There is a telling incident near the end of Ying Jia Tan's book, which occurred when he and his family were in Taiwan in the summer of 2017. On the afternoon of August 15, 2017, two engineers at Taiwan's largest natural gas power station in Ta-tan made a serious mistake during routine maintenance that quickly spiraled out of control, leading to a major power outage for 6.68 million residential and commercial units on the island. The outage lasted a few hours. The political ramifications echoed for months, with rival political parties pointing to the incident as an illustration of the vulnerability of the island and reinvigorating the importance of energy security as an electoral issue. As a curious bookend, as I was reading Tan's book in December 2021, power outages were also roiling the mainland Chinese economy, forcing the Chinese government to roll back curbs on coal use and delaying the implementation of more ambitious efforts to decommission coal-based power plants in efforts to combat climate change. Both incidents illustrate the importance of electricity, not just in the history of technology, but also in the political economy of countries and as a tool of the state to control the populace. This often-overlooked connection makes Tan's book both timely and an essential new entry in the historiography on modern China.

Recharging China in War and Revolution begins with the textile mills of Shanghai, an industry closely connected to the fragmented history of its power market. The first power station in China started operation in 1882 and was outfitted with a 16-kilowatt direct current generator in a former warehouse at the corner of Nanjing East Road and Jiangxi Road. In the subsequent decades, new power stations opened but struggled with competition from gas and other alternative power sources for electrical lights. The biggest consumers of electrical power were the cotton mills, part of Shanghai's industrial base. Many of these companies, however, continued to rely on the older technology of steam engines and their own generators rather than purchase power from power stations, initially because these did not generate enough power and later because the older technology continued to be more cost-effective. Tan's case studies of Shanghai textile mills and the Huizhou silk industry break down the linear narratives of progress to demonstrate the uneven and fractured development of the power infrastructure in China based on a series of contingencies and the interconnected history of electrification and industrialization.

From these examples, Tan moves on to a fascinating discussion of the power grid during war in the 1930s and 1940s, covering the period from the Japanese invasion to the civil war between Nationalist and Communist forces for control of the mainland. The retreat of the Nationalist government to the southwest ceded much of the country's industrial and electrical capacity to the Japanese. By the late 1930s, the Japanese controlled 97 percent of the country's generating capacity. To counter this existential threat, a group of what Tan terms “engineer-bureaucrats” went to work rebuilding the country's electrical infrastructure with built-in resilience to handle war and other disasters (p. 62). This meant growing reliance on small coal-fired power systems that could be easily moved and redeployed.

These engineer-bureaucrats become the protagonists of Tan's narrative, bridging the Republican and Communist eras. After more than a decade of war, a period of hyperinflation and civil war, on the eve of the Communist victory in 1948, the nation's electrical industries were on the brink of collapse. As the Communists marched to victory, they shifted strategies from blowing up power stations to prevent their falling into enemy hands to preserving these important assets of governance. As they took over major urban centers, Communist leaders realized the importance of electricity. Chen Yun, the deputy commissar of the Liaodong Miliary Zone in 1948, wrote that “first and foremost, we must restore electrical power” (p. 151). Key to these efforts was the forging of alliances with technical workers. Ultimately, the Communists secured control over the country by their close attention to essential services, including the restoration of electricity. Over the next decade, Tan details the People's Republic of China's development of electricity as a pillar of state power. Tan places these developments in the larger context of Chinese development and transition to its current fossil-fuel-based economy in the age of the Anthropocene.

Tan successfully shows that the history of China's energy infrastructure was deeply entangled with the country's economic development, with reverberations well beyond the construction of the physical structures of power. As Tan points out, “In addition to identifying the electrical infrastructure as the source of institutional resilience, placing electrification at the center of modern Chinese history unsettles the linear conception of historical progress focused on the revolutionary movement led by China's political leaders” (p. 7). What comes in the rest of the work is the history of the ways that electricity powered the rise of modern China. By focusing on the electricity grid, Tan provides a tantalizing new perspective on China's developmental trajectory and its revolutionary past.