Date of Award
8-7-2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, one of the biggest challenges for the new Chinese government was how to transform the untamed rivers from a natural threat to social and economic stability into a natural source of energy to fuel the industrialization of the countryside. Committed to changing the Chinese society through socialist planning and Maoist mobilization, the Chinese government strove to integrate foreign models of water management with the country’s domestic needs. From the early 1950s to the early 1990s, China continually mobilized millions of peasants, soldiers, workers, and engineers to tackle the problems of flood control, water supply, and rural electrification through the construction of hydroelectric dams and canals. While this long-term water conservancy campaign intended to make the Chinese countryside open-air factories through the installation of hydraulic infrastructure, it also introduced the industrial mode of labor to harness the human muscle energy in the rural land. In this process, cultural workers from the state’s propaganda machine joined the engineering campaign and created a wide range of sensorium pedagogies to train the non-expert mass laborers into productive, efficient, and skillful infrastructure builders. In this context, this dissertation bridges environmental history and media studies to analyze how Chinese water conservancy enlisted cultural production as a logistical device of infrastructure labor training. Combining historical research with theoretical discussion, this dissertation explores the intertwined histories of China’s rural infrastructural modernization and cultural politics of productivity, efficiency, and skill. Focusing on four hydraulic cases, including the Foziling Reservoir, the Ming Tombs Reservoir, the Red Flag Canal, and the Three Gorges Dam, I approach the cultural works produced in tandem with these four projects as a media complex of labor force extraction. Going beyond the symbolic meanings of the cultural materials, I highlight how Chinese visual artists, dramatists, newsreel filmmakers, and science-fiction writers designed their works to impart the industrial system of time management, maintain human kinetic energy, demonstrate construction procedures, and orient the Chinese masses’ sensory perceptions of their bodies, mind, and the hydraulic edifice. At the intersection of landscape transformation and the formation of the industrial subject, this study reveals Chinese hydraulic engineering as a protracted struggle for both the natural and human resources, in which the revolutionary state of China forged its own mode of environmental governance by consolidating its control over technology, labor, and sources of energy.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Lingchei Letty Chen
Committee Members
Diane Lewis; Jianqing Chen; Ying Qian; Zhao Ma
Recommended Citation
Gao, Yuan, "Corporeal Technology: Hydraulic Engineering and the Media of Labor in China, 1952-1993" (2024). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3293.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3293