Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882-1955 by Ying Jia Tan (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 by Ying Jia Tan Zhaojin Zeng (bio) Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 By Ying Jia Tan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. Pp. 294. China, the largest fossil energy consumer today, recently vowed to decarbonize its economy. The country has announced plans to reach peak emissions in 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. These ambitious goals have once again drawn wide attention to the development trajectory of China as a carbon economy. In Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955, Ying Jia Tan offers a timely account of China's energy history, detailing its electrical development from the late Qing to the early Mao periods. Tan discusses three interrelated aspects of China's electrification: local efforts to secure electricity supply, national strategies to pursue energy independence and economic sovereignty, and, at the planetary level, China's entry through accelerated industrial growth into the Anthropocene Epoch. Framing electrical industries as a central site for power struggles and technological competition, Tan argues that the intertwined processes of infrastructure development and state-building gave rise to resilient political and economic institutions in China after war and revolution. A multilevel analysis of individuals, agencies, and regimes pioneering China's electrical growth, Tan's book sheds new insights on the complex relationship between energy, politics, and state-making in the early twentieth century. [End Page 921] As Tan reveals, China's path toward a carbon-intensive economy stemmed from constant energy crises. Chronic power shortages in everyday life and power loss during wartime became the major impetus for governments and elites to build and control the electrical infrastructure. The engineer-bureaucrats, in particular, brokered the electrification process. They did so while vying for dominance over the new infrastructure. In the Lower Yangtze areas, where cotton mills and silk filatures were concentrated, newly built power stations and grids generated not only electricity but also tensions and conflicts between local elites, government officials, and factory workers. The grip on energy supply allowed the Shanghai Municipal Council to intervene in the labor strikes at the British and Japanese mills. Local power stations also became a weapon for Huzhou industrial elites to fend off the Nationalist government's nationalization efforts. In these two cases, Tan highlights the crucial role of electricity production and consumption in the shaping of everyday politics and nation-building in the early Republican era. Tracing the footsteps of engineer-bureaucrats, Tan continues to examine how wartime electrification centralized state power. The Sino-Japanese War and World War II witnessed a new wave of energy-infrastructure development spearheaded by different authorities: Nationalist China, Imperial Japan, and the United States. In the north, the Japanese regime rationalized coal distribution and reorganized the regional power networks. The Nationalists in the southwest also resorted to a greater degree of state intervention. Tan shows that the Electrical Works represented the Chinese state's remarkable efforts to improve energy efficiency by applying advanced technology, optimizing resource use, and establishing industrial standards. China's wartime energy story also involves the transnational flow of human capital. American dam builders and Chinese engineers made the joint—albeit unsuccessful—attempt to survey the Yangtze Gorges in the hope of reconfiguring China's energy geography. Nevertheless, the war deepened China's coal reliance, making the country march further toward a carbon-intensive economy. Electrical industries transformed into political assets in the postwar years. Failing to appropriate major power plants doomed the Nationalist regime's plan to restore economic and social order. The Communists, by contrast, chose a more cooperative and lenient approach toward engineering elites. In so doing, the new regime turned the electrical infrastructure into the economic foundation for its political rule. Following the founding of the People's Republic, electricity supply further increased, but mostly through labor mobilization and social control rather than new capital investments. Those practices strengthened the state's control over the industries, paving the way for a state-led, labor-intensive developmental approach that descended on the country after 1955. Tan's narrative, ending on the eve of China's accelerated industrial growth, thus invites scholars to [End Page 922] explore how energy continued to propel China...