Title:
Engineering Shanghai: Water, sewage, and the making of hydraulic modernity

dc.contributor.advisor Lu, Hanchao
dc.contributor.author Shen, Xincheng
dc.contributor.committeeMember Krige, John
dc.contributor.committeeMember Bier, Laura
dc.contributor.committeeMember Brown, Joe
dc.contributor.committeeMember Tone, John
dc.contributor.department History, Technology and Society
dc.date.accessioned 2019-08-21T13:51:17Z
dc.date.available 2019-08-21T13:51:17Z
dc.date.created 2019-08
dc.date.issued 2019-05-08
dc.date.submitted August 2019
dc.date.updated 2019-08-21T13:51:17Z
dc.description.abstract This dissertation explores the water technologies in Shanghai from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century and in what ways the infrastructures – the drainage system, the water supply, culverted rivers, the water closet, and the water-carriage sewer system – played a role in the shaping of the cityscape, economics, and politics of Shanghai. While previous scholarship has engaged the social aspect of city water engineering, especially with respect to hygiene and its relation to growing state intervention, this dissertation focuses on the engineering work itself, indicating that the concept of being modern might be an aspiration, but it was the material and practical aspects of water engineering that laid the ground and set the rules for government intervention. Only within the spatial and economic limits allowed by the engineering feasibility could the authorities materialize political influence. Following the Introduction, Chapters 2-5 discuss components of the engineering system in Shanghai – drainage, waterworks, culvert, and sewage treatment. An exhaustive look at the technical details provides us with better explanations as to why foreign technologies were accepted and in what context decisions were made by authorities. Despite these works being the embodiment of state-of-the-art Western knowledge, what facilitated their local adoption were practical and mundane concerns. Chapters 6-8 discuss how economics competition and political struggle prior to WWII played out in the context of growing engineering sophistication between actors such as corporations, consumers, political authorities from the city to the state, and from Chinese to foreigners. Chapter 9 offers a criticism about the ill-fitting, conventional concept of modernity for China studies and calls for a new theoretical framework within which the question of development could be answered in light of the incremental improvements in engineering practices. The thesis of this research is to propose the concept of hydraulic modernity. The contention here is that practical aspects of the technocratic-engineering system of city water dictated the pattern of engineering works and consequently influenced how political and economic capital were organized for the system to achieve greater capacity and homogeneity, the two criteria used to measure the development of a system in this dissertation. The former indicates the maximum output of an engineering system and the latter points to the reduction of the number of heterogeneous interest groups inside a technocratic-engineering system in order to lower the risk of malfunction. Modernization of Shanghai was not driven by top-down infusion of knowledge, etiquette, and ideology, but a process of meticulous interconnection of layers of technocratic-engineering systems, upon which further institutionalization of social actors was able to come into being.
dc.description.degree Ph.D.
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1853/61700
dc.language.iso en_US
dc.publisher Georgia Institute of Technology
dc.subject Shanghai
dc.subject Water supply
dc.subject Sewer system
dc.subject Modernity
dc.title Engineering Shanghai: Water, sewage, and the making of hydraulic modernity
dc.type Text
dc.type.genre Dissertation
dspace.entity.type Publication
local.contributor.advisor Lu, Hanchao
local.contributor.corporatename School of History and Sociology
local.contributor.corporatename Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
relation.isAdvisorOfPublication cf53317e-4f3c-4a2b-ba02-d3956eecbbfa
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication 4a394044-f889-462e-bd25-ffd14ad5e9f3
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication b1049ff1-5166-442c-9e14-ad804b064e38
thesis.degree.level Doctoral
Files
Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
SHEN-DISSERTATION-2019.pdf
Size:
12.95 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
LICENSE.txt
Size:
3.87 KB
Format:
Plain Text
Description: