Transnational Experiments with a Local Material: Bamboo-Reinforced Concrete in China and India, 1945–65

For around a century, builders around the bamboo-growing world have tried replacing steel or iron reinforcement with bamboo, in colonial military outposts, transnational engineering collaborations, and ad hoc building projects. In the decade following the Second World War, however, the use of bamboo-reinforced concrete rose to national prominence in two countries: India and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This paper explores how builders and engineers tried to adapt reinforced concrete to their local economic and environmental conditions, and how those conditions shaped the adaptation process.

In both the PRC and India, proponents of the material believed that bamboo could be a potentially effective and plentiful replacement for steel, at a time when steel production could not keep pace with national construction goals. The environmental implications of such experimentation differed, however, based on existing patterns of timber use and the mechanisms each state used to promote new materials. The PRC government promoted bamboo research not just to find new ways to build with concrete but also to contend with a chronic scarcity of wood. Because the PRC pressured work units to find new uses for bamboo, cultivators and producers responded by over-cutting the material, leading some regions to experience shortages of bamboo and wood. In India, research into bamboo was wrapped up in projects to increase the exploitation of India’s timber, and the same institutions were developing new treatments and techniques that would allow builders to use wood in a variety of new ways. Thus, although both states developed, and even directly collaborated on, a similar way to use concrete without access to steel, this process of localizing modern construction emerged from and sustained different relationships between people, bamboo, wood, and industrial materials.