By the end of the 1970s, the Chinese claimed to have built just under 90,000 small hydropower stations across the country. This talk, based on a chapter from an in-progress book, explores the micro-history of a single such hydropower station. From planning, finance, and construction, to labor, operation, and maintenance, Professor Ghosh’s goal is to explain the political economy that enabled the Chinese to mount small hydropower projects and connect them to local grids, thereby contributing to our understanding of subnational governance and center-local relations in Mao-era China.

Arunabh Ghosh (BA Haverford; PhD Columbia) is a professor in the History Department at Harvard University. A historian of modern China, his interests include social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, environmental history, and transnational history. Ghosh is the author of Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (Princeton, 2020). He is working on a book titled The Significance of Small Things: Hydropower and Rural Energy in China (under contract with Stanford University Press).