No Money. No Machines. No Teachers. They Built China’s Hydropower Anyway.

In 1950, China had 360,000 kilowatts of hydropower installed. A medium-sized city could not keep its streetlights on.

Factories needed to start. Cities needed electricity. Coal could not be supplied fast enough. Imported equipment cost too much. There was no way back.

In 1951, a national survey of hydropower resources began. Teams went into the mountains with theodolites, current meters, leveling rods, and notebooks. They measured drop, flow, and geology. They slept in villages, tents, and old temples. They wrote numbers by hand. When the survey ended, one fact stood out: most of China’s water energy was in the southwest. Yunnan alone held nearly a quarter of the national total. The Jinsha, Lancang, and Nu rivers had run through the Hengduan Mountains for millions of years. The drop was huge. The water flowed away for nothing. Not even a splash was kept.

Our team formed in Yunnan in the early 1950s. Its predecessor was the Yunnan Hydropower Engineering Bureau and its survey crews. That is the base of what is now Hydropower Bureau No. 14 and the Kunming Institute under PowerChina. Our first job was to renovate and expand Shilongba Hydropower Station.

Shilongba started generating in 1912. It was China’s first hydropower station. By the 1950s it was worn out. The units had been bought from Germany in the late Qing Dynasty. They were noisy. They leaked oil. They shook. We were to install new 2×3,000-kilowatt units.

There was no large hoisting equipment. A rotor weighing hundreds of tons was carried into the powerhouse by human muscle. Ropes cut into shoulders. Wooden rollers went under steel. Jacks were turned by hand. The rotor moved inch by inch. Work chants passed from one end of the powerhouse to the other. Men pulled together. Men sweated together. Men cursed together. Then they pulled again.

There were no precision instruments. An old master pressed a listening rod against the casing. He closed his eyes. Three seconds later he said the clearance was two silk too large. A young man next to him did not believe it. He took the rod and listened. Ten seconds later, he nodded.

Here, China’s first generation of hydropower workers learned how to install a unit of their own.

Once they had a foothold, the team moved to the Wumeng Mountains. They worked there for twenty years. They built the Yili River cascade hydropower stations. It was China’s first river developed as a cascade by its own people. They lived in tents, then in brick houses. Children were born. Workers grew old. Some died. On the day the Maojiacun earth dam closed, someone stood on the dam all night. He said nothing. The river was diverted. The earth held. Later, that dam was called Asia’s first earth dam.

What woke us up was Lubuge.

In the early 1980s, the diversion system of Lubuge Hydropower Station was put out for international bidding. The Japanese company Taisei Corporation won with a bid 43 percent below the base price. How many people did they bring? Thirty managers and a few machines. We were still using human-wave tactics. Hundreds of people piled onto one site. No cost accounting. No schedule planning. No one knew the daily cost. No one knew the daily progress.

Those thirty people from Taisei did more work, faster, than our hundreds.

A saying spread around the site: the Japanese bulldozer is quieter than our tractor.

That taste was hard to swallow. Shame, not anger. But it forced a reform. The project legal-person responsibility system, the bidding system, and the construction supervision system all started at Lubuge. In 1987, five ministries and commissions of the State Council issued a document promoting the Lubuge experience across the national construction industry. We took on the survey, design, and part of the construction of Lubuge. Later we won the National Excellent Engineering Survey and Design Gold Award.

More valuable than the trophy was this: we made the whole industry realize for the first time that engineering could be done this way.

Later, at Xiaowan, the position reversed.

Xiaowan Hydropower Station is on the middle reaches of the Lancang River. We had to build a 294.5-meter-high concrete double-curvature arch dam. Before this, no one in the world had built a 300-meter-class double-curvature arch dam. That is about the height of a 100-story building. The dam site is in an 8-degree high-intensity seismic zone. The slopes on both banks are 700 meters high. The underground cavern group was larger than any built before.

No one could teach us this. It could not be bought.

We attacked it ourselves. From dam structure and seismic design to ultra-high slope support, we ground out the entire technology for a 300-meter-class extra-high arch dam, bit by bit. We built models. We ran tests. We failed. We revised. We wrote our own codes. We checked every block of concrete. Academician Pan Jiazheng later said that after Xiaowan was completed, foreigners began coming to China to learn hydropower construction.

On August 25, 2010, the last unit at Xiaowan went into operation. On that day, China’s total installed hydropower capacity crossed 200 million kilowatts. First in the world.

From 100 million to 200 million took only six years. The first 100 million kilowatts, counting from Shilongba, took fifty-five years.

Today, China’s installed hydropower capacity accounts for more than 40 percent of the world’s total. Those giant stations on the great rivers are backed by this team that walked out of the Yunnan canyons. There are still many hard problems in pumped storage and the new power system. There are still mountains to climb. There are still rivers to develop. There are still nights when the answer is not in any book.

The people who carried instruments on mountain roads in the 1950s probably could not imagine that the road with no way back would become the road that now astonishes the world.

They could not imagine it. They had no time to imagine it. They just wanted to get the job done.

The listening rod at Shilongba, the earth dam at Yili River, the bulldozer at Lubuge, the arch dam at Xiaowan. One line.

The water in the canyon is still flowing. It just no longer flows away for nothing.