The story of China since the fall of the Qing empire has been one of technological backwardness, plagued by failures to attain modernization comparable to the West. Chinese intellectuals saw these civilizational deficiencies as the primary cause of China’s decline and colonization, a founding trauma of Chinese politics. These experiences of underdevelopment defined China’s identity on the world stage and became the rhetorical and policy obsession of its leaders throughout the 20^th century. Infrastructure was a fundamental means by which China’s leaders sought to modernize the nation. Such a project in equipping the nation with an advanced urban system, rural technology, efficient factories, and renewable power sources created new divisions between the political and technocratic. It also subsumed these divisions within the ideological frameworks of nationalism, socialism, and capitalism. The construction of modern infrastructure in 20^th-century China produced a new understanding of the nation for grassroots actors, engineers, and political leaders. It also delineated a new conception of what it meant to be a modern Chinese subject, embedded within the nation’s advancing infrastructural regime.

This panel explores efforts to understand infrastructural modernity from four vantage points. Xi Zhang examines state-led urban park projects in Republican-era Shanghai, exploring how parks constituted a crucial architectural, ideological, and aesthetic component of the Nationalist state’s modernizing vision. Moving into the socialist period, Zhaojin Zeng’s work presents a microhistorical study of how peasants, cadres, technicians, and sent-down youths worked together to produce a bacterial fertilizer that marked a leap forward in rural industrialization. Zeng also considers how this socialist good became a marketable commodity during the reform period. Similarly paying attention to China’s transition from socialism to capitalism, Sarah Chang’s paper focuses on how one state-owned steel factory implemented a new “garden factory” campaign, using funds generated in a nascent market economy to power a new set of utopian imaginaries of the modern Chinese enterprise. Covell Meyskens turns to China’s state capitalism in the late 1980s and 1990s and analyzes how the Three Gorges Dam was made possible by state-led development during the Mao era and represented a new identity for modern China in the wake of 1989 and the Tiananmen Square Massacre.