Between 1937 and 1957, China experienced a severe energy crisis that transformed the nation's political and social order, as the Japanese, Guomindang, and the Communist vied for supremacy in China. From the second Sino-Japanese War, Civil War between Nationalists and Communists, until the completion of the People's Republic First Five Year Plan, the military played an increasingly important role in China's electrical industries. I begin by looking at how the Japanese military worked together with Japanese power companies to take over the electrical infrastructure in the cities around North China and the lower Yangtze Delta. The Guomindang regime, which retreated to Southwest China, built its electrical industries to cater to military demands. The Chinese started making electrical components such as wires and vacuum tubes, which were vital to military communications. During the Civil War, the People's Liberation Army devised strategies that minimized damage to electrical power infrastructure during urban warfare. After Communist victory in 1949, revolutionaries in military uniforms made use of their expertise in logistical planning and mass mobilization to coordinate the usage of electrical power. By the end of two turbulent decades, China's electrical power sector transformed from an industry dominated by foreign capitalists into an integral part of the permanent war economy. This dissertation compares the effectiveness of the fuel-provisioning regimes developed by the Japanese, Nationalists, and the Communists. The Japanese military worked closely with the power companies to take over the electrical industries in North China and Lower Yangtze and controlled the coal supply to these occupied regions. The high cost of transporting coal and maintaining the electrical power infrastructure bogged down the Japanese, which contributed to the collapse of the Japanese empire. Meanwhile, a group of engineer-bureaucrats, who followed the Guomindang regime during the retreat to Southwest China, coordinated the nationalization of China's electrical industries and established national standards for the nation's public utilities. The Guomindang government however failed to build on these wartime achievements after 1945. The Communists secured the defection of the Guomindang's engineering elite, which allowed them to inherit the electrical power industries built by foreign capitalists, Japanese invaders, and Guomindang regime largely intact. The Communists retained a firm grip on political power, because they devised the most efficient and effective way to make use of limited energy resources.
...More
Chapter
Stéphanie Homola;
(2013)
La relation de maître à disciple en question : transmission orale et écrite des savoirs divinatoires en Chine et à Taïwan
(/isis/citation/CBB309036679/)
Article
Fu, Daiwie;
(2007)
How Far Can East Asian STS Go?
(/isis/citation/CBB000760582/)
Article
Hong, Sungook;
(2007)
East Asian STS: Some Critical Issues
(/isis/citation/CBB000760598/)
Article
Kuo-Hui Chang;
(2015)
Technological Construction as Identity Formation: Building Taiwan's High-speed Rail During the 1990s State Transformation
(/isis/citation/CBB982387882/)
Chapter
Lin, Yi-ping;
Liu, Shiyung;
(2010)
A Forgotten War: Malaria Eradication in Taiwan, 1905--65
(/isis/citation/CBB001252504/)
Article
Li, Cho-ying;
(2010)
Contending Strategies, Collaboration among Local Specialists and Officials, and Hydrological Reform in the Late-Fifteenth-Century Lower Yangzi Delta
(/isis/citation/CBB001034997/)
Book
Jeremiah D. Lambert;
(2016)
The Power Brokers: The Struggle to Shape and Control the Electric Power Industry
(/isis/citation/CBB317525908/)
Article
McMahon, Daniel;
(2012)
Geomancy and Walled Fortifications in Late Eighteenth Century China
(/isis/citation/CBB001231499/)
Article
Sik, Kim Yung;
(2010)
A Philosophy of Machines and Mechanics in Seventeenth-Century China: Wang Zheng's Characterization and Justification of the Study of Machines and Mechanics in the Qiqi Tushuo
(/isis/citation/CBB001034892/)
Book
Taomo Zhou;
(2019)
Migration in the time of revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB982293659/)
Book
Greene, J. Megan;
(2008)
The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan: Science Policy and the Quest for Modernization
(/isis/citation/CBB000831094/)
Article
Wang, Xiaohu;
(2013)
A Further Study on the Measuring of Time in the Military in Pre-Modern China
(/isis/citation/CBB001200169/)
Book
Wayne Soon;
(2020)
Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History
(/isis/citation/CBB037739409/)
Article
Nicholas Amthony Autiello;
(2021)
Taming the Wild Dragon: John F. Kennedy and the Republic of China, 1961–63
(/isis/citation/CBB626916216/)
Book
Fan, Yanqiu;
(2011)
Duo yuan xiang qian yu chuang zao zhuan hua: Taiwan gong gong wei sheng bai nian shi
(/isis/citation/CBB001213617/)
Book
IEEE, ;
(2007)
2007 IEEE Conference on the History of Electric Power
(/isis/citation/CBB001034017/)
Book
Billington, David P.;
Billington, David P., Jr.;
(2006)
Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000772760/)
Article
Hélène Gaget;
(2019)
Évolution de la formulation de l’analogie électrique-mécanique par les ingénieurs entre 1920 et 1960
(/isis/citation/CBB403117606/)
Book
IEEW, ;
()
2008 IEEE History of Telecommunications Conference: Paris, France, 11--12 September 2008
(/isis/citation/CBB001034035/)
Article
Balzhiser, Richard;
(Summer 1998)
The Chinese Energy Outlook
(/isis/citation/CBB519117168/)
Be the first to comment!