Irrigated Area Figures as Bureaucratic Construction of Knowledge: The Case of China

This is a cautionary tale regarding the generation and use of irrigation statistics, given their intrinsic problems of measurement and their bureaucratic construction. China has one of the world's largest irrigated areas, and probably its most intensively measured. Here the author explores the problems of measuring irrigated area, the principal categories used in China, the agencies that issue data and their probable biases and the difficulties of interpreting increases and decreases in irrigated area in any meaningful way. The author uses the purported decline in irrigated area in the 1980s and its recovery in the 1990s to illustrate these difficulties in interpretation.