-hung Hsiao not only helped me secure access to the documents but also directed me to leading scholars in the field. Outside of Academia Sinica, Chiao-lun Cheng, Ming-sho Ho, Wen-hua Kuo, and Sao Yang Hong, Jen-shen

Acknowledgments xiii

Wu, spent many hours discussing my project with me and pushed me to articulate my underlying arguments more clearly.

Through the years of research and writing, members of the scholarly community have challenged me to connect electricity to political and economic issues. Members of the Civil War workshop at Yale in May 2016, Cheow Thia Chan, David Cheng Chang, Shiu-on Chu, Rob Culp, Fa-ti Fan, Joshua Freeman, James Gao, Judd Kinzley, Diana Lary, Joe Lawson, Rebecca Nedostup, Philip Thai, Xian Wang, Dominic Yang, and Shirley Ye inspired me to situate electricity within multiple modes of warfare. The working group on electricity based at the University of Leeds, namely Animesh Chatterjee, Graeme Gooday, Phil Judkins, Michael Kay, and Daniel Zapico, kept me abreast of developments in the history of technology. At the Anthropocene workshop in August 2018, Arjun Guneratne, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Julia Adeney Thomas encouraged me to engage with the scholarly literature about the Anthropocene. I would also like to thank Seung-joo Yoon for inviting me to present the contents of this book at the Distinguished Ott Family Lecture series at Carleton College.

I would also like to extend a heartfelt thanks to all those who offered important advice after reading parts or all of this work: Mark Baker, Nicole Barnes, Nick Bartlett, Peter Braden, Corey Byrnes, Chen Zhongchun, Howard Chiang, Angelina Chin, William Chou, Marwa Elshakry, Victoria Frede-Montemayor, Gao Ming, Li Hou, Kathryn Ibata-Arens, Lijing Jiang, Abishek Kaicker, Stefan Krebs, Chien-wen Kung, Shigehisa Kuriyama, Ulug Kuzuoglu, Eugenia Lean, Thomas Lean, Kan Li, James Lin, Helena Lopes, David Luesink, Christine Luk, Timothy Mitchell, the late Aaron Moore, Seung-Youn Oh, Chang Woei Ong, Elizabeth Perry, Jiwei Qian, Kerry Ratigan, Christopher Reed, Daniel Sargent, Corinna Schlombs, Phil Scranton, Victor Seow, Qin Shao, Yubin Shen, Misato Shimizu, Tuan-hwee Sng, Wayne Soon, Fubing Su, Nicolas Tackett, Christopher Tong, Yijun Wang, Heike Weber, R. Bin Wong, Shellen Wu, Xie Shi, Nobuhiro Yamane, Wen-hsin Yeh, Yuan Yi, Zhaojin Zeng, Ling Zhang, and Dongxin Zou.

I am grateful to have worked with Emily Andrew, Allegra Martschenko, and Alexis Siemon at Cornell University Press. The constructive feedback from the two reviewers pushed me to articulate the main questions motivating the research. Micah Muscolino identified himself as one of the reviewers. Wen-Qing Ngoei, who published with Cornell University Press, offered much needed advice in responding to reviewer comments. I also thank Katherine Thompson for her editorial assistance in the early stages of revision, and Mike Bechthold for professionally made maps. Wendi Field-Murray, Christine Ho, Hsiao-ting Lin, and Covell Meyskens offered invaluable advice to help me locate the cover xiv Acknowledgments image. I am grateful to Jessica Ryan for her meticulous copyediting, and Ihsan Taylor at Longleaf Services for guiding this first-time author through the production process.

Finally, the research and writing would not have been possible without my supportive family. My wife, Teoh Song Keng, took care of Ke Qing, Ke Ren, and Keda while I was away on research trips or presenting my work at some academic conference. I hope that this book will raise our awareness of the precarity of carbon-fueled economies and inspire conversations about how to leave behind a sustainable world for our future generations.

AH AHC

AS

BMA CAS CCP FMSXSL

ABBREVIATIONS

Academia Historica

American Heritage Center

Archives, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica

Beijing Municipal Archives

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Chinese Communist Party

Cheng Yu-feng and Cheng Yu-huang, ed., Ziyuan weiyuanhui jishu renyuan fu mei shixi shiliao [Archives on the National Resources Commission Technicians’ Training in the United States]. Taipei: Academia Historica, 1988.

horsepower—a unit of power equivalent to 550 fount pounds per second

hertz—number of cycles per second

kilowatt—one thousand watts, with a watt being one unit of electrical power equal to one ampere under the pressure of one volt kilowatt-hour—unit of electrical energy equivalent to one thousand watts of power supplied to or taken from an electrical circuit steadily for one hour

National Archives and Record Administration

National Construction Commission

National Diet Library

National Resources Commission

Seeley G. Mudd Library

Shanghai Municipal Archives

Shanghai Municipal Council

volt, the SI unit for potential difference. One volt is the potential difference that appears across a resistance of one ohm when a current of one ampere flows through that resistance.

Note: Definitions of scientific units based on the glossary of the US Energy

Information Administration.

XV

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

This book mostly uses hanyu pinyin, the official romanization system used in mainland China for Chinese names, terms, and expressions. The transliteration is also used for the titles of Chinese publications. Names of individuals are written in the Chinese way, surname first.

Some names and places have traditional Wade-Giles spellings that are in common usage. I have decided to use the original spelling and included the pinyin in parenthesis at first usage and also in the list of Chinese characters. Examples include Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan), Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), T.V. Soong (Song Ziwen),

I have also decided not to impose pinyin on place names and political figures in Taiwan. Taipei is spelled as such, rather than converted into Taibei. The name of the electrical engineer who became the Premier in Taiwan is rendered as Sun Yun-suan rather than Sun Yun-xuan.

xvii

RECHARGING CHINA IN WAR AND REVOLUTION, 1882-1955

Introduction

Forging Resilience

N 2010, CHINA OVERTOOK the United States as the world’s largest con-

sumer of power.' This was a remarkable achievement considering that the

People’s Republic had struggled to keep the lights on during its early years. The Communist regime greeted this accomplishment not with celebratory cheer but with trepidation. Seemingly aware of the destructive and precarious nature of its carbon-intensive development, Zhu Yongpeng, the general manager of the state-owned power company Guodian Corporation, had in 2009 called for the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy to “promote sustainable economic development” in an editorial for Qiushi, the bi-monthly political theory periodical published by the Chinese Communist Party. He noted that the fossil fuels that had fueled China’s exponential growth “have an end-use energy conversion rate of only 30 percent and account for over 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emission.” Zhu thus called on Chinese state power companies to fully harness China’s clean energy potential to “better balance economic and social development with environmental concerns.”” Like his predecessors who had built China’s electrical infrastructure through decades of perpetual warfare, Zhu not only was facing a trade-off between short-term needs and long-term sustainability but also had to build a power system resilient enough to withstand the vagaries of war and economic turmoil.

Three separate modes of warfare shaped the electrification of China through an age of revolutionary upheaval and armed conflict between 1882 and 1955. The organizational resilience of China’s electrical power sector, and by extension the national economy, emerged from the lessons learned from resolving electrical crises. First, electricity came onto the scene during an age of economic warfare between Chinese and foreign textile firms from the late Qing to the early republic. Chinese mill owners learned to adapt to the unequal distribution of energy resources and leveraged their political connections to survive the onslaught of global economic competition. Second, following the catastrophic loss of 97 percent of China’s generating capacity to the Japanese after the outbreak of the aaa, & 500 1000 kilometers

Mongolia eHarbin

Changchun Beijing Shgnyang Beiping)

Zhangjiakou (

North Korea County Cang County South

C H | N A Linfene Korea Ls e Tianshui

Japan e Xiangtan

@Guilin Taipei ar

Hong Kong

By Philippines

FIGURE 1.1. China. Map by Mike Bechthold.

second Sino-Japanese war in 1937, competing regimes that vied for supremacy in China capitalized on the exigencies of military warfare to consolidate and nationalize a highly fragmented electrical power sector. Nationalist forces that retreated to Southwest China were thus able to sustain the resistance against the Japanese by powering its defense industries with makeshift power stations. Finally, by using electricity as an instrument to wage the people’s war, the Communist regime not only was able to inherit the electrical infrastructure largely intact after a bloody military conflict but also established the mobilization structures for production campaigns in the early years of the People’s Republic.* The image on the cover of this book, showing a worker defending a factory from sabotage, suggests that political power did not simply emerge from the barrel of the gun but arose from the state’s ability to defend its power infrastructure and recharge itself in the face of adversity.

The ability of China’s electrical industries to recover from catastrophe raises a deeper question: Why did China’s industries achieve such rapid growth during these turbulent years despite material scarcity? To answer this question, this book focuses on the formative years of China’s electrification and explores how the interplay of strong and weak organizational forces within a compressed time frame strengthened the capacity of the electrical infrastructure to adapt and recover under adversity, which in turn strengthened the organizational resilience of China’s political regimes. In the opening sentence of his study on administered mass organization, Gregory Kasza proclaimed, “technology made it possible to organize people on an unprecedented scale.”

Electricity is a tool for the state to strengthen its control over the populace. And electrical industries served as a site of policy innovations for weak institutions, which, according to Yuen Yuen Ang, played a crucial role in helping China escape from the poverty trap. Its troubled beginnings offer empirical evidence for the “mixture of top-down direction and bottom-up improvisation that lays the foundation for coevolutionary processes of radical change.” Unlike Andrew Nathan’s work that pointed to the political processes within the Chinese Communist Party as the main reasons for its survival, this study sees the electrical infrastructure as the source of China’s organizational resilience.°

The compressed development under conditions of material scarcity also shaped the economic growth models of China and its East Asian neighbors. These institutional constraints shaped China’s electrical industry in these turbulent decades of war and formed the foundations of what Huang Xiaoming described as the East Asian growth model, which began in the second half of the twentieth century as “a desperate quest for survival and catch up.” These developments also pushed the East Asian economies into “a form of growth that derived its power for rapid and prolonged expansion from institutional manipulation and national reorganization for international competitiveness.”’ Material scarcity forced power companies and state regulators to operate with limited capital and labor. Understaffed political institutions responded to energy crises by introducing adaptations to improve the efficiency of electrical power production, distribution, and consumption. The successful resolution of energy crises lent greater credibility to state agencies that then exercised their newfound authority to dictate the pace of China’s industrialization.

Dark forces, however, lurk beneath growth through adversity. Far from being a triumphant narrative about system builders overcoming great difficulties to set the stage for China’s transformation into an industrial powerhouse, this book highlights the immense cost of China’s electrical infrastructure development at the national, international, and global scale. At the local and national level, the compressed development of China’s electrical industry resulted in residual inefficiencies, as system builders resorted to low-cost fixes to meet immediate demands for electricity during moments of crises. Power companies saved time and cost by installing new equipment without dismantling the outdated versions, and defects embedded in the system lowered operational efficiency in the long run and even caused catastrophic failure further down the road. These practices led to the persistence of obsolete technology.

On the international level, resistance against foreign control over China’s electrical power sector became a source of diplomatic tensions. China’s industrialists and policy makers saw Chinese control over the electrical industries as the key to defending the nation’s economic sovereignty. Prior to the Japanese invasion of China in July 1937, a handful of foreign-owned power stations accounted for most of China’s electric power supply, while multinational corporations cornered the market on electrical supplies. The economic blockade during the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance revealed the dangers of overreliance on foreign capital in electrical power infrastructure. The nationalistic objectives of China’s state-sponsored electrical sector were at odds with foreign partners that came to its aid. Even as the state-owned power sector relied heavily on technology transfer from British and American corporations, their system builders rigorously defended its autonomy by fending off attempts to impose foreign technical standards on China. Technical cooperation was fraught with disagreements over the value of intellectual property and access to proprietary knowledge, which soured the relations between China and its foreign partners. These conflicts persisted over time and are at the root of conflicts that reemerged in 2018 during the trade war between China and the United States under the Trump administration.

Finally, at the planetary level, the electrification of wartime China laid the groundwork for the phenomenal industrial growth that transformed China into a major contributor to the “Great Acceleration” characterizing the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, a term coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000, suggests that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch through the force of human activity. Unprecedented spikes in fossil fuel consumption and the appearance of vast quantities of manufactured materials in sediments suggest that the Earth is stratigraphically and functionally different than in earlier epochs.* Clive Hamilton went further to argue that the Anthropocene is “a proposition that human activities have ruptured the old Earth system and produced a new one.” The War of Anti-Japanese Resistance marks a point of rupture, during which the frenzied struggle for survival catalyzed the growth of China’s electrical power sector. This book delves deeper into questions raised by the contributors to the 2014 special issue of the Journal of Asian Studies, in particular the impact of the Anthropocene on the vulnerability and resilience of Asian populations.”

The formative years of China’s electrical industries offer a window into China’s chaotic transition from, to borrow E. A. Wrigley’s terms, an “organic economy” to a “carbon economy.” As China’s economy became integrated with the industrialized nations in the West, energy shortage limited the scope of its economic growth. For most of the period covered in this book, China was what Micah Muscolino termed an “advanced organic economy.” The introduction of the steam engine did not lead to exponential growth in manufacturing output, as the quantity of raw materials remained constrained by the pace of the carbon and nitrogen cycles of this “organic economy.” The creation of a military-industrial complex during the relentless state of war between 1937 and 1954 sped up the extraction of carbon resources—a trend mirrored in Europe and the United States. Persistent energy crises forced system builders to focus on short-term gains at the expense of long-term sustainability. As Vaclav Smil has shown, energy intensity, the ratio of total primary energy supply to the gross domestic product (GDP), followed an overall upward trend to the end of Mao’s rule.” The final chapter of this book identifies 1955 as the starting point of the Great Acceleration of China’s electrical industries. In this year, the Ministry of Fuel Resources abandoned a course of development based on optimal use of existing equipment and embarked on a massive expansion of different sectors within the electrical industries. It ordered the installation of large numbers of generators and the building of hundreds of small dams, paving the way for the energy-intensive period of the Great Leap Forward.

Thrust onto the front line of war and ideological struggle, government engineers, whom I refer to as engineer-bureaucrats, acted as the brokers of change as they built China’s electrical infrastructure under the stress of material scarcity. This history of China’s electrification and state-building follows these engineers and examines how they confronted the cost of compressed development at the national, international, and planetary level. It adopts Bruno Latour’s approach of “following the scientist” to open the black box and better understand science in the making. The settings of the individual chapters are what Latour would consider to be “centers of calculation” where these engineers devised solutions by drawing together facts and mechanisms gathered from earlier observations. These engineer-bureaucrats were not technocrats in the strictest sense of the word; nor should China be regarded as a “carbon technocracy.”? Primarily concerned with the state’s proper functioning through the implementation, administration, and regulation of policies, they were bureaucrats first and foremost. Engineering was the means used to address the problems at hand.

These engineer-bureaucrats resembled the scholar-officials who had managed the Yellow River and Grand Canal hydraulic systems. Just as the rivers provided the lifeblood of agrarian economies, the electric grid supplied the driving force for new industrial and commercial activities that transformed urban life in modern China. The first generation of electrical engineers saw Confucian scholar-generals as their role models. Yun Zhen (1901-1994), an engineer who appears in every chapter in this book, studied at the Government Institute of Technology (predecessor of Shanghai Jiaotong University) when Neo-Confucian scholar Tang Wenzhi served as president. Yun fondly remembered how Tang revived the ideals of “unity of thought and mind” advocated by Ming Neo-Confucian scholar Wang Yangming (1472-1529) and taught his students to “seek truth from facts.” Engineer-bureaucrats were “specialists in a system that admired generalists, technologists in a system that prized knowledge of Confucian ethics,” a situation similar to Confucian scholar-officials working on hydraulic projects during late-imperial China in Randall Dodgen’s study.” Unlike their predecessors, the engineer-bureaucrats of the early twentieth century entered the electrical industry after completing formal engineering education and therefore did not have to learn the technical details on the job.

The “carbon lock-in” arising from the state-centered approach to electrical infrastructure development parallels the “hydraulic lock-in” from three thousand years of unsustainable growth fueled by state-sponsored irrigation projects. As Mark Elvin argued, the “paradoxical combination of increased stability and increased instability” arose because Chinese authorities expended considerable resources to prop up existing hydraulic systems, which stabilized short-term tax revenue but destabilized the hydrological regime further down the road." Engineer-bureaucrats, who administered the state-owned power industries, shared the state-centered outlook of their predecessors. Just as the state’s ability to control the Yellow River- Grand Canal hydraulic systems came to be seen as an indicator of dynastic vitality, the engineer-bureaucrats considered the scale of the state-owned power industry as a proxy for state authority. Seeking to expand the state-controlled regional power grids under conditions of material scarcity, engineer-bureaucrats built on top of the ruins of defunct power systems, thereby embedding the legacy systems’ flaws into the new infrastructure.

Engineer-bureaucrats looked toward the examples of scholar-generals from the Ming and Qing Dynasties as they came to concurrently assume civilian and military responsibilities. Yun Zhen was familiar with the writings of Wang Yangming, a Ming Dynasty scholar not only well known for his writings about the unity of knowledge and action but also for his military exploits. Zeng Guofan, the selfstrengthening reformer who organized the provincial militia that helped the Qing defeat the Taiping rebels in 1864, was another role model for these engineer-bureaucrats. Early in their careers, engineer-bureaucrats began assuming a dual civil-military identity. They worked for the National Resources Commission (NRC), a government agency established in 1932 for industrial development in anticipation of an all-out war against Japan.” The NRC’s predecessor was the National Defense Planning Commission—the name a clear indication of its military function. When Sino-Japanese hostilities broke out in 1937, the electrical power industry became a key aspect of military logistics. Conferred military titles, the engineer-bureaucrats dismantled electrical equipment in coastal cities besieged by Japanese forces and transported them hundreds of miles to mountainous inland cities. They painstakingly assembled electrical equipment from disparate sources to build from the ground up the electrical infrastructure that powered the defense industries. These battlefield experiences morphed into strategies for accelerated industrial growth under conditions of material scarcity.

Reinscribing Patterns of Historical Change

In addition to identifying the electrical infrastructure as the source of institutional resilience, placing electrification at the center of modern Chinese history unsettles the linear conception of historical progress focused on the revolutionary movements led by China’s political leaders. This book is not a survey of the history of China’s electrical industries.” It focuses on the alternating current (AC) as a revolutionary force in two senses of the word. In the literal sense, the AC is an electric current that periodically reverses direction, as the flow of the electric current changes direction with the wire loop rotating in a magnetic field. In the figurative sense, the AC was revolutionary: it fueled the rise and fall of regimes vying for supremacy in modern China and served as the driving force of historical change. This overview of modern Chinese history offers a sneak preview not only of how the strong dominates the weak through the control of electricity but also of how weak insurgents capitalized on vulnerabilities within the power network to overthrow strong incumbents.

Networked electricity came to China just as foreign powers carved out spheres of influence along coastal cities and border regions of the Qing Empire. China’s first power station was built in 1882 in Shanghai—a treaty port established after the Qing Empire’s defeat by the British in the Opium War (1839-1842). British, American, French, and Japanese capitalists invested in power stations in treaty ports all over China, using them as instruments to assert their economic hegemony.”!

China’s reformers and revolutionaries imagined electricity as a force for accelerated development that would propel China into the ranks of industrially advanced nations. Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Chinese Republic, saw electricity as a magical force. In his June 1894 letter to Viceroy Li Hongzhang, a key advocate of the selfstrengthening movement launched to preserve the Qing Dynasty by maintaining traditional values while embracing Western technology, Sun wrote, “Electricity, for example, has neither form nor substance; it resembles but is not water. Its energy pervades all things and circulates throughout the universe. Its uses are more extensive than anything else, and it is most versatile.”” Viceroy Li had long been aware of the vast potential of electrical power. Back in December 1888, Li approved the installation of a 15 kW generator to power the electric lights in Empress Dowager Cixi’s palace at the West Garden (Xiyuan).’? This former imperial garden is known today as Zhongnanhai and is the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party and State Council. Coincidentally, the site of China’s first power station outside of the treaty ports is now the focal point of central political authority.

With the collapse of the Qing Empire in 1911 following the armed uprising in the treaty port of Wuchang, Sun and his successors saw the nationalization of the power sector as a necessary step toward national unity. Between 1916 and 1928, control of China was divided among military cliques and regional factions. Chiang Kai-shek, the commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy who emerged as Sun Yat-sen’s successor in the Guomindang, declared victory over the warlords and established the national capital in Nanjing in 1927. Chiangs government tried to fulfill Sun Yat-sen’s vision of bringing the electrical industry under national ownership. As we will see, a lack of state capital and fierce opposition from the gentry not only derailed these plans for nationalization but also forced the Nationalist government to safeguard the monopolies of small power plants littered across the Lower Yangtze. The fragmented nature of China’s electrical industries was an expression of the limited capabilities of the Guomindang regime.

Electricity embodied the space-time compression experienced during an age of political upheaval. Science fiction writers of the late Qing had already envisioned an age in which people communicated with brain electricity, or used electricity as an instrument of mind control.” By 1928, Hu Shi, a Columbia-trained intellectual of the May Fourth Movement, was expressing amazement that “my people have traveled with me from the vegetable oil lamp to electricity, from the wheel-barrow to the Ford car, if not the airplane, and this in less than forty years’ time!”

With the outbreak of the War of Anti-Japanese Resistance in 1937, romantic visions of linear progress toward modernity evaporated, as China grappled with the catastrophic loss of its electrical power sector. Back in 1933, Japan’s electrical industry was 1,756 times that of China.”* This translated into a higher industrial capacity for the Japanese, which in turn strengthened their military capability. The Japanese were thus able to quickly capture the coastal cities, causing the Guomindang regime to lose 95 percent of its sources for industrial production.” The war created sudden shocks to China’s electrical industries. As discussed later in this book, the most heavily electrified regions in the Lower Yangtze suffered a decline, as Japanese occupation forces shifted their industrial production northward to take advantage of rich coal deposits. The generating capacity of Southwest China increased dramatically as the Guomindang’s engineer-bureaucrats brought electricity to these far-flung regions to power the defense industries. Electricity thereby completed its transformation from an exotic commodity into a weapon for state power.