The Current Governance: Distributed Chinese Television and Hydropower in the 1980s

 

How might the history of television and the history of energy development cross paths, inform, and complicate each other? Professor Weixian Pan's work revisits the formative decade of China’s economic reform, the 1980s, as one of such moments when the expansion of televisual technology encountered demands of redistributing hydro-energy. By examining TV documentaries, popular writings/manuals on television infrastructure, and public documents of hydroelectric dams, she advances two intertwined arguments in this talk:

 

First, the televisual played a prominent role in animating the imaginary and material distribution of natural and technologized currents. The televisual broadcasting of river documentaries in the early 1980s, such as Masashi Sada’s Choko/The Yangtze (1981) and the regional Guangdong TV series Zhujiang Qing / Love for the Pearl River (1983), reshaped China’s major rivers as complex frontiers on screen for geopolitical aspirations, cultural power, and economic resource extraction on screen. Such televisual imaginations were built upon an overlapping development of airwave, cable, and satellite transmission infrastructure.

 

Second, while kinetic movements of river currents generate volumes of electricity that fuel the coastal economic frontline, infrastructure projects also produce new models for engineering and managing hydraulic resources upstream. Professor Weixian Pan will elaborate on this dynamic through the early development of Lubuge Dam, the first internationally funded hydroelectricity project in the reform era and a celebrated model for China’s hydraulic engineering and management revolution.

 

These various cultural, technological, and managerial practices to govern and redistribute water and electrical currents and televisual imaginations, therefore, constitute a distinct form of “current governance” that relies on a destructive trans-regional resource dependency while continuing to extend this political-economic logic to new resource frontiers in more recent years.

 

 

Weixian Pan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. Her research interests center on the politics of visuality, critical media infrastructure, and environmental media. Her current book manuscript, Frontier Vision: The Geopolitics of Seeing China’s Borderlands, examines how China’s geopolitical aspirations have been hyper-mediated and entangled with the logic of frontier-making between the mid-twentieth century and the present. This book offers a transhistorical view of the visual regimes that recalibrate natural environments and their political promises through geological extraction, televisual mediation of hydropower, and maritime signal sovereignty. She is currently working on a collaborative video project on the hydraulic and infrastructural landscapes along the Pearl River in Southern China. She is also the 2024-2025 Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellow in China Studies.