摘要

From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, heightened oil prices drove international interest in renewable energy technologies. These technologies also captured the interest of Chinese leaders and researchers in this period, who hoped that they could target weaknesses in China’s energy supply. Daxing County in Southeastern Beijing was an important experimental site for exploring how renewables might be integrated into rural life. In Yihezhuang Village, the PRC’s Central Science and Technology Commission collaborated with the West German Ministry for Research and Technology to build a “solar village.” Based on West German and Chinese sources including photographs, blueprints, and maps, this presentation explores the site as a lens for differing visions of the role that renewable energy should or could play in a country with an eighty-percent rural population and a chronic energy scarcity problem. This suburban laboratory featured energy-efficient residential and public building design, solar arrays and collectors, and communal biogas pits. In their interactions with the site, Beijing officials, German and Chinese experts, and solar village residents each displayed different understandings of how its technologies could contribute to the public and private good, and ultimately what it meant to live well in the Reform era.

主讲人

Amanda DeMarco is a PhD student in modern Chinese history at UC San Diego and currently a visiting international student at the CAS Institute for the History of Natural Science. Her dissertation focuses on the development of renewable energy technologies in China in the 1980s. She is interested in the social and economic implications of China’s Reform-era science transformation, as well as in the dynamics of intercultural knowledge production. Her master’s thesis, which focused on the role of China experts in East Germany in the 1950s, was published in the Journal of Contemporary History.