Dear all, I am happy to share that the Global Environments Workshop will meet on Monday, November 20th, 5:45 - 7 at 9 Kirkland Place. We will discuss Jason Chan's dissertation prospectus, "Forging the Third Pole: Tibet, Steel, and the Global Extreme-Environmental History of the People's Republic of China, 1956-2006." Please RSVP by emailing me (nathanielmoses(a)g.harvard.edu) to receive a copy of the prospectus. We look forward to seeing you there! Abstract: Forging the Third Pole: Tibet, Steel, and the Global Extreme-Environmental History of the People’s Republic of China, 1956-2006 Fathomed from the towering height of the Tibetan Plateau, the history of socialist development and science in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) takes on a distinct hue. For three decades, benefitting from the plethora of grassroots sources and access to municipal and county archives, PRC historians have centered rural China and cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin in conceptualizing Maoism. Abstracting Han Chinese’s experiences through successive campaigns in the Mao Zedong era (1949-1976), these works have defined Maoism as the shared grammar for labor-intensive, urban-biased rural development; mass and political participation in knowledge production; ideological remolding of society; “war against nature;” and anti-imperialism. My dissertation elucidates how the extreme environments of Amdo (Qinghai) and Central Tibet (Xizang) had redefined Maoism. Threaded with the construction of the Qinghai-Xizang (Qingzang) Railway between 1956 and 2006, it argues that Maoism belied its revolutionary rhetoric in that it was technocratic, colonial, and—at the same time—global on the Tibetan Plateau; and that the reform era (1978-2012) saw not its retreat, but its consolidation. Utilizing internal-circulation scientific publications, archival documents, oral histories, as well as environmental data, this dissertation traces Chinese planners and scientists’ conceptualization of the Tibetan Plateau as the “Third Pole” and argues that industrialization on the Tibetan Plateau was not only entangled with that in Soviet Siberia and the North American Arctic through notions of their shared experiences, but, by the 1990s and 2000s, also became a source of emulation across global cold regions. It unearths the transnational, trans-polar history of development in PRC-era Tibet and, in doing so, proceeds to interrogate the extent to which international polar science participated in it. Best wishes, Nathaniel