Corporations, Governments, and Socioenvironmental Policy in China: China's Water Machine as Assemblage

Abstract

The standard approach to China's environmental management, fragmented authoritarianism, assumes the existence of state, corporations, farmers, and consumers. New social actors now populate the Chinese landscape, however. One such actor is the network we call the China water machine; others comprise the networks and coalitions that oppose the China water machine's operations. These actors play out their operations and conflicts within socioenvironmental regions like Yunnan. All three (China water machine, oppositional groups, and socioenvironmental regions) are interpreted as assemblages. After contrasting assemblage and the hydrosocial cycle, the article demonstrates how assemblage theory can guide empirical research, by describing the emergence of the China water machine, its membership, and its effects. This machine involves corporations, universities, international institutions, and arms of the government, tasked with identifying and framing what are water management issues, formulating standardized procedures for tackling those issues, and then constructing solutions. These cooperative activities of government and other actors cannot be identified as “Chinese,” as they partly depend on institutions and corporations domiciled outside China; together they render the standard theory incomplete.

研究中国环境治理的标准取径——破碎的威权主义——预设了国家、企业、农民和消费者的存在。但今日新的社会行动者已遍布中国。此般行动者之一, 便是我们称之为 “中国水务机器” 的网络; 其他则包含了反对中国水务机器运作的网络与联盟。这些行动者在诸如云南的社会环境区域中运作并产生冲突。这三大网络 (中国的水务机器、反对的群体, 以及社会环境区域) 皆被诠释为凑组。对照凑组与水文社会循环之后, 本文透过描绘中国水务机器的浮现、其成员关系与影响, 展现凑组理论如何能够为经验研究作出指引。此一包括企业、大学、跨国机构与政府部门的机器, 被赋予指认并框架何谓水资源管理议题的责任、形构应对这些议题的标准化过程, 接着建立解决方案。这些政府与其他行动者的合作行动, 不能被指认为 “中国的”, 因其部分仰赖来自中国外部的机构与企业; 它们共同让标准化理论显得不够完整。

El enfoque corriente en relación con el manejo ambiental de China, el autoritarismo fragmentado, asume la existencia del estado, las corporaciones, agricultores y consumidores. Sin embargo, ahora el paisaje chino está poblado con nuevos actores sociales. Uno de esos actores es la red que nosotros denominamos la máquina del agua de China; otros están constituidos por las redes y coaliciones que se oponen a las operaciones de esa máquina del agua. Tales actores ponen en juego sus operaciones y conflictos dentro de regiones socioambientales, como Yunnan. Todos estos tres (la máquina del agua de China, los grupos opositores y las regiones socioambientales) se interpretan como ensamblajes. Luego de contrastar el ensamblaje con el ciclo hidrosocial, el artículo demuestra cómo la teoría del ensamble puede guiar la investigación empírica, describiendo la aparición de la máquina del agua de China, su membresía y sus efectos. Esta máquina involucra corporaciones, universidades, instituciones internacionales y ramas del gobierno, encargadas de identificar y enmarcar los asuntos propios del manejo del agua, formular procedimientos estandarizados para afrontar esos asuntos, para luego construir soluciones. Estas actividades cooperativas del gobierno con otros actores no pueden identificarse como “chinas”, ya que dependen parcialmente de instituciones y corporaciones domiciliadas fuera de China; en conjunto, lo que ellas hacen es dejar incompleta la teoría estándar.

Key Words:

• assemblage
• China
• hydrosocial cycle
• network
• water management

关键词：:

• 凑组
• 中国
• 水文社会循环
• 网络
• 水治理。

Palabras clave:

• ensamblaje
• China
• ciclo hidrosocial
• red
• administración del agua

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Jon Barnett, Eric Sheppard, Sophie Webber, and the anonymous reviewers, who provided valuable comments on earlier drafts.

Funding

The authors acknowledge the support of Australian Research Council for Discovery Project Grant DP110103381.

Notes

1. We could call the machine a coalition (as Han [2013] does) or an apparatus. Machine points to the real, productive effects of this network, analogous to the real, productive effects of the machinic assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) or the antipolitics machine (Ferguson 1990).

2. Broadly, in environmental management, the central government sets goals and policy, allocates budgets, and lays out procedures for implementing policy. Province-level governments make concrete plans and budgets for implementation by prefectures and counties. The actual monitoring and controlling of the operations of water users and polluters is the responsibility of the lowest levels of government in this hierarchy. If local governments are lax, the central government relies on province or prefecture governments to bring them into line; all government leaders below the central government have performance targets, in which a critical component is growth of gross domestic product. Webber et al. (2008) explained this system in more detail.

3. We follow de Landa's (2006) reinterpretation of Deleuze and Guattari (1987); see also de Landa (2002) and Bonta and Protevi (2004). An introduction was provided by Shapiro (2007). In the terms of Brenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth (2011), we are ontological assemblage thinkers—assemblage is the way of being of things in the world. Brenner and colleagues contrasted this approach with assemblage as a particular type of research object (loose, provisional coalitions of actors) and with assemblage as methodology (pointing to the role of nonhumans in the construction of the social world). “Assemblage” is increasingly used in geography (Anderson et al. 2012). It emphasizes the labor involved in assembling social and material practices that are diffuse; it points to the agency of a collective, rather than an organic whole; and it recognizes that assemblages are provisional (Anderson and McFarlane 2011). The term implies a less-than-organized collection of disparate actors united for specific purposes or interests—governing a UK region (Allen and Cochrane 2007), master-planning a Sydney urban development site (McGuirk and Dowling 2009), or moving policies between places (McCann 2011; Pow 2014). This use of “assemblage”—as particular kinds of things (a provisional collective of disparate actors) rather than the way of being of everything in the world—is distinct from the philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and de Landa.

4. This invention has to be replicated for every environmental object whenever analyses are based on relations of interiority. Accounts of social forests would need to posit “original trees” and “trees” (after they had passed through a social process); accounts of beaches would need to posit “original beaches” and “beaches” (after humans had acted on them). The confusion is avoided if interactions are based on relations of exteriority and properties are distinguished from capacities. Water is water, but its capacity to carry commodity relations depends on the properties of the other components in the assemblage it belongs to.

5. Ontological realism is the claim that what things are in the world and how they behave are mind-independent: They exist independent of their being known or even knowable (Jenkins 2005, 2010).

6. These lists are not scalar or hierarchical for, except in trivial cases (e.g., streamlets to streams), these are neither movements from prior to subsequent nor from less to more complex: Organizations, such as corporations, might belong to networks, such as an industry association; and some things, such as corporations, might belong to many different kinds of assemblage, such as a network (industry association), socioenvironmental regions (e.g., Yunnan and Guangdong), and the population of regions that comprises a country. In assemblage thinking, scale is complex and things operate within many different scales.

7. Global production networks (Yeung and Coe 2015) and actor networks (Latour 2005; Muller 2015) are also assemblages.

8. A collection of firms with specific characteristics (producing wood products, say—the “wood industry”) is not an assemblage, nor is a taxonomic region, such as “the Rust Belt.”

9. An analysis of the reasons for this transformation of the state-owned enterprises provides a means of linking this analysis of assemblage to questions of external forces and structure or agency. The China water machine belongs to other assemblages, such as Yunnan and China; within the China assemblage, institutions like the State Council drive approaches to macroeconomic policy, such as corporatization of state enterprises, that set the conditions under which the China water machine was formed and flourished. This is power “onto” the machine. Within the machine, members have different capacities to influence others—power “within” the machine.

10. The institutes are Hydraulic Structures Engineering, River Engineering and Research, Geotechnical Engineering, Hydrology and Water Resources, Hydraulics, and Hydraulic Engineering Design; its ninety-nine faculty members and staff include seven academicians (www.tsinghua.edu.cn). The Department is colocated with the Departments of Civil Engineering and Construction Management in the School of Civil Engineering.

11. The core school of the University, the School of Water Resources, together with the Schools of Electric Power, Resources and Environment, Civil Engineering, and Environmental and Municipal Engineering, offers forty-two undergraduate and thirty-one graduate programs about water management.

12. It has more than forty PhD students and 100 master's students.

13. Here is another form of cross-scalar effect.

14. Again, we could be led into analysis of external forces were we to pursue an analysis of World Bank ideologies about water management and competitive tendering.

15. On the one hand, these linkages depend on postwar developments in communications and transport technologies; on the other hand, they are one component of the system of “fast policy”—the growing transnational connectivity of policymaking arenas (Peck and Theodore 2015).

16. We have not discussed here approaches to water that are labeled “hydropolitics” or “technopolitics.” These represent a sensibility to, rather than a theory of, social reality: the sensibility that the choice of technologies of water management is political and that the technologies of water management in turn have political effects. Webber, Crow-Miller, and Rogers (2017) applied this idea to water management in China.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Webber

MICHAEL WEBBER is Professor Emeritus in the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include economic development and water management in China.

Xiao Han

XIAO HAN is a doctoral candidate in the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests focus on the China dam construction industry and its activities overseas.