CHAIRPERSON
Prof Mike Douglass, Asia Research Institute, and Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
In 1954 residents of the middle Yangzi basin experienced catastrophic flooding. The official response to this disaster was reported as a triumph for the nascent Maoist regime. Government engineers seemed to have minimised humanitarian and economic losses by instituting a series of timely hydraulic interventions. Propagandists argued that the Communist Party had led the newly liberated Chinese people to a historic victory in the war against water. Using archival evidence and oral history testimony collected in Hubei province, this paper offers an alternative history of the 1954 floods. It reveals that the humanitarian consequences of government hydraulic policies were far more catastrophic than previously acknowledged, and that the lives and livelihoods of rural communities were sacrificed in order to protect urban centres.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Chris Courtney is a postdoctoral fellow in the Asia Research Institute. His research focuses upon the environmental and social history of the middle Yangzi region. Prior to arriving at the National University of Singapore he completed a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. His forthcoming monograph examines the 1931 Central China Flood.
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