To Understand China’s Global Development Strategy, Look to the United States’ Past

In 1807, when the upstart American merchant Jesse Hawley first proposed a canal between Lake Erie and the Hudson River, he drew inspiration from China’s extensive canal system. More than a century later, the roles were reversed. In the early 1940s, when China’s Kuomintang Party sought assistance designing what would become the Three Gorges Dam, it went to the United States’ Bureau of Reclamation for help.

Fast-forward to today, and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) makes Beijing the world’s largest source of development finance. In the decades since the Kuomintang’s request for U.S. assistance, China has drawn from the U.S. playbook on how to use infrastructure as a geopolitical tool. When pursuing massive infrastructure investments at home and extending technical assistance and finance abroad, China may even imagine itself as reclaiming its position as the world leader in infrastructure development. Understanding Chinese development policy today requires keeping these congruent histories of American and Chinese infrastructure development in mind.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American infrastructure projects such as the Erie Canal, the Pacific Railroad, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Hoover Dam captured the international imagination as symbols of national strength and harbingers of economic development. These projects acted as catalysts for the dispossession of Indigenous lands, ushered settlers westward, and allowed the United States to consolidate its control over distant territories. The United States’ explosive growth throughout the 19th century was understood by international observers as a consequence of its ability to harness the benefits of its vast territorial expanse for industrial development via the nation’s extensive system of canals, railroads, and hydropower projects.

No wonder that when Kuomintang leaders began contemplating a hydropower project on the Yangtze Gorge, they looked to the United States for help. The decision to seek assistance from the United States was not purely a technical one—nor was the United States’ decision to provide it. From 1943-44, John Savage, chief designing engineer for the Bureau of Reclamation, spent six months surveying potential sites under the State Department’s Cultural Cooperation Program.

Savage’s visit was part of a broader State Department-led effort to strengthen Sino-American ties and use China to contain Japanese imperial ambitions in the region. In turn, Kuomintang leaders hoped to continue benefiting from American largesse. From 1943-47, China received $670 million from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, of which $474 million was contributed by the United States.

The United States’ strategy of diplomacy through development would not end with China. In the years following Savage’s visit, the United States took advantage of its reputation as the leader in infrastructure-led development. As part of a Cold War-era effort to combat communist influence, the Bureau of Reclamation’s Foreign Activities Office developed a global program of technical assistance spanning Lebanon, Ethiopia, Thailand, Brazil, and beyond. By the 1960s, the program had provided assistance to 108 countries.

Now, it’s China’s turn. When the Three Gorges Dam was completed in 2008, it was the largest dam in the world in terms of installed hydropower-generating capacity. The sheer size of the dam put China on the map as a leading developer of mega-projects. However, the Three Gorges Dam represented only one of many ambitious infrastructure projects China was pursuing.

In 2000, China launched its western development plan to direct investment toward China’s western provinces. This initiative funded many large-scale infrastructure works, including tens of thousands of miles of new highways, railways, and pipelines, as well as hydropower projects throughout Xinjiang and Tibet that rival the Three Gorges Dam. When this western development plan was launched, Chinese authorities drew comparisons to the development of the American West in the 19th century. Premier Zhu Rongji and Vice Premier Wen Jiabao, leaders of the campaign, even commissioned a study of U.S. westward expansion.

Simultaneously, China took its renewed reputation for infrastructure expertise abroad. In 2005, China’s Sinohdryo Corporation signed a memorandum of understanding with Ghana to help build the Bui Dam. In 2006, President Hu Jintao pledged to fund up to 70 percent of the dam after the World Bank and other multilateral development agencies deemed the social and environmental costs of the project too high for them to participate. This pledge signaled China’s rapidly growing involvement in African infrastructure development—commitments that would ultimately become a part of the BRI.

History might not repeat itself, but it can rhyme. When Jesse Hawley wanted to expand his contemporaries’ imaginations of what the Erie Canal could do for American prosperity, the best examples he could call up were China’s Great Wall and Grand Canal. Today, after more than a century of U.S. dominance in infrastructure development, Hawley’s counterparts may look to the Three Gorges Dam or China’s high-speed rail network. For Chinese leaders themselves, the legacy of U.S. development in the 19th and 20th centuries provides lessons in how infrastructure promotion can consolidate domestic control at home and export influence abroad.

Mary Shi received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2024. She is currently an LSA collegiate fellow at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and was a 2023-24 IGCC dissertation fellow.

Thumbnail credit: Robert Huffstutter (Flickr)