China and the Emergence of a Global Small Hydropower Network, ca 1980s

Speaker: Dr. Arunabh Ghosh, Associate Professor, Department of History, 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)

Chair: Shri Shyam Saran, President, IIC

This talk explores China’s role in emerging global small hydropower networks of the late 1970s and 1980s. Starting early in the decade, Chinese small hydropower expertise and technology traveled across the Global South, and even made its way to the United States. China also came to play an increasingly central role in a host of ambitious international hydropower conferences – in places like Kathmandu, Nairobi, and Hangzhou. The talk will trace and contextualize this story, unpacking in the process how Chinese expertise was exported abroad and how it came to serve as a benchmark for global small hydropower projects

First lecture in a new bi-monthly series focusing on contemporary China

(Collaboration: Centre for Chinese Studies, Ashoka University; and NYU Shanghai)