China and Global Small Hydropower in the 1980s

 

Chinese hydropower first captured the world’s imagination not—as one would expect—by going big, but rather by being small. By the end of the 1970s, the Chinese claimed to have built just under 90,000 small hydropower stations across the country. Over the ensuing decade, this small hydropower expertise and technology attracted interest across the world, both in the Global South and in the Global North. China also came to play an increasingly central role in a host of ambitious international small hydropower conferences—in places like Kathmandu, Nairobi, and Hangzhou. In this talk, I trace and contextualize this story in light of histories of hydropower, energy, and global development.

 

 

Arunabh Ghosh (BA Haverford, PhD Columbia) is an associate professor in the History Department at Harvard University. He is the author of Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China (Princeton, 2020). Current projects include a history of small hydropower in the PRC and a history of China-India scientific networks.