Solar Village Daxing: Green Energy for Reformed Living

In the early 1980s, elevated oil prices drove international interest in renewable energy. China was no exception to this trend, which intersected with longstanding problems in its energy sector and new challenges associated with Reform and Opening. China had long suffered from coal shortages, which posed a threat to the growth that accompanied economic reform. Anticipating a surge in energy consumption, the PRC’s Central Science and Technology Commission collaborated with the West German Ministry for Research and Technology to build a “solar village” in Daxing, southern Beijing, that would explore the suitability of green energy technologies for rural Chinese people. But which technologies could best meet villagers’ changing needs and expectations? What were those expectations? And what could Chinese people afford? Based on West German and PRC archival sources including photographs, blueprints, and maps, this paper explores the site as a lens for differing visions of the role that renewable energy should or could play in a country with an eighty-percent rural population and a chronic energy scarcity problem. This suburban laboratory featured energy-efficient residential and public building design, solar arrays and collectors, wind mills, and communal biogas pits. It sought to offer creative solutions to the fundamental contradiction of constant scarcity alongside rising consumption. It also existed in a long PRC political-economic tradition of suppressing rural consumption, by supporting rural energy use without allocating fuel resources to rural people. In their interactions with the site, Beijing officials, German and Chinese experts, and solar village residents each displayed different understandings of how its technologies could contribute to the public and private good, and ultimately what it meant to live well in the Reform era.