https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1717-6777
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ABSTRACT
Central China’s Danjiangkou Reservoir supplies clean water to major cities as part of the South–North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP). Fencing is presented as essential to establishing borders, controls, and authority over the water reservoir and surrounding areas that were previously settled lands. Drawing on Tania Li’s work, as well as work by geographers and anthropologists on the contested production of the state and the border through practice, we focus on the mundane engagements and material practices of a range of actors with this state-led development to illustrate how even state lines that seem natural, and are used to justify or facilitate the massive resettlement and landscape reorganization, also require ongoing construction and engagement. While fencing is presented as part of establishing pristine first class water quality, our research shows that fences have failed, been crossed and are constantly negotiated. We contend that to unravel the apparent solidity of fencing technologies, they should be understood as an interface, one that is under constant negotiation and reconfiguration and that in practice requires the work of a range of actors. In considering these engagements, we contribute to a burgeoning literature critically examining the state in China.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank our colleagues from the Changjiang Water Resources Commission Research Institute for their generosity and insight. The paper and our research in China also benefitted from the broader China research team at the University of Melbourne and our ongoing, productive discussions – this includes Michael Webber, Jiang Min, Zhao Yue, Zhen Nahui, Han Xiao, Shi Chenchen, Jiang Hong, Ian Rutherfurd and Jon Barnett. We thank John Zinda, Zhang Wenjing and Zali Fung for reviewing an earlier draft of this paper. We are grateful for the work by Jiang Hong to create a map of what is a complex and dynamic area. We also very much thank the residents who took time to speak with us about fences, farming and life around Danjiangkou.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 As a drinking water reservoir, Danjiangkou is accompanied by a proscribed area or ‘buffer zone’ within which access has been restricted; we discuss the details of how it is defined below.
2 We refer to practices of bordering here because the line-drawing and boundary-making of the state project is an inherently territorial one advanced by state authorities. However, we recognize that the terms ‘borders and boundaries’ have overlap (as the Encyclopedia of Geography entry suggests).
3 A fences and fines approach to conservation is also referred to as ‘conservation and control’ and ‘fortress conservation’.
4 While ‘relatively limited’ in China, political ecology has provided ‘an important alternative framework with which to critically scrutinize China’s human–environment relations’ (Yeh, Citation2015, p. 619). Yeh’s review included work in English and in Chinese, although she notes that the literature in Chinese is limited to a few articles (p. 620).
5 Key concerns of this literature have included state capacity and central–local government relations (Chung, Citation1995; Lu, Citation1997; Zhong, Citation2003), the party–state’s institutional resilience and adaptation (Shambaugh, Citation2008), and cycles of fiscal decentralization and recentralization (Wong, Citation1991; Whiting, Citation2001; Tsui & Wang, Citation2004; Landry, Citation2008). For those focused on ‘society’, there are long traditions of scholarship on peasant–cadre relations, protest and other forms of resistance, that also adopt a state/society binary (Siu, Citation1989; So, Citation2007).
6 This included visits to and observations of water treatment plants, government water quality monitoring sites, villages with pollution control demonstration projects, and several villages in the buffer zone where agribusinesses were now managing orchards or other plantations.
7 We now know that this project is the source reservoir for the SNWTP, but at the time the original aim was flood control. The Danjiangkou Dam was proposed to create a water reservoir for flood control after downstream flooding on the Han River. There was no power generation in original plans (Chen, Citation2014).
8 While the aim is first class or ‘Class I’ water quality, this can vary across different parts of the project. We understand that ‘Class I’ is achieved by the time water reaches the Taocha canal head and surrounds (10 km) while ‘Class II’ is more common at the reservoir.
9 One agribusiness owner told us that the people who were resettled left lots of rubbish around the village. It was ‘very dirty’ (20 July 2019).
10 Some of these local bureaus are named, for instance, ‘Reservoir Resettlement Management Bureau’ as more directly linked to resettlement. In our case, it is Reservoir Assets and Resources Management Development Bureau. These bureaus would be removed after the reservoir construction is completed and/or reservoir assets/resources management issues have become routine and they can easily be handled/taken over by department of water resource management (under the Water Resources Bureau).
11 As an interviewee explained, even as authorities from the County Reservoir Assets and Resources Management Development Bureau visit the buffer zone daily to inspect activities, we were told ‘they have no authority to handle anything, just write a notification’ (20 July 2019). We did not encounter anyone who was fined or had been reported to party secretary, but many who admitted to farming small plots or ignorance of rules, that they were simply farming ‘their land’ (as discussed further below).
12 Mu is a unit of land measurement in China equivalent to 666.5 m2. At present, 1 RMB = US$0.157.
13 The Yangtze River Water Conservancy Commission is the river basin authority, operating under the Ministry of Water Resources, for the Yangtze River and tributaries.