ABSTRACT
Serious consideration of a Yangtze dam began with Sun Yat-sen’s proposition in 1919—though it, like most of Sun’s ideas, remained unachievable during China’s divisive warlord era. In the 1980s, the Chinese government began feasibility studies for a massive single dam that would achieve the disparate goals of flood control, power generation, and improved shipping. In June 2007, the China had nearly 53 million cars on the road. By 2011, that the number had risen to 172 million, and by 2019, 258 million. By comparison, the United States, with less than a quarter of the population of China, had 280 million cars on the road in 2018. The possibility of an individual being able to buy a car underscores the massive social changes generated by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms begun in the 1980s. These reforms were expanded by Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, sustained by Hu Jintao, and extended under Xi Jinping in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
