Fluvial Dreams of Modernity: Hydropower Infrastructure, Global Networks, and State Making in Xikang, 1939–1947

When China’s Republican government fled to Chongqing during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), it brought with it a heightened demand for electricity production for the war effort. The relocation of the Nationalist government and an ambitious new generation of Chinese technocrats to Sichuan Province brought unprecedented resources to West China. After Xikang Province was formally established in 1939, the provincial government under Liu Wenhui acted as a key intermediary that connected the central government’s desire for wartime resources with Xikang elites and officials’ interest in local energy development projects. This new alignment of interests allowed the Xikang provincial government to secure the technical expertise, finances, and equipment necessary to build two state-of-the-art hydropower dams during the wartime period. The legacies of these projects and the engineering experts who worked on them were foundational to the earliest imaginings of the vast scale and potential of hydroelectricity in the Sino-Tibetan borderland.