The politics of water in rural China: a review of English-language scholarship

Abstract

Politics is about access and power, and access to freshwater resources in rural China is complicated and understudied. China's massive size and diverse climate make it hard to generalize about freshwater resources in rural areas of the country. On balance, China is not water-scarce, yet geographic and temporal variations in water availability are dramatic, with China's driest areas receiving far less precipitation than the wettest areas. Rural areas are the locus of competition among freshwater users including agriculture, power companies, industry, households and ecosystems. Additionally, while peasants may hold usage rights (not title) to farmland, it is not a given that they will hold rights to water that will guarantee the productivity of that farmland in areas where precipitation is low. Finally, water quality is, unfortunately, an increasingly important factor affecting the availability of ‘fresh’ water, as is evident in the notion of quality-induced scarcity (shuizhixing queshui). This contribution reviews a small but important body of scholarship on rural water politics in China, identifying existing themes and suggesting new directions where scholarship is currently lacking.

Keywords:

• water resources
• water politics
• rural water use
• hydropower
• water pollution
• irrigation
• agriculture

I am grateful to my undergraduate research assistant, Ms. Kexun Sun, and to The Henry Luce Foundation for its support of the Asian Environmental Studies Initiative at my institution, Hobart and William Smith Colleges. All errors are, of course, mine alone.

Notes

¹Pinyin: guodu chouqu. To abstract water is to extract it from an underground or surface source and convey it to some point of use.

²See Office of the South-North Water Diversion (n.d.). As of 23 March 2012, completion of the eastern and central routes was expected in 283 days and 19 months, respectively.

³Yangtze (Chang), Yellow (Huang), Zhu, Songhua, Huai, Hai and Liao Rivers. The report is based on data from 408 monitoring stations on 203 rivers in seven major basins.

⁴See Greenpeace (n.d.).

⁵These articles are from a special issue of The International Journal for Water Resources Development devoted to water rights questions in China.

⁶This is not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, of course. The Colorado River in the western United States traverses seven US states before passing through a small section of northwestern Mexico. Yet the US failed to address the allocation of water to Mexico until nearly 20 years after establishment of the Colorado River Compact, which divided an overly generous estimate of the river's flow among the seven states alone.

⁷The article actually states 420 GW as the 2020 target, but that figure includes 350 GW of traditional hydropower and 70 GW of pumped storage hydropower.

⁸First published in Chinese in 1999 as Zhongguo Shui Weiji by China Environmental Sciences Publishing House.

⁹See Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (n.d.).

¹⁰Walker (2010) details this dynamic in the case of Minamata Disease (mercury poisoning) in Japan.

Additional information

Darrin Magee is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Asian Environmental Studies Initiative at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. A specialist on environmental issues in China, he has lived and worked in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. His research and teaching address water, energy and waste issues, including large-scale hydropower and other water infrastructure. He is also a Fellow for Rocky Mountain Institute's ‘Reinventing fire: China’ Project.