The Three Gorges Dam of the Rise of Chinese State Capitalism

In 1919, the father of modern China Sun Yat-sen first proposed building a dam in the Three Gorges region that would discipline the Yangtze River’s unruly waters and transform its flows into an engine of national development. Over the course of the twentieth century, Chinese state elites strived to achieve this technoscientific dream and construct a massive hydropower station that would give a huge infusion of energy to national industrialization and boost national scientific prestige by establishing the world’s largest dam. Government efforts, however, repeatedly came up short from the 1920s to 1970s due to geopolitical pressures, internal strife, and the state’s limited resources.

This paper will chart out how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) worked in the 1980s to overcome domestic resource shortages by partnering with the World Bank and other American-led organizations. American advisers assisted China with tapping into global knowledge networks and industrial supply chains. However, Washington also attempted to link the Three Gorges project to China’s rapid marketization, an idea the CCP rejected as it sought to craft a new state capitalist mode of industrialization. In the wake of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, Sino-American cooperation fell apart over concerns about Chinese illiberalism and the dam’s social and environmental impact. The CCP, nevertheless, still constructed the Three Gorges Dam in the 1990s by partnering with international firms and mobilizing the technical, administrative, and fiscal resources Chinese industry had accumulated through state-led development. By building the dam, the CCP not only provided China with a state-controlled motor of national development, but it also employed the Three Gorges project to rebrand China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre as a great power whose state capitalist developmental model could create huge infrastructural wonders for both China and the world.