Abstract
This ethnographic study examines the implementation of Chinese engineering standards in a multinational pumped storage hydropower project in Israel. Using an ethnographic approach, the study investigates how Chinese standards are negotiated, accepted or rejected within local engineering practice and how Chinese engineers experience the international adoption of their knowledge. We find that although the adoption of Chinese practice-based standards lags behind Western principle-based knowledge in institutional spheres, the gap between the two has started to narrow on an individual level. We also show how the personal lives of Chinese engineers are affected by, and, in turn, have an impact on the standard practices of Belt and Road Initiative projects. The international adoption of Chinese standards is a multi-layered process of infrastructure experimentation on the ground rather than a top–down slogan. Our research broadens the discussion of engineering standards in energy transition and highlights how knowledge and practice flow, or fail to flow, from the infrastructure periphery to its centre, potentially reshaping global energy construction paradigms.
In his office on the construction site of a pumped storage hydropower plant in northern Israel, Xiong, a Chinese contract engineer, showed me a PDF flowchart titled ‘Design Documents Submission/Approval/ Review Procedure’. Covering nearly 20 steps, with many arrows branching off from and pointing towards previous processes, the chart explained how engineers from different companies and agencies worked together on a multinational pumped storage hydropower project. Typically, Chinese design engineers drafted design drawings, which were then reviewed by local Israeli engineers. Upon review and approval by local certified engineers, the design drawings were submitted to the project owner’s engineers for review. Once approved, the construction engineers carried out construction according to the design drawings, with adjustments to the design plan as needed. As the project moved forward, this process played out during different parts of the engineering work, from reservoir and underground tunnel excavation to plant house construction, and from turbine installation to power grid commissioning. ‘This is where Chinese standards step in and out’, Xiong said, pointing to the flowchart. According to Xiong and many other Chinese engineers, Chinese engineering standards intersected with Israeli and international engineering standards in different ways at different stages of the project, subject to various geological, technological, cultural, institutional, and geopolitical considerations.
The project was located within an area covered by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a transcontinental infrastructure and energy interconnectivity programme announced by the Chinese government in 2013.1 For a decade, scientists have predicted that, in the field of energy, the BRI will revolutionize energy infrastructure in the participating nations by proffering Chinese monetary resources, technologies, and expertise.2 Consequently, Chinese standards have attracted increasing attention.3 In recent official news about BRI outcomes, the Chinese government listed the publication of ‘1,623 foreign language versions of Chinese industry standards in the fields of energy, transportation, railroads, etc.’ as a key achievement of the BRI in the infrastructure development industry.4
While such official narratives provide an overview of the BRI’s standards exportation focus, they do not address more specific questions about such exportation’s performance and dynamics on the ground. For example, what role do Chinese standards and technologies play in transforming energy infrastructure in specific BRI projects in different countries? And how do engineering professionals from diverse professional and national backgrounds engage with engineering standards from different knowledge systems, particularly Western-derived international standards and standards from China and other non-Western countries? These questions are largely unexplored in the existing BRI literature but have been partially addressed in engineering and business studies.
Even before the launch of the BRI, Chinese firms applied their expertise around the world through international project contracting. However, the BRI increased the visibility of Chinese firms in the international market for infrastructure development,5 leading them to become engineering contracting partners in more regions worldwide.6 According to the Engineering News-Record annual report, Chinese contractors accounted for approximately 33.4 per cent of the international market revenue in 2021, the largest market share of international contractors.7 Researchers in engineering and business disciplines have found that Chinese domestic standards are significantly different from international technical standards, which are traditionally dominated by International Electrotechnical Commission, European Standards, American Society for Testing and Materials, as described further on in this article. These differences have become a significant challenge for Chinese firms entering international contracting markets.8 Scholars have thus called for more attention to be paid to standards differences and their potential impact on Chinese firms’ overseas projects. However, this line of enquiry focuses on standards only as a commercial indicator of project delivery rather than on standards as a body of knowledge that plays a role in the transformation of energy infrastructure.
Engineering, industrial, and technical standards are grounded in science but enshrined in various national and international bodies of law and policy, which are meant to establish industry norms and limit legal liability. But, in particular locations and on particular projects, standards are tools that can be applied according to the discretion of local actors.9 Using ethnographic methods, this research takes a bottom–up perspective to examine engineering standards as a socially constructed body of knowledge mediated in practice by multiple factors. On the site of the first pumped storage hydropower project with Chinese firms contracted in Israel, we examine how Chinese standards succeed or fail to enter local engineering practice, and how Chinese engineers perceive and experience Chinese standards and knowledge ‘going global’. Chinese engineering standards are subject to approval or rejection depending on specific situations; in many cases, engineers negotiate a slippage between ‘ideal’ contract documents and complex decisions made in real-time at construction sites. The greater the extent to which engineering tasks involve on-site construction practices, the more potential there is for Chinese standards to be subject to negotiation. While Chinese practice-based standards may have initially struggled to rival the prevailing Western principle-based knowledge in institutional and authoritative spheres, the gap between the two has started to narrow. At the same time, the personal lives of Chinese engineers are significantly affected by and have an impact on the standard practices of BRI projects. Our research suggests that the exportation of Chinese standards is not a macro-level slogan but a multi-layered process of infrastructure experiment on the ground. This research broadens the discussion of engineering standards in energy transition, a process in which knowledge and practice flow from the infrastructure periphery to its centre and create the potential to reshape global energy construction paradigms.
Research methods and fieldwork sites
Pumped storage hydropower (PSH) is a type of hydroelectric energy storage used by electric power systems for what is often termed ‘load balancing’. This form of hydroelectric energy involves constructing two reservoirs at slightly different elevations, generating power at high-demand (and high-price) times by moving water downward through a turbine, and then pumping the water back up at low-demand (low-price) times. This storage method has become increasingly vital in the shift towards renewable energy, because it offers much-needed system flexibility and stability to accommodate the growth of wind and solar capacities globally.10 As an illustration, solar, wind, and garbage power plants have been built or are under construction near our research site. Moreover, pumped storage hydropower plays a crucial role in Israeli energy security, as it constitutes over 50 per cent of the emergency power supply in the country.
Our research site, located in the Jordan Valley near the Sea of Galilee, is the largest PSH project in Israel, with an installed capacity of 344 megawatts (MW). Although it was initiated in 2017 with an expected completion date of late 2021, unforeseen delays due to COVID-19 have pushed the project’s completion to 2023. Despite this setback, approximately 170 engineers, hailing from a range of national and professional backgrounds, regularly work on site. Local engineers representing governmental authorities and the project owner, as well as German and British engineers representing financing banks, and Chinese (all of whom are Han Chinese), French, Italian, Israeli and Arabic engineers from contracted construction companies are all part of this diverse team. The first author conducted extensive ethnographic research in 2019 and 2022, spending several months in the field and participating in engineer work meetings and after-work social activities, as well as in-depth interviews and follow-up conversations with 35 sampled engineers.11
This case study is not meant to be representative of all Chinese PSH projects; instead, it offers a close look at the ways in which Chinese engineering standards are negotiated and implemented in a particular local context. We draw primarily on Chinese engineers’ narratives that are based on their rich knowledge of Chinese standards but also on Israeli and European engineers’ narratives to make the research data and analysis more comprehensive. Interviews ranged in length from 45 minutes to 4 hours.
For data analysis, we coded and analysed interview transcripts in the original language (Chinese or English), developing a codebook containing themes and subthemes on the topics of interest.12 To safeguard anonymity, we use pseudonyms for the research participants. Additionally, we collected audiovisual materials related to engineers’ standards practices, including photos and videos of design plans and construction procedures, along with standard documents, commercial contracts, and technical review reports for archival research.
Socially and historically constructed standards as energy production infrastructures
In the engineering industry, technical standards, which establish the engineering and technical requirements for processes, procedures, and methods, are unquestionable ‘pillars’ of engineering construction, creating a close relationship between standardization and institutional engineering and business performance.13 Although engineering and management scholars observe that, in general, standards differences are an issue in international engineering,14 companies’ and engineers’ perceptions of such differences are rarely investigated. Particularly, as Keith Maskus claimed,15 how participants from different countries, including China, react to the disparities between native and international standards when they enter global markets is poorly understood. In one of the few studies in this area, Zhen Lei et al.16 found that the differences between Chinese and international standards can hinder the international business ventures of Chinese companies in the infrastructure sector and have lasting effects on project performance. Nevertheless, current research lacks in-depth examination of how these disparities in standards create obstacles in the routine practices of engineers on the ground. As science and technology scholar Casper Bruun Jensen criticized, standards are often overlooked in their own capacity and are more frequently regarded as ‘forms leaving the content’, rendering them as peripheral or unseen factors in other analytical pursuits (such as project performance).17 In fact, the majority of standards research in engineering fields assumes that standardization is solely related to economic, or technological necessities while in management studies standardization is primarily an institutional issue, thus leaving the nuanced and crucial knowledge production surrounding standards and standardization untouched. Moreover, existing research rarely situates such knowledge production processes within geopolitical or cross-cultural settings like BRI.
Unlike in discipline-specific studies, where technical standards are analysed with singular economic, institutional, or technical principles, recent science and technology studies have approached standards using constructivism and viewing standards not as abstracted models and simple principles but as complex social and historical constructions. This approach sees standardization as mutually constitutive sociotechnical, cultural, historical, and economic-political processes.18 Science and technology studies scholars have focused consistently on the ‘genealogies and multidimensional implications’ of different standardization processes and outcomes in specific local contexts.19 For example, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Star argued that standards differ in terms of practice at community levels and carry uneven consequences for individuals and groups of people across sociotechnical, cultural, and political landscapes. According to them, standards often embody ‘goals of practice and production that are never perfectly realized’.20 The process of standardization often includes negotiations between parties from different sociocultural, historical, and political backgrounds and might lead to contingent and unpredictable outcomes.
Thus, Bowker and Star suggest that slippage between the ‘ideal standard’ and ‘contingencies of practice’ – officially documented standards and their actual realization in particular contexts – is a critical site for analysing standards and standardization.21 Such sites are crucial to knowledge production in a broader context. Through empirical investigation and comparison of knowledge representations among people from different and often hierarchical knowledge and cultural-political backgrounds, the analysis of standards and practice also brings to light the biases in favour of, or against, certain ways of knowing. Such biases have been inscribed in many classic theories of globalization, such as World Systems Theory which claims that knowledge, experience, and technology flow only from developed countries (the centre) to less-developed countries (the so-called periphery).22 This presumed knowledge hierarchy has been criticized by many scholars in science and technology studies, as Susan Star and Martha Lampland pointed out, ‘Our ethnocentrism, and our assumptions about infrastructure and standards, comes to the fore when we encounter wild (to us) representations.’23
Standard slippages and associated knowledge hierarchies have been examined in science and technology studies in various domains such as public health, labour, IT engineering, and everyday shopping activities, demonstrating that standards are contingent and sometimes even arbitrary when it comes to practice. People might express anger, frustration, and confusion about standards in response to the ‘messy’ and intensively social, political, and historical process of standardization in real life.24 However, the contingent nature of standards has not yet been sufficiently examined in the field of energy engineering. Thus, researchers in social studies of energy have called for more ethnographic studies on energy infrastructures (e.g. energy project construction sites), where technical standards and devices encounter and entangle with energy professionals and local environments in complex ways that increasingly impact the prospects of a global energy transition to renewable sources.25 In anthropology and science and technology studies of infrastructure, scholars argue that it is essential for infrastructure research, as part of the study of contemporary society, to analyse the energy infrastructure and understand the long-term and global social and cultural consequences of infrastructure choices that are often presented as mere local technical choices in the present.26
This multidisciplinary call for attention to energy infrastructures introduces another crucial characteristic of standards to the centre of analysis. An early science and technology scholar Thomas Hughes suggested that infrastructures often start off as a collection of small, independent technologies with wildly divergent technical standards.27 Bowker and Star advanced this view, arguing that these standards are deeply embedded in various infrastructures and contain messy realities that influence people’s lives through a complex sociotechnologically mediated process.28 Echoing Bowker and Star, recent anthropologists studying infrastructure have begun to observe and document the process of infrastructure construction and its effects upon society, organizations, and people. They highlight how pre-determined standards are often negotiated during application.29 Following this line of inquiry, this research approaches standards as the intellectual infrastructure of energy production and storage. We trace how Chinese standards, as emerging knowledge, contribute to the nascent energy transition.
Grounding Chinese standards in local practices
The fourth section of the project’s commercial contract between the Israeli owner and the Chinese contractor – a state-owned enterprise (SOE) – the ‘Owner’s Requirements’ stipulates that ‘all design and construction work, including the materials used and methods applied’ in this project should accord with Israeli standards. If Israeli standards are not applicable, ‘EUROCODES, EN (European Standard), ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials), ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation), BS (British Standard), IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), or equivalent standards (subject to the Owner’s review)’ should be referred to instead.30 Chinese standards for this project, including national standards (GB and GB/T) and energy industry standards (SL and DL), were implicitly included as ‘equivalent’ but not literally present in the official document. These Chinese standards are usually drafted by state-owned enterprises in the industry, published, and supervised by the Standardization Administration of China, the standards organization authorized by the State Council of China to exercise administrative responsibilities.
Many Chinese engineers felt ambivalent about the role of Chinese standards in their work on the project. Zhu, a civil engineer, said ‘We could not use Chinese standards. We could only look them up for reference unofficially, even though we know that they are often more up to date.’ Such sentiment was widely shared among Chinese engineers, built upon the professional experiences of their own and earlier Chinese engineers working on international projects since the turn of the century.31 However, based on their professional training and experiences, most local and European engineers believed their Western-derived standards, which were clearly stipulated in the contract, to be more trustworthy and felt more comfortable using long-established standards with which they were more familiar.
The Chinese design engineers, particularly those with geotechnical expertise, were the first to encounter this standard hierarchy, since their work began right after underground rock samples had been taken. They evaluated the degree of stability and strength of the rock and classified the rock type according to standards documents; then, design engineers in other professions began design work on reservoirs, powerhouses, or underground tunnels based on the classifications. Most Chinese geotechnical engineers felt they were always trying to work according to the ‘Western style’ instead of applying the Chinese style. As Chu, a geological engineer, summarized, ‘In our profession, we only follow European and US standards, although there are no essential differences between those and Chinese standards in classifying rocks.’
Like the geological engineers, design engineers in the civil and mechanical specialities soon encountered standard differences and hierarchy; however, unlike the geological engineers, the design engineers managed some negotiations to use Chinese standards. For example, through laborious ‘standards comparison’ work, Chinese design engineers proved that Chinese standards could be applied to steel lining design because steel liners produced following the Chinese standard also met the American standard requirements. In this way, Chinese standards were authorized as one of the ‘equivalent standards’ specified in the contract. Accordingly, they used Chinese standards for calculation formulas and parameters in the design calculation. Following the contract terms, the application of equivalent standards is ‘subject to the Owner’s review’. So engineers representing the client reviewed Chinese engineers’ proposals against Israeli, European, American or ISO standards. This design review process was where controversy frequently occurred, and as with the geological engineers, most negotiation attempts by Chinese design engineers failed. In 2019, Chinese engineers tried to prove that Chinese standards met the technical structural design requirements (rebar and concrete) for the middle underground tunnel segment. However, when the local and European engineers from the client’s side rejected and suspended the contractor’s work, the Chinese engineers compromised and applied European standards. As they said, failing to meet a deadline can result in heavy fines; thus, they could not afford the time and financial costs of continued disputation while on-site workers and machines stood idle.32 ‘Compromising to the Western style is the most efficient solution’, Liu, the chief design engineer said bitterly.
The design engineers attributed the resistance they encountered to various factors. ‘Most of us are not fluent enough in English’, explained Liu, the chief design engineer, ‘but it’s not just about language – it’s about communication.’ Even when using the same English terms to discuss with their European or local counterparts, Chinese engineers found it challenging to understand other parties. ‘We have very different design philosophies’, Liu concluded, ‘or, to put it another way, different technological cultures.’
Several design engineers attempted to rationalize these philosophical differences based on their university education. They argued that engineering programmes in China were heavily influenced by the Soviet Union in the past, and although there has been a shift towards Euro-American models, the distinctions remain significant and impede the application of Chinese standards to this project. Others, such as Liu, believed that these disparities in engineering philosophy stem from the divergent paths of technological development in China and the West. The Western engineering industry is built upon individual professional qualifications, which is lifelong. But we are not a thorough individual professional qualification system. Although on the surface, China also has individual professional qualifications, in fact, the enterprise always bears the responsibility. So Chinese standards are relatively rigid, with no causes and effects [for individual engineers to understand]. The engineer enforces the standard, then the company is absolved of (accident) responsibility. This is a bit short-sighted, but very efficient path of technology development. Its disadvantage is that we do not explore the principles and origins of engineering technology enough. We follow what the standards specify, but why do so? We may not have studied enough. But when it comes to international projects, the rationality of the design plan must be fundamentally justified, from the principle, the calculation of step-by-step inference to the final design drawings. . . . In this sense, we are not ready, and Chinese standards are not yet equipped to meet international standards.
This messy situation might originate not only from the knowledge hierarchy between Chinese and Western standards but also from engineers’ different roles in the project: Chinese engineers worked as contractors rather than directly for the Israeli project owner. But the technical plan provided by Italian geological engineers, who were subcontractors of the Chinese SOE, was much more easily approved by the project owner’s engineers. Many Chinese engineers said that they thought it would be beneficial to have some European engineers on their contractors’ team, as Xu, a 29-year-old geological engineer, said: They [European engineers working for the Chinese contractor and for the project owner] are from the same knowledge system, and might more easily communicate with each other, unlike when the client’s engineers deal with us. They question us first, even before looking at our plans. They have presumptions about us [our knowledge as untrustworthy].
Chinese engineers’ narratives suggest that the differences between the principle-based and template-based knowledge systems stem from engineers’ early education, professional system, national technology development path, and on-site practice at each phase. Despite the complexity of such systematic variations, on the project site, the standards hierarchy presents practice-based knowledge as less credible and principle-based knowledge as more dependable. In ideal situations where engineering problems match principle-based knowledge (e.g. many geological inspections and desk-design work), Western standards were hard to challenge with Chinese experience. However, the problems engineers face on site are never ‘ideal’. In these interstices between the ideal and practice, Chinese engineers occasionally managed to assert the authority of Chinese standards. As already mentioned, the more engineering work was related to on-site construction practice, the more space is available to Chinese engineers in terms of negotiating standards. Liu pointed to the subtle and complex role Chinese standards played in practice: Such a project is essentially a construction project, its function of distributing energy is achieved only when construction is completed . . . we are not allowed to use Chinese standards on the surface. However, in practice, there are many situations where both local and Western [European] standards are not applicable; this is when we can refer to Chinese standards.
Paper versus practice: Exporting ‘invisible’ Chinese standards
Liu’s point of view was vividly reflected in the construction of the surge shaft, a structure designed to prevent excessive hydraulic pressure from building up at the downstream end of the pipe, as water flows through the turbines. Per Israeli standards, a surge shaft at a vertical depth of tens of metres should be constructed from the bottom up; however, Israel has not had any construction experience with surge shafts as deep as 400 metres (the approximate depth of the PSH surge shaft), and the geological condition was so poor that all engineers agreed that bottom–up construction would cause collapse. By referring to Chinese standards and experience, which provide for top–down construction, they partially reduced the risk of collapse but could not eliminate the risk totally. Ashkenazi, an Israeli mechanical engineer, made suggestions based on his experience in South Africa, and the Chinese and Israeli engineers came up with a new plan. A bottom–up excavated impedance hole, a top–down excavated shaft hole, and reinforcement measure were successfully applied to the surge shaft construction. ‘We were very creative and had a great collaboration on this’, Ashkenazi concluded during a follow-up chat. ‘We solved the problem in such a talented way, the Chinese guys had even applied for several patents for it in China!’
The success of the surge shaft construction and the resulting knowledge innovation can be attributed in large part to Ashkenazi’s receptive attitude towards Chinese engineering knowledge and practices. As the certified engineer responsible for the surge shaft, Ashkenazi had the authority to approve or reject Chinese engineers’ design drawings, construction plans, and material and equipment use. This was a crucial aspect, as according to Israeli Planning and Building Law, all foreign engineering products required approval from local certified engineers before they could be put into practice on site. Consequently, the Chinese contractor employed local certified engineers from various professions to ensure compliance with local engineering institutions and legal authorities based on their professional qualifications. These local certified engineers had dual identities, exercising authority on behalf of both their Chinese employers and local engineering institutions. This unique position allowed them to consider Chinese standards and experience more thoroughly, and they came to accept Chinese approaches sooner than did client's engineers or engineers from local authorities. In fact, they often proactively defended Chinese engineers in controversial situations.
In the case of the surge shaft, engineers from the Israeli Ministry of Labour originally required Chinese materials and equipment to be tested in Israel according to local standards. Based on his cooperation with Chinese engineers and his professional authority, Ashkenazi rejected the ministry’s requirements and to some extent took on the liability for Chinese engineers, insisting that the testing be conducted in China according to Chinese, European, and South African standards. Ashkenazi’s decision was ultimately accepted by the Ministry of Labour, greatly facilitating the innovative completion of the surge shaft. As the project drew to a close, Ashkenazi initiated a new collaboration with Chinese engineers on another reservoir testing technology. The two teams agreed to develop the technology according to both Israeli and Chinese standards, with the Chinese engineers applying for a Chinese patent for the resulting innovation, while Ashkenazi got a new contract from the Chinese company to expand his own business. This new technology is poised to have a significant impact on future Chinese standards for both domestic and export use, and plans are already in motion to apply it to other hydraulic projects in China and beyond.
A similar debate arose regarding the reversible pumped storage units, which included a specific set of turbine, generator, and transformers having both generating and pumping functions. The units were contracted to a European manufacturer and produced according to French, EU, and Israeli standards. The commercial contract between the local project owner and the Chinese contractor required the tested units’ performance to meet International Electrotechnical Commission standards. These standards only specify the required test outcome, which is that the power plant must prove its capability to generate power stably at any capacity between 0 to 17.2 MW, according to the real-time requirements of the power grid. However, the standards do not provide guidance on how the tests should be conducted. The owner’s engineers requested the contractor to conduct the generating capacity test by performing 10 start–stop operations at intervals of 10 per cent, from 0 to 17.2 MW. The Chinese mechanical engineers objected to this method, citing excessive waste. Instead, following Chinese standard GB/T 18482-2001 ‘Specification for start-up test of reversible pumped storage units’, they proposed stabilizing the units for one minute through mechanical operation when the power generation reached 10 per cent, and then increasing the power and repeating this process until it reached 100 per cent, without shutting down the units. Zhang explained further, We successfully convinced them (the owner’s engineers) because they (the European standards and International Electrotechnical Commission standards) don’t have specifications on such a procedural issue, but we do. We are much more experienced than them on this. Of course, we also used some tactics. In the document submitted to the Israeli Electric Corporation for approval, the commissioning schedule follows the ‘manufacturing enterprise’s standard’, with no mention of Chinese standards at all. But we all know that the manufacturer’s standard is written based on Chinese standards, because this manufacturer has produced many of their units in China for years. Their enterprise standards have already internalized Chinese standards.
Ashkenazi’s supportive attitude originated partially from his role as an independent certified engineer employed by the Chinese SOE but also from his daily experiences working closely with Chinese engineers on site. In general, among Israeli and European engineers representing all parties, the closer and more frequently they worked together with their Chinese counterparts on site, facing various unexpected engineering problems, the more they accepted Chinese processes and reflected on their own practices. With professional recognition from their local counterparts, the Chinese engineers became more confident, and their narratives about conflicts and compromises significantly changed. In 2022, many Chinese engineers felt that they were now negotiating based on reason more often than immediately compromising, which they deemed ‘useless . . . the more you compromise, the less respect you earn from them’. Instead, they tried to start a dialogue on an equal footing in order to move the project forward.
However, even though personal attitudes on both the Israeli and Chinese sides changed as the project progressed, institutional and authoritative presumptions of Chinese standards were hard to overcome within the construction period of this particular project. It took over a year for the owner’s and contractors’ engineers to obtain Israeli Electric Corporation’s approval on the programme of commissioning tests.
Ultimately, most standards controversies on site were more complicated than simple technicalities. The outcome of standards negotiation depended on engineers’ specialization (design or construction), occupational positions (contractor, independent, and certified, or client/local authority engineers), and cultural and national backgrounds. In the problem-solving process, technological problems intersected with legal, commercial, institutional, and geopolitical concerns, while trust and innovation coexisted with suspicion and prejudice. As Jenson demonstrated in the context of Danish healthcare system standardization, ‘standards do not simply fall from on high and land in local practices without problems’.36 Indeed, it was in the slippage from the contract’s stipulated ideal standards to the messy realities of on-site work that Chinese standards came to be approved or rejected for application. Thus local certified engineers, as gatekeepers of two professional systems, played crucial roles in accepting or rejecting Chinese engineering knowledge, particularly from a liability perspective.
No successors: Engineers as standard bearers
In June 2022, the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese contractor organized online training on international engineering project management. Some engineers shared the training material and their experiences with the first author. The online course was delivered by the previous company leader (who visited this PSH site in 2017). In a section titled ‘Chinese Standards or International Standards’, the speaker explained that the national leaders had set the tone for ‘Chinese standards going abroad’ as ‘accepting international rules and standards first’ in an inner summit with Chinese international engineering companies: Introduce rules and standards that are generally supported by all parties, and promote enterprises in project construction, operation, procurement, bidding, and other aspects in accordance with generally accepted international rules and standards, while respecting the laws and regulations of each country.
As Xiong pointed out, Chinese engineers’ experiences with standards setting is not a singular contemporary phenomenon. In the 1980s and 1990s, when Japan was the leading non-Western economic power, Japanese contractors accounted for nearly 20 per cent of the global construction market.37 They spent great effort to export Japanese engineering standards at that time,38 with no lasting effect. In Xiong’s explanation, this is partially because Japan’s technical expertise was not backed up by a domestic manufacturing industry covering the whole-industry chain. In fact, Japan’s knowledge spillover to the United States in the manufacturing industry in the 1990s significantly benefited from direct investment in the United States on R&D of certain products.39 ‘This is one of the lessons we have learned’, Xiong concluded, ‘and also something that differentiates Chinese companies from Japanese companies. Today even the European manufacturer’s manufacturing base is in China.’
However, this manufacturing capability is not enough to facilitate the export of Chinese engineering standards on this project. Yao, the deputy chief design engineer on civil work, who has had ‘hundreds of meetings and quarrels’ with European and Israeli engineers since 2017, said that his work priorities in 2022, near the project’s completion, finally turned from solving specific problems to a more general ‘standardization’ regarding standards application. He reflected, ‘I’m trying to extract the expertise and experience from the context of this particular project, so that future engineers can use it as standardized knowledge on other projects in other countries.’ Like many other Chinese engineers, Yao does not expect to see Chinese standards exported to the Western engineering market in the near future. ‘At least not in my career time’, he said, ‘but we can prepare something for the next generation. The standardization work I’m doing now will let them know what to do when they face a similar situation.’
However, Yao also worried about the practical applications of such standardization: ‘When [young engineers] try to apply the abstract knowledge back in some specific contexts, they might have big problems due to a lack of actual experiences on site.’ According to Yao and many middle-aged Chinese engineers, they faced the serious situation of ‘having no successors’. The willingness of younger Chinese engineers (aged 20–30) to work on international projects has decreased dramatically compared to a decade ago. Several young people have resigned from this PSH project. Those who did not quit were assigned to other domestic engineering projects; occasionally, they transferred to other countries after gaining some experience in this project. Among the 20 design engineers, Yao was the only one to stay from the beginning to the end. He shared his feelings about this: We often joked that to make Chinese standards ‘go abroad’, we have to wait for the old generation of engineers who are too loyal to Western standards, like those we have met on this project, to leave the stage of history. But, in fact, we [Chinese engineers] might have no people left on the stage even before that.
Sharon Traweek depicted how high-energy physicists’ professional and personal lives were driven by anxiety and fear of limited access to the scientific machines and limited chances of scientific discovery.41 These findings resonate with Star and Lampland’s argument that standards, like many other technical devices, often prescribe certain values that have great consequences for individuals.42 In this project, Chinese engineers faced an even more difficult situation. ‘We have to sacrifice [family time] because it wasn’t us who chose this life, it was the company, and the state [who] chose us!’, Zhang, the procurement engineer, joked with a bitter smile. Such a ‘standardized’ sacrifice is driving younger engineers away from the project. It appears that the engineers are not only creators and practitioners but also carriers of standards. Whether Chinese standards will have a continuous impact on global PSH engineering depends, in part, on the life and career choices of Chinese engineers.
Discussion and conclusion: Relative standards and infrastructure experimentations
The narratives of Chinese engineers regarding their struggles and achievements in introducing Chinese standards to the PSH project directly address the question raised by scholars in engineering and management studies: how do participants from non-Western countries navigate the differences between native and international standards when entering global markets? Our study addressed this question within the framework of science and technology studies, examining what happens when knowledge flows across technological, institutional, and geopolitical borders on a pumped storage hydropower project site. This question is not only relevant to the complex and challenging situations faced by engineers on this project, but also to the essential goals of the BRI.
As a more recent entrant to the global economic stage, China’s engineering standards are not authorized explicitly by contract documents but often manage to ‘leak’ into the project in practice. The extensive pushback that Chinese engineers meet when they introduce Chinese standards into construction practices and theoretical discussions reveals that the dominance of Western knowledge hinders the incorporation of knowledge from other parts of the world.
Even though Chinese standards might have been better suited in some cases, they are not the preferred choice at the institutional or authoritative level. The reason can be partly attributed to the fact that in certain industries, Chinese foreign investment and the export of standards are strongly influenced by the goals and objectives set by the state, such as increasing market share and competitiveness.43 Additionally, as the Chinese engineers in this study critically noted, the prevailing efficiency-oriented principle in Chinese engineering practices made it more difficult for Chinese standards to gain trust, despite their suitability. As Bowker and Star have observed, standards rarely win simply because they are the best technologically; instead, adoption depends on pre-established authorities, market trends, cultural and historical precedents, and similar factors.44
According to the International Energy Agency, hydropower is ‘an essential foundation for transitions’ in part because it plays a load-balancing role for variable or intermittent renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.45 The International Energy Agency notes that pumped storage hydropower in particular is now the most common ‘grid-scale’ storage technology in the world. China is emerging as a new global climate change mitigation contributor through the deployment of and investment in renewable energy and pumped storage hydropower.46 It is already leading in renewable energy production figures,47 and Chinese engineering standards in this field are developing and evolving through numerous project-based experiences and state-coordinated standardization efforts. In contrast, as many Chinese engineers claimed, the European and American engineering standards, most of which originate from private standards, have been updated very slowly and even remain similar to those of the 1950s. However, state-coordinated standards, no matter how advanced, must be approved by individual certified engineers prior to their application in a project in a Western country. In these circumstances, we suggest that when the updated standards from a non-Western country meet the old standards from Western institutions, the conflicts surrounding standards practice reflect collisions between the infrastructural centre and peripheries of the transition to renewable energy.
The global shift towards renewable energy sources requires updating or replacing current infrastructure through significant national and transnational efforts that involve various political, technical, economic, social, and ethical decisions. This infrastructure transition requires careful planning in a political and economic landscape that is still dominated by major industrial players in the West and a technological field that has not yet established unified key technologies and is increasingly seeing a variety of decentralized local initiatives and innovations.48 By viewing engineering standards as a knowledge infrastructure at the intersection of politics, economics, and sociotechnology, we analysed this particular PSH project as an experimental site of global energy transition. Our findings showed that although the Western, principle-based, privately derived ‘international’ engineering knowledge at the centre was difficult to challenge at the authoritative and institutional levels, individual engineers were able to renegotiate in practice and produce new patents, work methods, and cultural understandings of each other. Practice-based, state-mediated engineering standards from knowledge peripheries, in this case, China, were subtly introduced (through approval or rejection) into a project that mainly adopted established international standards from Western countries, thus contributing to engineering knowledge innovation. Such innovations are an essential part of the renewable transition.
As this PSH project and BRI itself are an ongoing experimental process, it is currently difficult to predict the outcome, but our research findings indicated that the gap in engineering between central, principle-based knowledge and peripheral, practiced-based knowledge is being reduced, and that relationships between multinational engineers and standards are being reconfigured in a less hierarchical way. Looking to the future, this changing infrastructure may affect future renewable energy production practices beyond the local level. As Penelope Harvey et al. have argued, there is a recursive relationship between infrastructure, culture, economics, and politics.49 Similar to Japan’s growing economic dominance in the 1980s, we are seeing an increasing international adoption of Chinese standards, as Chinese firms, guided by national policies and international initiatives such as the BRI, are capturing a larger market share of renewable energy projects around the world.50 But the sustainability of such adoption of Chinese standards is still questionable.
Bowker and Star have argued that standards have significant inertia and can be difficult to change,51 while Jensen demonstrated that standardization actively transforms relationships, thus changing actors’ identities, organizations’ structures, and work forms, and is reshaped by these changes in turn.52 This research not only responds to both arguments, but also further suggests that at the institutional and authoritative level, standards and the associated knowledge hierarchy are difficult to change; yet at the individual and practice level, standards can be dynamic and innovative processes. It has broadened the significance of single BRI projects to an experimentation of global renewable infrastructure transformation with increasing Chinese influence and lasting Western domination of engineering standards. Such experimentation was not initiated by state-sponsored propaganda or macro geopolitical gaming but by Chinese engineers’ standards practice on the ground in specific places. Moreover, such infrastructure experimentation may have consequences that cut across the economic, political, and organizational domains, therefore remaining mostly invisible to traditional single-discipline analysis. This research, therefore, introduces an experimental and interdisciplinary perspective to empirically examine BRI and Chinese standards ‘going global’ in the energy and infrastructure industry.
Our findings also showed that in BRI projects, Chinese engineers’ personal lives were intertwined with the application of standards. Their worries about the unsustainable future of Chinese standards ‘going global’ were also derived from their current life situations. While scholars consider the BRI and global energy transformation to be grand initiatives, it is also crucial to attend to local narratives from engineers and other actors at the centre of knowledge production. The collisions, negotiations, and compromises around engineering standards are an important part of the story of the current energy transition.
