From Natural Barrier to National Symbol: Technologies, State-Building, and the Remaking of the Yangzi River, 1843-1937

From the 1840s to the 1930s, the Yangzi River—the longest waterway in China and an essential channel for irrigation and trade—underwent a profound, multi-dimensional transformation. In the late imperial era, the Qing state established a riverine governance that simultaneously mitigated flood and security threats while sustaining adaptable alliances with local elites to manage key tributaries. The pressures and incentives introduced by European colonial expansion in the mid-nineteenth century prompted the Qing and the succeeding Republican governments to reconfigure this governance as part of a self-strengthening strategy. Between the 1850s and the 1930s, this process unfolded through technological reforms marked by the adoption of integrated watershed management approaches to recast the river from a danger into a resource, legal reforms enabling the Chinese state to more assertively regulate maritime trade within its territorial waters, and ideological reforms redefining the Yangzi as a unifying national symbol resisting colonial privileges while linking China’s interior to global industrial capitalism. My dissertation argues that the Yangzi River was not merely a natural waterway stretching from Tibet to the Pacific, but an evolving assemblage of technologies, institutions, and discourses that actively produced and symbolically defined the modern Chinese nation-state. Ultimately, river making was synonymous with state-making.