Sciences Po
PSIA – Paris School of International Affairs
Master in Environment Policy
Is the South-North Diversion Project Justified?
An investigation into the limitations and possibilities for water management in Northern China
Marina Lou
Master’s Thesis supervised by StéphanieBalme
Academic year 2013/2014
The copyright of this Master's thesis remains the property of its author. No part of the content may be reproduced, published, distributed, copied or stored for public or private use without written permission of the author. All authorisation requests should be sent to [email protected]
ABSTRACT
This paper is an inquiry into both the context and the subtext of the largest water management project in human history, the South to North Water Transfer Project. Contextually, this paper will highlight that the critical level of water scarcity in the Northern region, the risk of social instability due to increasing water reallocation from the agricultural to the industrial sector, and the CCP’s limited demand-side policy options, have made such a project an attractive option for relieving the Northern Regions of its water shortage problems. Subtextually, China’s cultural reverence for water has politicized its rivers for centuries; thereby creating an arena where managing the waters through hydraulic projects is an attractive option which serves to legitimate the State’s exercise of power.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing this thesis has been a humbling lesson in the kindness of strangers, and of loved ones.
First and foremost, it would not have been possible without the support and patience of my supervisor, Professor StéphanieBalme, whose calmness and logical mind guided me through the winding road of discovering the world of Chinese water governance.
Second, the generosity and kindness of Professor UpmanuLallhas given me the unbelievably fortunate opportunity to study as a Visiting Scholar at the Columbia University, and enjoy the immensely intellectual community of the Water Centre, at the Earth Institute. His feedback and prompts as I studied the hydrological circumstance of China has made the writing of this thesis an even more enriching experience.
Throughout the writing of this thesis, I have been indebted to many researchers for their guidance in data analysis and collection. In particular Mr Xi Chen, MrQianjin Dong and Mr Errol Lloyd. Mr Lloyd has been especially kind with his time and his technical expertise, forwhich I am deeply grateful.
Finally, for my mother and father, for believing in the old Chinese adage that one must move to find oneself.I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1 ...... 8
I. Introduction ...... 8 A. Background ...... 9 B. Approach ...... 10 C. Chapter Summaries ...... 11
Chapter 2 ...... 13
II. Setting the Scene: Water Scarcity in China ...... 13 A. The National Context ...... 14 B. Huang, Hai and Huai River Basins ...... 17 1) Spatial water risk ...... 18 2) Temporal water risk ...... 19 3) Groundwater depletion ...... 21 4) Scarcity coupled with Pollution and Wastage ...... 23 C. New Water Distribution Risks ...... 24 D. Impacts of Water Shortage ...... 29 E. South-North Diversion Project...... 32 F. Concluding Remarks ...... 35
Chapter 3 ...... 36
III. Governing the Waters ...... 36 A. Water as a Common Pool Resource...... 37 1) Common Pool Resources for the Chinese Communist Party ...... 37 B. Framework of Water Governance ...... 41 1) Legal and Political Context ...... 41 2) Market Mechanisms for Water Savings...... 45 3) Political Tools: Cadre System ...... 47 C. Limits to Legislative Governance ...... 49 1) Horizontal and Vertical Fragmentation ...... 50 Horizontal Fragmentation ...... 51 Vertical Fragmentation ...... 53 2) Lack of Enforcement...... 56 3) Water Cadres...... 58
4 D. Limits to Market Mechanisms...... 61 1) Lack of Institutional Reforms ...... 61 2) Water’s Price Inelasticity...... 64 E. Some Reflections ...... 66
Chapter 4 ...... 68
IV. Culture(s) of Water...... 68 A. Introduction to a Cultural Vantage Point...... 69 1) Culture, culture, everywhere...... 69 2) Methodology...... 72 B. CCP’s Hydraulic Projects ...... 75 C. Water in Chinese Culture ...... 78 1) Water in Confucianism and Daoism...... 79 2) Water in Mythology...... 82 3) Water for Technocrats...... 88 Value of Labour in Marxism ...... 89 Mao’s Education Reforms...... 90 Rise of Engineers post-Mao...... 92 Technocrats’ Rule over Resources...... 94
Chapter 5 ...... 96
V. Conclusion: No Other Way but South-North...... 96
Bibliography...... 100
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FIGURES
FIGURE 1. CHINA’S WATER BASINS 15 FIGURE 2. WATER BASIN RESOURCES AND POPULATION DATA 16 FIGURE 3. MULTIYEAR SPATIAL MODELING OF WATER DEFICIT IN CHINA 21 FIGURE 4 : TOTAL WATER DEMAND IN THE 3H BASIN 25 FIGURE 5 : CHANGE IN INDUSTRIAL ALLOCATION AND USE IN THE 3H BASIN 25 FIGURE 6: CHANGE IN AGRICULTURAL ALLOCATION AND USE IN THE 3H BASIN 25 FIGURE 7: DISTRIBUTION OF COAL IN CHINA 27 FIGURE 8: ROUTES FOR THE DIVERSION PROJECT 33 FIGURE 9. HORIZONTAL FRAGMENTATION IN WATER MANAGEMENT 51 FIGURE 10. DIFFERENT WATER QUALITY RESULTS 53 FIGURE 11. VERTICAL FRAGMENTATION IN WATER MANAGEMENT 54 FIGURE 12. SEPARATE RESPONSIBILITIES OF EACH LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT 54 FIGURE 13. HISTORY OF WATER PROJECTS FUNDING 76
TABLES
TABLE 1: 12 TH FIVE YEAR PLAN TARGETS FOR WATER 44 TABLE 2. CHINA’S PRICING PRINCIPLE 1985 45 TABLE 3. HISTORY OF ECONOMIC POLICIES FOR WATER 46 TABLE 4. AVERAGE COST OF WATER (YUAN/CUBIC METRE) 47 TABLE 5. MYTHS IN SEMIOLOGY 1 TABLE 6: DAMS COMPLETED BETWEEN 1949-72 75
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“The best way to conduct oneself may be observed in the behavior of water. When given a place to wait, it fills that place by taking the shape of what it contains, its upper surface poised and level, absorbing, accepting what it can as lightly or heavily as it does itself. If pressed down, it will offer back in all directions everything it was given. If chilled, it will shatter daylight and whiten to stars, will harden and sharpen and turn unforeseeably dazzling. Neglected, it will disappear, being transformed and lifted into air. Or thrown away, it will gather with other water, which is all one water, and rise and fall, re-gather and go on rising and falling the more quickly its path descends and the more slowly as it wears the path away. To be left a while, to stir for the moon, to wait for the wind to begin again.”
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“若水章第八上善若水。水善利萬物而不爭，處眾人之所惡，故幾於道。居善 地，心善淵，與善仁，言善信，政善治，事善能，動善時。夫唯不爭，故無 尤” 《道德經》, 老子
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CHAPTER 1
I. INTRODUCTION
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A. Background
Life derives from water, this much is unmistakable. Humans have depended
on water for nurture and transport for thousands of years, and as Lao Zi teaches us,
water unites and divides us, it can be both limiting and expansive, and its
transformative ability to exists in solid, liquid and gaseous states makes it unique as
a resource. Indeed, his metaphysical words aptly illustrate the centrality of water
which transcends social and behavioral-stratas and captures in its essence, a
fundamental question for humanity: how does an individual live amongst society.
In the context of governance, this uniqueness has led to complicated implications
for decision makersvis-à-vis management of common pool resources.The diverse
and often competing uses of water can be the source of conflicts and tensions
(Grover, 2007) as its governance lie at the nexus of multifarious disciplines.
Historically, managing water quality and availability for China’s large
population has always been challenging for its rulers. In the coming decades, there
will be a new horizon of challenges that its decision makers must face. Currently
China has 20 percent of the world’s population but only 7 percent of its fresh water.
Though in the 1950s the country had 50,000 rivers with catchment areas of 100
square kilometres or more, it is estimated that now, the number of rivers has been
reduced by more than half, to 23,000(Economist 2013). In the coming decades, the
country’s ever-expanding populationwill inevitably increase the pressure on
waterresources in order tomeet fromnew demand for food, energy and land.
Additionally,pressed against this,is the overwhelmingthreat of climate change,
which is predicted to make supply of waterincreasingly less reliable due to
frequency in extreme weather changes such as droughts and increase in localized
9 ambient water temperature(Nijssen & O’Donnel 2001; Nijssen et al. 2001).The complexity of the hydrological system and the heterogeneity of the actors that participate in water use in China makewater management a diabolical policy question.
B. Approach
The enormity of the problem cannot be captured by one paper alone. Indeed,
the territory covered by this paper has already been partially charted by four genres
of scholarly literature, which extensively overlap my efforts. The central concern of
water stress in China has been the subject of many hydrological studies and climate
modeling by hydrologists and engineers(Nijssen et al. 2001; Fischer et al. 2007; Shi
2013; Dan et al. 2012; Chen et al. 2013).Social scientists and legal scholars have
developed the question of common pool resource management and legislative
efforts for its regulation, while discussion on economic market based approaches to
distributing water resources has taken place in economic journals for many years
now(Zhong & Mol 2009, 2008; Wu 2011; Briscoe 2011).While the present paper
has benefited greatly from the work of previous scholars in these fields, who have
done tremendous work in rationalizing how water management has developed and
could be further improved in China, my research agenda hopes to bring these
aspects of study together in order to understand a new question: Is the South-North
Diversion Project justified for China? Can China’s plan to construct large water
engineering projects be explained by the regulatory context and the cultural subtext
for water management, particular to the nation?
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C. Chapter Summaries
Rivers are like stories. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. In between, they flow. Or they would flow, if we let them. This paper will seek to tell the story of water management in China,through three dimensions, beginning with setting the scene in:
Chapter 2: Setting the Scene, Northern China’s water scarcity. Hydrological data and modeling for China’s three northern water basins (the Huang, Hai and Huai river basins) will illustrate that water resources are most urgently stressed in these areas. Additionally, thegrowing competition for water supply between Northern
China’s industrial and agricultural sectors has led to increasing reallocation of water from the agricultural sector to the industrial sector.Fresh water supply shortage andsocial implications will be the focal point through which water management will be analyzed, which helps explain in part, why the South-North Diversion Project has been put into place.
Chapter 3: Governing the Waters , will discuss the current institutional arrangements for water management in China, and investigate the complexities and fragmentation therein. The Chinese government, being well aware of the water shortage problems in the Northern Basins, have instigated a plethora of legislative, political and economic initiatives to better manage the waters in the past decades, which has had limited success. It will be the argued that the South-to-North Water
Diversion project is the inevitable solution to an impossible management problem arising from the complexity of the Chinese polity and its contradictions within.
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Chapter 4: The Stories of Water, analyzing the narratives that govern waters in China. In Chapter 4,the subtext of the current system of water governance will be
explored. The stories of water and its development in the consciousness of the
Chinese political system, the idea of water management in the context of the culture
of water will be investigated, with consideration of China’s historic folklore
together with its culture of political-technocrats. It will be argued that the cultural
idea of water is ever interplayed and interchanged with the environmental reality
ofmanaging the complexities of water as a resource. Works of mythology, folklore
and history have elevated the position of ‘water’ in Chinese consciousness, and
highly politicized the idea of managing the rivers. This is then further enforced by
the creation of a technocratic society post-Cultural Revolution, which naturally
favoured engineering solutions. Thus, the culture of ‘big project’ solutions for water
management in China is both reinforced by its history and technocratic society, and
perpetuated by the complexity of managing a common pool resource under a
fragmented authoritarian system, discussed above.
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CHAPTER 2
II. SETTING THE SCENE : WATER SCARCITY IN CHINA
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A. The National Context
It is well recognized that China will be facing serious water stress from
constraints on water supply as well as deteriorating quality due to accumulated
effects of agricultural growth, industrialization and urbanization coupled with
declining fresh water quality and quantity(Gleick 2006; Chen et al. 2013).1Though it is estimated that from surface water, groundwater availability, China’s total annual water resource is 2812.5 billion cubic metres (which ranks it sixth in the world, with 27 percent of world’s fresh water); the available water resource per capita is only 2156 cubic metres, which is far below the world average of water resource per capita (Liu et al. 2013). This is expected to decline to 1,875 cubic metres as its population is projected to rise to 1.5 billion by 2033. 2
As water issues escalate, river basins are increasingly acknowledged as the
appropriate basic unit for analyzing water resource management(Amarasinghe et al.
2005; Shen 2009; Todd et al. 2011).River basins, or ‘catchments’ are entire areas
drained by a river, including its tributaries. They absorb and channel run-off from
snow-melt and rainfall, form a critical link between land and sea, and as an
1The international definition of water stress is 1,000 m 3 of usable water run-off per person per year(Brown, Matlock & Ph 2011). This is known as the Falkenmarkindicator, perhaps the most widely used measure of water stress.
2 The per capita number for 2033 is calculated by dividing China’s total freshwater resources, which, is 2812.502 km3, according to the Little Green Data Book, by the projected population peak of 1.5 billion by 2033, which is available from the State Population Development Strategy Report, published by the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China in 2007 and available at
14 ecosystem, feedback into accompanying wetland and groundwater systems. All of which are important in the cycle for freshwater availability(Technical Advisory
Committee, 2000). The importance of viewing water resources through river basins as logical unit of analysis was confirmed by revisedthe new Chinese Water Law, passed in 2002, which provided that the ‘state shall exercise a water resource management system of river basin management in conjunction with jurisdictional management(People’s Republic of China, 2002).In China, rivers are categorized into nine major river basins, which are Song-Liao, Hai, Huai, Huang in the north, and Yangtze, Pearl, Southwestern, Southeastern and Inland in the South (see map of water basins in Figure1).
FIGURE 1. CHINA ’S WATER BASINS
(Amarasinghe et al. 2005)
The already stressed supply of water is aggravated by the fact that the
distribution of water in China, as is the case for most countries, is highly variable
15 both temporally and spatially.The common Chinese idiom that China’s water problems can be summed up as ‘too much, too little, too polluted’still rings true. In general, Southern China is more water abundant than the north. For example, in
2013, the Southern five river basins had 92.4 percent of the annual surface water,
68.3 percent of the groundwater, with 53.5 percent of its population. In comparison northern China accounts for only 7.6 percent of the runoff, 20.3 percent of the groundwater with 44.4 percent of its population. This reduces its annual water resources per capita to 778.9 cubic metres for its inhabitants (See Table 1).
Therefore, this paper will focus on the more water scarce regions located in the
Huang, Hai and Huai river basins.
FIGURE 2. WATER BASIN RESOURCES AND POPULATION DATA
(Liu et al. 2013)
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B. Huang, Hai and Huai River Basins
Availability of both surface and groundwater resources are particularly
stressed in the three northern river basins Huang, Hai and Huai (from now on
referred to as the 3-H basins), which incorporate five provinces (Jiangsu, Anhui,
Shandong, Henan and Hebei) and two municipalities of Beijing and Tianjin(Zuo,
1985). Broadly speaking, in the 3-H river basin region, 34.7 percent of China’s
population has access to only 7.6 percent of China’s naturally available water
resources and 6.6 percent of China’s total surface area. Moreover the region
accounts for over 35 percent of the national gross domestic product (Xie,
2009).While many factors contribute to the water scarcity problem, the spatio-
temporal distribution of water resources being inconsistent with the socio-economic
use of needs of water in the region makes the situation particularly difficult (Jiang,
2009, pp. 3185—3196). For instance, in the Hai water River basin, where Beijing
and Tianjin are located, only 1.5 percent of China’s water resources are available to
support 10 percent of its total population and 11 percent of its arable land. It has
been calculated that unless measures are taken to change the current state of affairs,
the total shortage for the 3-H basin area is projected to be 56.6 billion cubic metres
by 2050(World Bank, 2002). The following section of this paper will demonstrate
the four specific aspects of water stress in the 3-H basin: the existing spatial,
temporal water risk, the depletion of groundwater and the problem of inefficiency of
use. It will then conclude with a brief discussion on the related socio-economic risk
and the plan for the South-North Diversion Project.
17 1) Spatial water risk
As discussed above, the 3-H water basinsare geographically located in a water scarce area withhigh risk of drought. This situation has further deteriorated in recent years due to decreasing run-off and increasingdemand on water from agriculture production, industry and urbanization places it in even higher risk of water shortage.
Presently, theregion’s already limited water availability has worsened with declining rainfall and runoff. In normal water years, among its 662 cities, 300-410 will have insufficient water supplies, which becomes even more dire in drier years
(Li, 2006). At current water supply levels, the total water shortage is estimated to be
30-40 billion cubic metre per year. However, over the past decades, the average runoff has decreased by 23.8 percent, average precipitation by 9.6 percent and flow to the ocean decreased by 58.6 percent (Chinese Academy of Engineering,
2001).But some provinces suffer more than others: within the Hebei Province, surface runoff generation has decreased by 65 percent compared to the average in
1950s (Li and Wei, 2003; Li and Chen et al., 2009, pp. 3163--3173).
The persistent lack of recharge is alarming. For example, in the Hai river basin, about 4000km of water resources have dried up and 194 natural lakes and depressions have disappeared(Wang and Ren et al., 2000; Fan and Huang et al.,
2006, p. 919–929; Liu, 2012). In the Yellow river, there was a 51 percent decline of discharge into the sea since the 1950s and in the lower reaches of the river, there have been long consecutive days of no flow to the sea (Liu and Xia, 2004, pp.
2197—2210; Wang and Jin, 2006, pp. 35-44).These events not only put the region’s water supply at risk, it disrupts the natural ecosystem of water renewal. It creates a downward spiral where the water shortage weakens its ability to recharge through
18 rainfall in the future, which then decreases water resources in the future due to lack of renewal(AusAID, 2011).
On the demand side, the current cropping pattern for China identifies the 3-
H region as the highest intensity cropping areas in China. 67 percent of wheat, 44
percent of corn, 72 percent of peanuts, 64 percent of sunflower, 50 percent of
sesame and 42 percent of cotton (which explains why the basins account for 35-40
percent of the national GDP) are grown in the area, all being water intensive
agricultural pursuits. Additionally, the 3-H basin is estimated to host 31 percent of
its national output from industries such as paper making, coal fired thermal plant
electricity generation, chemical and textile which are responsible for high levels of
water pollution. As a result, it is not surprising that the surface and groundwater in
Hai, Huai and Huang basins have been seriously depleted and polluted due to rapid
urbanization and industrial development. In 2007, over 64 percent, 34 percent and
27 percent of its water has been registered as polluted according to Chinese
National Surface Water Standard for the Hai, Huai, and Huang basins respectively
(Qu and Fan, 2010, pp. 519—560).
2) Temporal water risk
Climate change will also aggravate the spatial patterns of stress discussed above (Wang and Zhang et al., 2012, pp. 231-240; Hulme, 1992; Heilig and Fischer et al., 2000, pp. 153—172; Tao and Yokozawa et al., 2003, pp. 203—215; Katz and
Brown, 1992, pp. 289—302). According to China’s National Assessment Report on
Climate Chang (Ding, 2006),over the past 100 years, inter-regional differences in
precipitation between the northern and southern basins have increased, with rainfall
gradually declining in North China at rates of 20–40 mm/decade, and rising in
South China at rates of 20–60 mm/decade (NDRC et al, 2007). Based on multi-year
19 data modeling and intra-annual water stress indices, it has been shown that there will be persistent shortages in the 3-H basins from natural variation in climate and existing demand (Piao and Ciais et al., 2010, pp. 43—51; Xia and Qiu et al., 2012, pp. 523—536; see Figure 2). It is forecast with modeling that with climate change risk, over the past 20 years, mainstream water flows havedeclined by 41 percent in the Hai River basin,15 percent in the Huang River basin and 15 percentin the Huai
River basin (NDRC et al, 2007).It is also estimated that average nationwidetemperatures will increase by 1.3 to 2.1°C by2020, 1.5 to 2.8°C by 2030, and 2.3 to 3.3°Cby 2050 (NDRC et al, 2007).
This is illustrated in a comprehensive hydrological and meteorological study, the spatial categorization of the magnitude and distribution of water deficit risks in China in this era of climate change will dramatically increase the water risk in the 3-H basin area (see Figure 3), which takes into account multiyear modeling of water availability and demand for water across all sectors (the red coloured areas are areas, where demand exceeds average annual endogenous supply in the county).
Additionally, The increase of water temperature will have significant implication for biodiversity and thermal energy plants in the region, which will be further discussed below.
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FIGURE 3. MULTIYEAR SPATIAL MODELING OF WATER DEFICIT IN CHINA
(Chen and Devineni et al., 2013, pp. 11129-11150)
3) Groundwater depletion
Groundwater and surface water are intimately linked in the overall hydrological cycle, so while river systems are naturally dominated by flow, aquifers discharge to surface water bodies and can be recharged by them and most aquifers have a large capacity to buffer surface water variability and drought cycles
(Garduño and Foster et al., 2006; Wang and Huang et al., 2007, p. 37–62).
A large volume of literature has recorded the troubling speed and extent groundwater depletion in the 3-H region over the past decades (Chen, 1985, pp.
167—171;Starrett, 2000; Lou, 1998; Wu and Xue et al., 1998, pp. 125-129).The 3-
H regions only have 14.5 percent of China’s total groundwater reserves. However, groundwater accounts for 48, 38, and 35 percent of total water resources in Hai,
Huai, Huang basins respectively.As available surface water becomes increasingly scarce, water demand has heavily relied upon the exploitation of groundwater since
21 1958 (Shen and Tang et al., 2005, pp. 280—288), and using groundwater extract to supplementing water supply in the regionis continuing at a constantly increasing rate (Xia and Su et al., 2008, pp. 117-120).Physical evidence of unsustainable groundwater use is obviously documented by falling groundwater and pressure levels (AusAid, 2011). Since the 1990s, the groundwater tables have been declining on average at the rate of about 1.5 metres per year (Currell and Han et al., 2012, pp.
4050—4066; Kreuzer and Von Rohden et al., 2009, pp. 168—180; Von Rohden and
Aeschbach-Hertig et al., 2010) In the Hai water basin, groundwater withdrawal has exceeded recharge rate, causing an average recharge deficit of 40-90mm per year, which is equivalent to continuous water table decline of 0.5m per year (Foster and
Garduno et al., 2004, pp. 81—93).Greater declines have been observed in many urban centres. For example, in Beijing, groundwater shallow aquifers have dropped more than 10 metres since 2000 (Ivanova, 2011).
Similar to the negative cycle that surface water has been trapped in,
groundwater is not being recharged at a sustainable rate because the mechanisms for
recharge have been disrupted by the massive deficit between extraction and
replenishment (Currell and Han et al., 2012, pp. 4050—4066).This has created
serious long-term problems for water supply in the northern basins, where lack of
opportunity for groundwater recharge has caused water quality degradation,
seawater intrusion and ground subsidence (Li and Wang et al., 2005; Kendy and
Molden et al., 2003) and fundamentally breaks the balance at the interface between
freshwater and seawater, ability for freshwater to recharge through precipitation.
Therefore the unsustainably exploitation of groundwater has continued to aggravate
the existing water scarcity problem in the 3-H region.
22 4) Scarcity coupled with Pollution and Wastage
One cannot discuss water resource without considering water quality and the efficiency with which it has been used. For the 3-H region, the water pollution in both surface and groundwater resources have rendered much raw water unsafe and useless. More than 30 years after the constitutional recognition of the States’ obligation to protect natural resources, water pollution continues to worsen as SEPA graded 32% of the water level IV, and 27% level V, both below drinking standards. 3
This problem is even more problematic for the region because it lacks the natural dilution capacity due to its already existing water scarcity (Johnson and Liu et al.,
1997; Winalski, 2009, p. 181). In addition, wastage and a lack of efficiency in the context of scarcity is another factor that compounds the problem (Hu and Wang et al., 2006, pp. 217—230). As noted above, the almost 70 percent of water is used for agriculture in the North, and though this is diminishing, the current irrigation method is highly inefficient due to porous canals and a lack of incentive to save water due to their lack of volumetric accounting and low water prices (Li, 2006, pp.
327—336;Wei and Davidson, 2006; Li, 2006).This issue is prescient in the context of managing water resources, which will be further discussed in Chapter 3.
3 See also national reporting of water pollution crisis in 2004 in Zhang 2004.
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C.New Water Distribution Risks
The spatio-temporal and groundwater risks demonstrated will be even more critical in the future, where the rapid rate of urbanization and industrialization of
China coupled with its growing, large population will heighten the risk of water scarcity in the North, and create conflicts in water distribution for the region. While historically the 3-H region’s water demand has been dominated by irrigation use for agriculture, which accounts for nearly 70 percent of its water allocation and use, the growth in urban lifestyles means that cities, highways, and industrial sectors are steadily encroaching on the region’s agricultural water allocation.The coal industry’s withdrawal and consumption of water resources is particularly intense, and its increasing demand has created an additional water risk for the region.
This trend can already be observed from the available water data, where water use in the region has been undergoing transfer from agricultural to non- agriculture sectorssince 1950s (Shen and Speed, 2009, pp. 209—225). From 1949 to
2004, the percentage of irrigation water use declined from 97 percent to 65 percent, while the share of industrial water use increased from 2 percent to 22 percent
(Thomas, 2008, p. 306–326),and domestic water use increased from 1 percent to 13 percent (Wang and Huang et al., 2008, p. 276). Figures 4, 5 and 6 demonstrate this with the most recent water allocation data for the 3-H basin area.Figure 4 showsthe trend of increasing water demand from all sectors, foreach of the three basins, as a percentage change from 2009 as a baseline. Figure 5 shows the increase for water allocation for the industrial sector, while Figure 6 shows the corresponding decline in water allocation for agriculture use.
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4 FIGURE 4: TOTAL WATER DEMAND IN THE 3H BASIN
5 FIGURE 5 : CHANGE IN INDUSTRIAL ALLOCATION AND USE IN THE 3H BASIN
6 FIGURE 6: CHANGE IN AGRICULTURAL ALLOCATION AND USE IN THE 3H BASIN
4Original data analysis from the Ministry of Water Resources, 2014. 5Original data analysis from the Ministry of Water Resources, 2014. 6Original data analysis from the Ministry of Water Resources, 2014.
25 The increase in water demand for industry can be mostly attributed to the urbanization process that has led to more demand for energy, a large proportion of which comes from the coal industry. China’s energy mix is dominated by thermal- electric generation from coal. However, coal is a highly water intensive energy resource, as water is used at every stage of the chain of supplying coal (Meldrum and Nettles-Anderson et al., 2013). It begins with mining, coal preparation, and transport conversion from the mining site. Then thermal energy plants will withdraw large volumes of water for cooling and it consumes water in the process of producing steam (Zhai and Rubin, 2010, pp. 5653—5660). Once coal is burnt, water is used again in waste disposal and transporting the wastage (NBSC, 2009;
Zhao and Chen et al., 2009, pp. 245—253; Guan and Hubacek, 2008, pp. 1300—
1313; Wang, 2008, pp. 49-53). The coal industry already accounts for one-sixth of total water withdrawals (Francis and Mehta et al., 2013) and it is set to increase. The most recent International Energy Agency Report, released just ahead of World
Water Day 2014, has forecasted that power generation from coal will increase by an average of 3.1 percent per annum until 2035, which will also proportionately increase the energy industry’s demand on water (IEA, 2014).
The map in Figure 7 illustrates the distribution of coal reserves and water capacity in China, and it is clear that coal reserves are mainly located in Northern
China and most of the coal industry (for example, coal fired thermal power plants, coking coal and chemical plants) all reside in the highly urbanized 3-H region.
26 FIGURE 7: DISTRIBUTION OF COAL IN CHINA
(Pan and Liu et al., 2012, pp. 93—102)
Due to the northern region’s proximity to enormous coal reserves, a large number of large-scalecoal plants are on the agenda as China tries to supply the urbanized society in the northern region with their new demand for electrification. Large water withdrawal, low recycling rate and waste water drainage problems that exist in every stage of the coal supply chain are severe problems for an already water stressed region (Pan and Liu et al., 2012, pp. 93—102). Furthermore, it has been well documented that the coal industry has had a large impact on the local water system by causing surface subsidence (Equeenuddin and Tripathy et al., 2010, pp.
75—82), water and soil loss (Haibin and Zhenling, 2010, pp. 1331—1340), and
27 discharge large quantities of waste water containing pollutants and toxic metal ions
(such as sulfides mercury and hexavelnt chrome (Li, 2005, p. 133)).
The increasing demand for energy and its push to reallocate water from agricultural sectors to industrial sectors has been termed the ‘water-energy choke point’. Already, it is projected that industrial water demand for china will increased to 265 billion cubic metres, which alone will account for 40 percent of the additional industrial demand world wide (McKinsey Group, 2009). It is foreseeable that in the coming adjustment period, agriculture demand will collide head-on with the industry. This adds another social equity dimension to the water risk problem in the 3-H region, as redistribution may create conflict between the already economically poor subsistent farmers and the demands its urbanized citizens (Cai,
2008, pp. 14—25), which will be further discussed below.As such, continuing the reallocation of water resources between the two sectors is unsustainable in the long term.
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D. Impacts of Water Shortage
Water lies in the nexus of many developmental issues, and there has been an abundance of discussion on how the lack of water availability will affect China in the future. Much of it has focused on water shortage as a constraint on future economic growth (Naughton, 2007; Shalizi, 2008;Gleick, 2009) and how it poses a threat to energy and food security (Hubacek and Sun, 2007, pp. 187-200; Medianu and Whalley, 2012).For example, the People’s Daily reported that water shortages have caused over 100 billion yuan loss to China’s economy each year (MWR,
2001). For a country that has lauded economic development as its premier political concern over the past few decades, facing future water constraint on its economic development is a highly political and politicized issue (Shen, 2005, pp. 329--338).
However, economic losses are not the only negative impacts that water shortages may cause.What is important in the context of this paper is that as the growing competition for water continues between rural agricultural use and urban development, the social inequity dimension of the water problem surfaces. There have always been distributive problems with water resources in China. For example, it has been recorded that the shortage of water has prompted companies to move factories upstream in competition for water, which has led to social unrest in downstream rural areas whose access to water was denied.(Chen, 2007, pp. 1—
15).Similarly, during a drought in 2000, the Officials in Anqiu City, Shandong
Province, began a project to stop seepage from the local reservoir so as to preserve water supply for the city and its industries. This led to a mass protest by local farmers who relied on the seepage to irrigate their fields, in the process of which
100 farmers and forty officers was wounded and one officer beaten to death (Kim,
29 2008, pp. 232—251 citing Washington Post, 2000). Particularly, large hydro- electric power projects such as the Three Gorges Dam, have displaced 225,000 people, and reduced the amount of available water downstream for farming irrigation(Cai, 2008).Indeed, many violent conflicts and lawsuits due to water management and water pollution issues have been recorded in throughout the years
(Tyler, 2014).
As discussed above the reallocation of water towards industrial use proposes
a conflict between urbanizing industries and the farming sector. This reallocation is
partly due to the need to meet urbanization demands, but also partly because there is
a tendency for local authorities to give higher priority to industries because water
used in the industry has a higher economic value (Cai, 2008). The lack of
compensatory measures for this reallocation of water resources and how it
disadvantages the rural community has clear implications for social security in the
region. Particularly because agricultural production is an already impoverish sector
that has benefited least from China’s economic growth.
Therefore it is clear that to preserve the level of economic and social
development in China, it is paramount that water governance improves.Supply to
both industry and agriculture without continuing to use the method of simply
redistributing scarce resources been recognized by the Chinese government again
and again in the last decades. In 1998 the Standing Committee of the ninth Chinese
People’s Political Consultative Conference resounded ‘through comprehensive,
thorough, and continuous campaign and education, vast numbers of cadres and
populace should be helped to bear in mind that China is a water needy country and
that water problems have already been a major factor inflicting our country’s
30 sustainable development...they should get to know that water conservancy is a fundamental (jiben) policy of our country’ (DRCCU, 2001).
31 E. South-North Diversion Project
This naturally leads the discussion to the plans for the South-North
Diversion Project. The scarcity of water in the 3-H basin and its social-economic
ramifications has had a long history in China. In 1952, Mao Zedong famously said
that ‘the south has a lot of water, the north little. If possible, it is ok to lend a little
water’ (Ma, 2004).This project will finally come to fruition in the next few years,
having been in the planning since 1979 (Ran and Lu, 2013, pp. 503-510). The cost
is estimated be as high as 65 billion USD, (excluding social and ecological
impacts), its draft plans have been approved and construction is underway (Xinhuan
News, 2014).If successful, it will bring substantial water to the North China Plain
from the Yangtse Basin, through three sets of diversions (the Eastern, Middle and
Western route) to the Northern regions (The Atlantic, 2014). The project’s goal is to
move 44.8 billion cubic metres of water across a total of 4350 kilometres every
year.
Given the water scarcity problems discussed previously, and the
unsustainable way in which water has been reallocated from the agricultural sector
to the industrial sector due to increasing demands from urbanization and population
growth, the CCP’s decision to construct the Diversion Project is not
surprising.Indeed, the main purpose of the diversion is to supplement water supply
for the urban centers and the industrial demand. The Eastern route is to supply water
to Tianjin, which has historically relied on emergency water diversions from the
increasingly dry Yellow River (Jowett, 1986, pp. 9—18). The Middle Route is set to
supply urban and industrial uses in Beijing, Tianjin, Henan and Hebei Provinces.
The Western Route will be shared between urban and industrial users in Western
China (Berkoff, 2003, pp. 1—28).
32 FIGURE 8: ROUTES FOR THE DIVERSION PROJECT
However, carrying out a plan of this magnitude will dramatically affect the country: socially, environmentally and fiscally. In terms of energy it will both reduce the hydroelectric generation capacity of the rivers it is diverting from, as well as require a significant amount of energy to move the water, which is incredibly dense resource to physically shift. The level of cooperation between municipal governments and local regions is said to be only possible under a centralized one-party state like China, and it is estimated that at least 345,000 people will be displaced for its construction. The environmental impacts of the transfer has been subject to much criticism, as there is a strong possibility that each transfer route could generate a range of negative impacts(for example saltwater encroachment in the estuary) and endanger aquatic life both in the Yangtse and along the transfer (He and He et al., 2010, pp. 1312—1323). How the project will control pollution in the process of water transfer is yet to be tested along all routes, though the goal is to bring water quality up to where fish can be found in water anywhere along the diversion route (Nickum, 2006, p. 623).
33 Ultimately, the project will only offer a panacea to the water shortage problem in the Northern basins, and even the strongest proponents of the project acknowledge it will be inefficient in the long term if water demand is not better managed through demand side regulation. Indeed, the former Prime Minister Zhu
Rongjistated that the initial stage of the transfer project follow the following guideline: ‘First save water, then transfer it; first clean up the pollution, then let the water flow by; first protect the environment, then use water’ (Yang, 2004). As such, the UNDP has criticized the project as a ‘high-risk gamble’ (UNDP, 2006), which begs the question why China is taking such a drastic and expensive approach to addressing the water scarcity problem in the northern basins. Some have argued that the CCP’s penchant for big engineering projects, despite other avenues available, to be a show of prowess by the CCP (The Atlantic, 2014).
34
F. Concluding Remarks
As this Chapter has demonstrated, the northern 3-H basin is facing dire
water scarcity problems that threaten its economic and social security. The increase
in demand for water can be attributed largely to the urbanization of the population
and its demand for more energy than ever before. The way in which the water
allocation has been redistributed from the agriculture sector to the industrial sector
in order to meet urbanization demands is not sustainable in the long term. In this
context, the Diversion Project can be understoodis a supply-side solution to a
fundamental problem of water scarcity in the region.
35
CHAPTER 3
III. GOVERNING THE WATERS
36
A. Water as a Common Pool Resource
The problems of water scarcity in the northern regions highlights the problem of distributing a common pool resources (CPRs), which are intrinsically difficult to govern due to the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968, pp. 1243-
1248) and the (in)ability of the individual to cohere in collective action so that common goods can be preserved to ensure their long-term viability (Ostrom, 1990).
CPRs like water resources exist in a system so large that it is costly to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use, and thus, leaving it vulnerable to overuse and depletion. Many scholarly articles in analysis of the tragedy of the commons recommend that ‘the State’ control naturally occurring common pool resources so as to prevent their destruction (Baland and Platteau,
1994; Gilmour and Day et al., 2012), while economists often recommend
‘privatization of the commons’ so as to encourage more efficient methods of use
(World Bank, 2008; Grafton, 1999; Rogers and Silva et al., 2002, pp. 1—17).
Importantly,ElinorOstrom’s pivotal contribution to analyzing how to govern CPRs and the problems of collective action have made it clear that contexts matter . One must look to the idiosyncratic scenariosthat common goods exist in,so as to make the most appropriate governance choices. This makes studying how CPRs are governed in China a particularly intriguing exercise, given its complex developmental history and its politically communistic roots.
1)Common Pool Resources for the Chinese Communist Party
Water has played a pivotal role in promoting the development of the Chinese
economy over the past decades, but as one can see from the discussion above, the
water scarcity and water pollution problems have not been successfully addressed
37 (Wang, 2010; (Golding, 2011, p. 399). The new demand from an urbanizing population and its new energy demands will present additional challenges for managing China’s waters in the future.
At the heart of the problem of China’s water crisis is the questions of how to best manage a CPR within the context its particular institutional, cultural and ideological history. Scholars who argue in favour of State control of CPRs as the most efficient and sustainable way to protect its use, are often surprised that the centralized political engine in China has not resolved its water problems.Most analyst still identify China’s regime as authoritarian (albeit one that is becoming increasingly marketised and pluralized, see Chen, 2009, pp. 1256—1257). After all, the fundamental law that informs China’s institutions is the leadership of the
Chinese Communist Party (‘CCP’) with ‘multiparty cooperation’(Shigong, 2010, pp. 12—46),which gives it de-facto supreme power (Golding, 2011; Choukroune,
2003). Its communist political history and lack of privatized property rights in
China should also make it an ideal candidate for regulating CPRs by State command. Indeed, the National People’s Congress stated in Article 6, section 1 of the Chinese Constitution, that ‘the state protects and improves the living environment and ecological environment’ 7 and rivers and other bodies of water were deemed ‘state property subject to state control’ (Qiu and Li, 2008).These provisos should theoretically allow the CCP ample policy options for better managing its waters, through both supply and demand side regulations.
Yet, the ‘big project’ engineering culture continues to dominant the water management landscape. The crowning jewel of which is the planned South-North
Transfer project discussed above. China’s tendencies towards big projects have
7Chinese Constitution Art.11 (1978).
38 been criticized as hubristic, and intending to demonstrate the prowess of a centralized state (Ha rd̊ and Jamison, 2005). It has been often critiqued for not employing more demand side strategies for water conservation, such as better water pricing and efficiency measures.
This chapter will seek to elucidate the paradoxical position that Chinese water policies exist in, which will explain, in part, the CCP’scontinued reliance on big projects such as the South-North Water Transfer. It will do so in two parts. First, the general framework of how water is governed today will be discussed in this chapter, in three respects: legislative regimes, economic measures and political tools used for water management. This will illustratea change in the CCP’s policy directions for water managementover the past few decades. It will show that while historically the country has been prone to command-and-control approaches to water regulation, the CCP has moved toward more demand-side regulatory measures (such as pricing) and bottom-up approaches (through incorporating integrated water management regimes) for regulating water resources. However, though this move towards demand side regulation is encouraging, in reality, there are institutional barriers to its implementation.
The second part of this chapter will demonstrate that the increasingly decentralized and fragmented sense of authoritarianism (as expounded in Lieberthal and Oksenberg’s seminal work on China’s policy making and implementation,
Lieberthal and Oksenberg, 1988)and the evolutionary process of forming the water governance system have created fundamental contradictions that lie in its institutional arrangements, such as a vertical and horizontal fragmentation in the policy and legislative sphere. These inherent and systematic contradictions make water management particularly difficult to realize. Additionally, though the CCP
39 has implemented more market solutions for incentivizing water efficiency and decreasing water demand, its pricing attempt lacks institutional support. Thus, it is unlikely that the economic measures and demand-side policy will achieve water savings in the present context. It will be argued that these fundamental barriers to implementing demand-side policy for water conservation are partly the CCP still relies on large supply-side solutions, such as the Diversion Project.
40
B.Framework of Water Governance
This section will place the problem of water scarcity within the context of
China’s legislative and economic regime and the possibilities and limitation within its models of governance. China’s leadership is well aware of the severity of its water problems, and has emphasized time and time again the importance of water management as a policy priority (Gleick, 2009). Historically, water management in
China has relied heavily on supply-side constraints and constructing structures for flood control, power, irrigation, municipal/industry supplies and navigation for grain transport (AusAid, 2001). Since 1990, China experienced a transition from this ‘hard-path approach’ to a ‘soft path approach’ that emphasized economic and institutional measures for water management (Gleick, 2009). This has been supported by the growing consensus among hydrologists and policy academia that
China needs to abandon its heavy top-down approach in favour of more localized incentives that reduce demand.
1) Legal and Political Context
Following the death of Mao and the beginning of Deng’s reforms in 1978, in the haste of creating China’s ‘economic miracle’, environmental degradation occurred at an unprecedented rate. In response, the Chinese legal regime for water management evolved along the way, making it a highly reactionary process.
In the beginning, other than the broad statement in the Chinese Constitution that the country’s water and rivers are under State control (therebyaffirming its non- proprietary nature), there were no centralized efforts to manage water quality and quantity. In general water was controlled by local authorities and managed on an ad hoc basis.
41 As water pollution became visibly problematic for China, the 1984 Prevention and Control of Water Pollution Act was created by the Standing Committee of
People’s Congress (SCNPC), which set out the general standards for water pollution and stipulated that water pollution should be managed by local authorities under the guidance of the standards set down by this law.It entrusted the management of water pollution to the Ministry of Environment Protection (‘MEP’). However, this legislation did not address the problem of water quantity, and many government authorities continued to interfere with water allocation.
In 1988, due to the complexity of the water allocation system and the conflicts
it created between different provinces and ministries, China created the landmark
Water Law (1988), which enshrined a new era in its water program. It was a first step towards rationalizing water management by creating a regulatory framework and redefining the important role of the Ministry of Water Resources (‘MWR’) for managing water allocation. From this point, the MWR became officially responsible for flood and drought prevention and control, as well as for water planning, monitoring, research, development, national-level policy making and inter-basin water policy coordination (Boxer, 2001, pp. 335—341).
Today, the Prevention and Control of Water Pollution Act and the Water
Law remain the two most important pieces of legal instruments for water governance and both have been updated since the 1980s. They interact with a number of other legislation within the framework of water governance, such as the Interim Measures
of Public Participation in EIA (2006), Environmental Impact Assessment Law
42 (2003), the Soil and Water Conservation Law (1991), Flood Control Law (1997)
and the Promotion of Clean Production Law (2002). 8
In 2002, the Chinese government drastically amended the 1988 Water Law
and established the legal basis for integrated water resource management and
demand management, which reflectedthe modern academic recommendation. First
and foremost, the new Water Law (2002) created river basin management systems and the River Basin Management Commission, which is responsible for holistic planning and sharing of water between different provinces, in accordance with contemporary theories of ‘integrated water resource management’ (Hufschmidt and
Tejwani, 1993).The law stipulated that basin and regional plans shall be subordinate to the basin plan (art 15) and new water projects must conform to the basin comprehensive plan (art 19) (Shen, 2009, pp. 484--496). Second, it also focused on creating legal basis for water resource allocation plans, water rights and withdrawal permits. The new legislation has embraced both top-down supply management through planning and allocation, as well as bottom-up measures that promote water conservation and point source pollution control.
Moreover, the CCP has also continued to issue policy guidance for improving water management in recent years. Beginning with the 9 th Five-Year Plan (‘FYP’), the Chinese Government recognized that it is important that water resource management and economic growth become coherent, and emphasized sustainable use of water in its policy agenda (Xie et al, 2009). In 1998, the MWR published
‘China Agenda 21’, a white paper on China’s Population, Environment and
Development in the 21 st Century (MWR, 1998). It was pivotal as the first official
policy paper that put forward a basin based approach to water management. Since
8 English versions of these laws can be found at
43 then, every FYP has tried to balance water supply and demand with economic development, setting targets for water pollution control and allocation with various actions plans and resource development plans such as the 12th Five-Year Plan of the National Water Resource Development (MEP, 2011). For example, the National
People’s Congress’ FYPs continue to set water conservation targets. In the latest
FYP, published in 2011, the State Council further emphasized ‘quality growth’, moving the State’s focus on economic expansion towards growth in a sustainable way, with promoting scientific development at its core (see Table below).
TABLE 1: 12 TH FIVE YEAR PLAN TARGETS FOR WATER Change Forecast over 5 Target 2010 2015 or years Binding (%) Farmland reserves (billion mu) 1.818 1.818 0 binding Decrease in water consumption per unit of 30 binding value-added industrial output (%) Increase of water efficiency coefficient in 0.5 0.53 0.03 forecast agricultural irrigation Increase of non-fossil fuel usage in primary 8.3 11.4 3.1 binding energy consumption (%) Decrease in energy consumption per unit of 16 binding GDP (%) Decrease in CO2 emissions per unit of GDP 17 binding (%) Chemical Oxygen Demand Total decrease 8 (COD) in emissions of Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) 8 binding major Ammonia Nitrogen 10 pollutants (%) Nitrous Oxides 10 Forest coverage rate (%) 20.36 21.66 1.3 Forest Increase binding Forest stock (m³) 137 143 6 (12 th FYP, 2011)
In particularly, part V of the 12 th FYP was written in response to the new competition for water from the energy industry and other urbanization demands, it looks to integrated goals between energy and water, and plans to reduce water intensity (water consumed per unit of value added industrial output) by 30 percent
44 by 2015,and to continue to reduce energy and carbon intensity (KPMG, 2011).
Numbered one on its priority for optimizing structures and accelerating coordinated regional development and sound urbanization development, the new Plan has clearly recognized the water crisis and promised more infrastructure spending and investment in water conservation management, some of which has been put into place (Lin, 2014).
2) Market Mechanisms for Water Savings
China’s market mechanisms for pricing water have similarly undergone an evolution in the past decades. Before 1980s, China’s water was seen as an abundant resource and it was essentially free. In 1985, China’s State Council decided that water tariffs were a necessary tool for controlling level of water use, and water prices centrally with the State Councils Water Tariff Method (See Table 2). It introduced some general principles for pricing water tariffs, and left provincial governments in charge of implementing the specific tariff, collection method, and management of different water users (Bhullar, 2013, p. 216).
TABLE 2. CHINA ’S PRICING PRINCIPLE 1985 Water uses Pricing Principle Agriculture Grain Grops Water supply Cost Cash Crops Slightly higher than supply cost Industry Supply cost plus 4 to 6 % profit Domestic Supply cost plus mini-small profit (Tsur, 2004)
Since the 1990s, both the central and local governments have made various
reforms towards creating economic approaches to water governance.In 1994, the
State Council (‘SC’) published the first national legislation for water supply
management, ‘Ordinance on Urban Water Supply’, which stated that it was
important that water management incorporate economic instruments, and put
45 forward the raising of water tariffs(State Council PRC, 1994).The Price Law
(1997)provided further guidelines for water pricing, which delegated more decision
making power to local governments and added a supervising and auditing system
for water tariff management (Wu, 2011). Over the years, the National Development
Reform Commission (‘NDRC’) together with the MWR continued to refine
principles for water charge, with numerous regulations and circulars (see Table 2)
so as to improve the economic compensation system for water resources (Wu,
2011). The Administrative Regulation on Urban Water Supply Pricing (1998) stated explicitly that the general principles for setting water tariffs are ‘cost recovery, reasonable profit, water conservation and social equity’ (Xie et al, 2009).
TABLE 3. HISTORY OF ECONOMIC POLICIES FOR WATER Title Issuing Body Year Tentative Administrative Method on Collecting Former Ministry of Water 1965 and Managing Water Charges of Hydraulic Engineering Administrative Method on Accounting, State Council 1985 Collecting and Managing Raw Water Charges of Hydraulic Facilities PRC Ordinance on Urban Water Supply State Council 1994 Circular on Collecting Water Resource Fee State Council 1995 Administrative Method on Urban Water Supply NDRC 1998 Price Circular on the Key Issues for Carrying out the NDRC 1999 ‘Administrative Method on Urban Water Supply Price’ Circular on Facilitating Water Supply Price NDRC, MWR, MEP 2002 Reform Circular on Promoting Water Price Reform, State Council 2004 Saving Water Use and Protecting Water Resource Administrative Method on Raw Water Price of NDRC, MWR 2004 Hydraulic Facilities Ordinance on Water Abstraction Permit and State Council 2006 Water Resource Fee Collection Opinions on Deepening the Reforms of State Council 2008 Economic Structure (Zhong and Mol, 2010, pp. 377—396)
46 These centralized policies mark the legal basis for water tariffs in China,
which now generally incorporates four elements: the supply price, the raw water
charge for hydraulic facilities, the water resource fee and the wastewater treatment
charges (for urban water use). As such, water tariffs have increased significantly
since the early 1990s to meet cost recovery, and are expected to continue to rise (Fu,
2014). The price of water is however highly varied depending on the type of water
user (agricultural, industrial or urban) and location of extraction (see Table 4).
Furthermore,groundwater and surface water are also priced differently for irrigation.
TABLE 4. AVERAGE COST OF WATER (Y UAN /C UBIC METRE )
(Yaozhou and Bingcai, 2002)
3) Political Tools: Cadre System
In addition to the legal and economic policies set out by the CCP, the
government has also tried to incentivize water pollution management through the
use of cadres as a tool unique to the country’s ‘adaptive authoritarianism’
(Heilmann and Perry, 2011).The cadre system is akin to issuing report cards for
government officials, and it’s a way to integrate vertical checks on local officials. It
sets targets for individual leaders, which are defined by three categories: soft, hard
or veto (Wang, 2013) and so communicates the priorities of the state. 9 In the past, it
has been used for population control and economic targets as a way of overcoming
the fragmentation problem of local protectionism discussed above. Recently, this
cadre system has been increasingly employed for environmental targets, such as
9 Veto goals are the most important goals, in that failure to achieve them trumps all other accomplishments. Traditionally these have been economic growth and birth quote goals.
47 sanctions against water pollution. 10 In 1997, the GuangDong Province began environmental responsibility cadre system, where local leaders were evaluated by their achievement in environmental quality, emission control and other factors of environmental management (Wang, 2013). In 2008 Hu Jintao began an effort called
‘green GDP’ – to incorporate environmental costs into GDP calculations (Liu and
Diamond, 2008, p. 37).Such a system is nothing new to the China. Historically, competitive promotion and reward systems havebeen used in the imperial system for centuries (Nickum, 2010; Pye, 1988; Minzner, 2009), as such, it has been often described as ‘responsible government’ with ‘chinese characteristics’.
In summary, though supply projects like the South-North Diversion are common in China, the Chinese government has been reforming its bottom-up regulatory system for water in recent years. However, its various attempts at regulating and incentivizing water savings have resulted in limited success, due to some fundamental barriers to their implementation, which will be discussed in the next part of this chapter.
10 Law on Prevention and Control of Water Pollution (promulgated by the Standing Comm. Nat’l People’s Cong., May 11, 1984), available in English at
48
C. Limits to Legislative Governance
‘Man never stops affecting his natural environment. He constantly transforms it; and he actualizes new forces whenever his efforts carry him to a new level of operation. Whether a new level can be attained at all, or once attained, where it will lead, depends first on the intitutional order and second on the ultimate target of man’s activity: the physical, chemical, and biological world accessible to him.” - Karl Wittfogel, 1947, Oriental Despotism
In 1957, Wittfogel put forward the idea of China as a ‘hydraulic state' where the government has proved its effectiveness through centralized governance of its water resources. The prowess of the central government was at the centre of his idea of ‘oriental despotism’, which argued that hydraulic management was an aspect of
‘taming’ China. However, contrary to popular belief, the CCP is not an all-powerful hand that controls every fiber of the country.Calman J Cohen, in his Statements to
US observed that ‘contrary to American images of PRC as a ruthless effective
authoritarian regime whose writ runs from the standing committee of the politburo
in Beijing to the most remote gambit, in many respects contemporary Chinese
government resembles a series of feudal baronies more than a totalitarian
dictatorship’ (Cohen, 2001).
As the above discussion illustrates, China has come a long way since the
days of a top-heavy hydraulic state and it has undergone a positive evolution
process where the CCP has strongly committed itself to confront the weaknesses in
its fragmented authority. In recent years, it has moved away from purely centralized
supply-side allocation to managing demand through efficiency targets, pricing
reforms and application of market mechanism. The creation of River Basin
Management Commission also signals a promising decentralized, rational approach
49 to allocation of water resources. Furthermore, as China is more open economically to the rest of the world, the level of individual autonomy is now higher than ever before in its one-party state.
However, it will be shown that the CCP’s demand-side initiatives tend to suffer from characteristics of institutional fragmentation, decentralization with difficulties in enforcement.Even more crucially is the fact that there is still an uneasy tension (Minzner, 2009) between Maoist governance and an understanding of water resources as a private, economically calculable resource based on rights.
These reasons, among others, have significantly limited the success of China’s water governance model. They go some way towards explaining why China still tends towards large engineering projects.
1) Horizontal and Vertical Fragmentation
Whilst the legislative evolution of water management has been promising, the process of ‘evolving’ legislation as a panacea for responding to water crisis over the past few decades has led to a system of water governance that is institutionally fragmented, both vertically and horizontally. Because water was seen as an abundant resource in China, water pollution was first to emerge as a governance problem, and with it evolved legislative measures and the creation of the MEP.
Completely separate from this system, the MWR was created to largely oversee quantity, rather than quality of water. Thus two tracks of water governance currently exist, under which various other ministries and river basin authorities function. It is said that ‘too many dragons are fighting overthe waters’ in China and indeed, such problems still persist with various disintegrated authorities all sharing power over water use.
50 Horizontal Fragmentation
The horizontal dimension refers to the cooperative arrangement between regions and ministries so as to effectively provide services and implement political strategies. Currently in China, the number of institutions involved in water management across the central ministries is baffling, and they are demarcated by whether the problem is one of quality or of quantity. Broadly speaking, the MWR is responsible for water allocation and water rights administration, and the MEP is responsible for water pollution prevention and control. However, as it can be seen from Figure 9 below, many other ministries also have responsibility for water pollution management and/or water quantity oversight.
FIGURE 9. HORIZONTAL FRAGMENTATION IN WATER MANAGEMENT
NB:Green ministries are in charge of water pollution, blue in charge of water quantity. The pink offer central policy steering)
Different types of pollution are controlled by different ministries. The MEP is designated as responsible for pollution from ‘industrial municipal sources’, whereas the Ministry of Agriculture is responsible for agricultural pollution and the
Ministry for Transport for pollution from transportation. Turf war is constantly
51 being fought between ministries. For example, in 1996 a power struggle between the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Construction surfaced because both were charged with supervision of water quality for drinking water.The Regulation on
Municipal Water Supply (1994) charged the Ministry of Construction with vague phrasing that ‘municipal construction authorities at various levels of government are responsible for supervising the urban water supply’ while the Communicable
Disease Prevention Act stated health authorities must regulate the quality of drinking water. This tendency towards lack of coordination between ministries often results in marginalizing the authority of the MWR (Shugang, 2010, pp. 3--22), and efforts to unite all water management under the ambit of MWR have been met with reluctance, and sometimes, hostility.
There has also been a long history of conflict between the MWR and MEP, because both have responsibility for ‘water resources’.Their lack of coordination continues today because there is little incentive for them to work together(Ongley,
2014, pp. 12-16).This becomes important because the issues of water management is intimately connected at every level and the problem of water quantity is necessarily related to the level of water pollution as it impacts on the amount of available freshwater. The lack of cooperation between the two ministries has made water management highly inefficient, which is clearly illustrated in the duplication and inconsistency of data between the two. For example, both ministries monitor water quality of major rivers, but each of their own monitoring stations and do not share their respective data on water quality with each other. This has resulted in inconsistent data on water pollution levels between the two agencies(see Figure 10).
52 FIGURE 10. DIFFERENT WATER QUALITY RESULTS
(Xie et al 2009)
Vertical Fragmentation
The system is also fragmented vertically between higher and lower levels of government. Each level of government has some responsibility for water extraction planning, from provincial to township level (see Figure 11 and 12). Competition between governments for water often makes trans-boundary water allocation coordination difficult and subject to the classic problems of tragedy of the commons, as local authorities tend to focus on local needs. For example, pollution abatement and water savings from one province will benefit rivers downstream for other provinces, but there is little incentive to install such measures because the water investment required must come from the province upstream (Revesz, 1992, p.
1210). Little budgetary support is given by the central government, and decentralization that has proven rather unhelpful for promoting water cooperation(Xia and Zhang et al., 2011, pp. 167—180).Importantly, this tendency for a race to the bottom is even more problematic for China because residents’ freedom of movement is limited. Whereas in other countries, collective action is encouraged by the ability of the individual to empathize with other people’s
53 positions, the household registration system (‘hukou’) tend to further re-enforces the local agenda as residents cannot move easily to another town (Lan and Livermore et al., 2011, p. 349).
FIGURE 11. VERTICAL FRAGMENTATIONIN WATER MANAGEMENT
FIGURE 12. SEPARATE RESPONSIBILITIES OF EACH LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT
54 The creation of the River Basin Management Commissions (‘RBMCs’) was an attempt to harmonized allocation orders between local governments, and has tried to incorporate the concepts that go into integrated water resource management
(‘IWRM’) (Wouters and Hu et al., 2003, p. 243). Basin management was emphasized, as well as alignment of policy through different organizational levels and sectors (Li, 2006; Grigg, 2008, pp. 279—292).Yetin reality, the Commissions have very little enforcement power and are only supposed to ‘provide technical directions and guidance to local governments within the basin’ (Xie et al, 2009). It only has authority to monitor quality, not truly control pollution. It is supposed to oversee allocation of withdrawal quotas, but has no power to prevent a province from exceeding allocation (World Water Assessment Program, 2009).In the case of overexploitation, the Commissions actions are limited to warning and persuasion(though the benefit of persuading local authorities against overexploitation after the fact is questionable, see Li and Beresford et al., 2011, pp.
951—969). Despite provisions and principles for water rights transfers, there are no specific regulations on conditions, procedures, and operating guidelines for such transfers. Furthermore, there is a lack of stakeholder inputs from affected provinces for feedback, which creates an adverse relationship between RBMCs and local governments, which greatly reduces the possibility of public participation and supervision for river management (Li and Beresford et al., 2011).Indeed, it has been argued that the concept of IWRM has too much western liberalism imbedded within it (such as transparency and responsible government) to be useful to China’s resource management (Mollinga and Hong et al., 2005, pp. 310—345).Therefore cohering all the levels of government and their ministerial portfolios in China continues to be troubled by the fundamental structural incompatibilities that
55 Liberthal and Oksenberg pointed out in 1988, as institutions have different financial profiles, subordinate unites and different career path for its officials.
These institutional weaknesses throughout the water governance system not only mean that water continues to be badly managed with little accountability, it has led to an inherent weakness of enforcement and inability to carry out the water conservation targets set out by the extensive and aspirational legislative ordinances, which will be further discussed below.
2) Lack of Enforcement
Needless to say, laws and policies are only meaningful if the government enforces them, but the lack of enforcement for water regulations and fee collection has been well documented (Schwartz, 2003, pp. 50).Most literature point towards high levels of ‘local protectionism’ (Wing-Hung Lo and Tang, n.d.; van Rooji,
2013; Palmer, 1998, pp. 788—808; Mol and Carter, 2006, pp. 149—170; Li, 2014, p. 103)as a reason for the lack of enforcement of environmental regulation, citing the Chinese idiom ‘sky is high and emperor far away’ (“天高皇帝远”) (Economy,
2003), which suggests that laws are not implemented due to the limited reach of the central government. The centralized top down system lacks personnel to enforce each level of government, because local actors do not share the environmental concerns of national regulation and have stopped regular enforcement (Wang, 2013;
Van Rooij, 2006, pp. 57—74). Indeed, the fragmentation between central agencies and local bureaus means that though the central government has created laws, they have little control over their actual implementation, because of human tendencies towards violation, conflicting local interests and lack of reliable data.
This is partly due to the inevitable lack of flexibility in regulatory planning for a semi-authoritarian state. For example, the system of law making from a
56 centralized government necessarily creates laws that are inherently rigid. Laws written with a ‘one size fits all approach’ at a top level were problematic because the lawmakers cannot possibly foresee every possible scenario and make the laws flexible enough to fit all situations. This problem is exponentially worsened for a country with the size and complexity of China. This structural problem also makes enforcement highly difficult down the road. It would require a highly large effective and lucid taskforce to enforce all centralized policy and law in China, a taskforce that clearly does not exist currently (Edmund, 2011; Kapp, 1974; Han and Zhang,
2006, pp. 271—292; Gilley, 2012, pp. 287—307; Xue and Simonis et al., 2007, pp.
669—676). On the contrary, the centralized legislative system hides high levels of fragmentation within China. Therefore, more often than not, this centralized system has not been able to enact some of its more ambitious goals, such as a comprehensive water pollution monitoring and prevention, simply because the scale of control it required was unfeasible and met with too much opposition. 11
Moreover, the lack of enforcement for water governance is almost guaranteed by the new Water Law , which has created many loopholes for local manipulation. Article 44 critically notes “medium and long-term plans of supply and demand of local water resources shall be formulated by water administration departments of the local governments concerned at or above the county level…in accordance with…the actual conditions of local areas concerned, and shall be executed after their inspection by development planning department of the local
11 Such was the case for the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Law revision, which failed to meet even mild expectations after negotiations and bargaining watered down the regulation. The process and the problems with negotiating with various parties from the NPC is well documented in Alford and Liebman, 2001.
57 governments concerned’. 12 Autonomy is also granted for determining water prices and collecting water fees by Art 34 (Zhang and Mol et al., 2007, pp. 659-668;
Zhong and Mol, 2008, pp. 899—913; Zhong and Mol et al., 2008, pp. 863—
877).As suchwater resource allocation plans are viewed by local authorities as more of a report, with aspirational targets, rather than regulatory requirements (Gao, 2006;
Chen and Wang et al., 2013, pp. 1457—1472). Furthermore, not all water uses are measured and managed bypermits and though water rights trading has been proposed to promote efficientwater resources allocation, the actual management stilllargely depends on administrative command and control. Withunderdeveloped water rights, it is difficult to regulate water use within this framework (Zheng and
Wang et al., 2012, pp. 1107—1123).
Insufficient water abstraction data also aggravates the lack of enforcement, particularly in the case of groundwater management (Wang et al, 2007), where there is little regulatory framework in place and often there is no volumetric data on water extraction from underground (Liao and Gao et al., 2008). Though it is technically required that well drilling permits are obtained before well owners begin drilling, according to survey data, less than 10 percent of well owners have done so
((Webber and Barnett et al., 2008, pp. 617—625). Only 5 percent of community leaders believed that well drilling decisions required consideration of well spacing, thus leaving groundwater resources completely unregulated.
3) Water Cadres
It has been interesting to witness the application of political incentives for
water quality management, as a way to compensate for the lack of enforcement
12 Kim, 1994 has further analysized this and showed that, the new Water Law is different from the old Water Law only in the sense that it now requires “medium- term” water supply and demand plans, in addition to “long-term” plans.
58 issue previously discussed. The cadre system has had mixed success in its implementation. On the one hand, if official data is to be trusted, at the end of the
11 th FYP, environmental cadre system and ‘Energy Saving and Emission
Reduction’ targets have driven positive government and enterprise action (Wang,
2010).On the other hand,the system only works if the data can be accurately recorded and collected, and because environmental targets continue to conflict with economic goals, the cadre system still suffers from some of the weakness in implementation. Indeed, there have been many reports of overtly illegal behavior or collusion among government officials to falsify performance (Wang, 2010).
Moreover, this system perpetuates the centralized power of the CCP and does not offer new solutions for the systemic institutional fragmentation that diminishes its political will (Van Rooij, 2006), nor does it help to integrate transparency and citizen support into the system (Van Rooij, 2006). Rather, it often places local governments against the interest of water users and creates social conflicts in its implementation. Indeed, it has been documented that local governments would cut off power to factories and other public service just so that they could meet these draconian and unrealistic targets set by the CCP.
Though it has been suggested that the cadre system could produce water
quality controlover the long term if it incentivized political support and developed
funding for environmental protection agencies to create accurate quantified water
quality data (Golding, 2013), it must be remembered that water quality is only one
aspect of water governance. Cadre-like incentives have been known to work for
‘rough results’ like pollution abatement targets, but changing supply and demand
patterns on a holistic basin-wide level would be much more complex. It will require
cadres to encourage water savings from all sectors (especially the agricultural
59 sector) and instigate proper systems of calculating volumetric data on a local level.
Thus, it is questionable whether such an instrument can truly solve the water governance problem in China.
60
D. Limits to Market Mechanisms
Though the CCP has made progressive moves towards economizing water and using market mechanism as a demand-side incentive for conservation, it will be argued that due to a lack of institutional reforms, China’s move towards water pricing has been ambiguous and ambivalent. In order to truly save water, the CCP must encourage water saving from its biggest water users, which is currently the agricultural sector. It currently uses nearly 70 percent of the water withdrawn, and without pricing mechanisms that encourage irrigation savings, there will not be substantial reduction in water use. However, the way in which water is priced for irrigation and the demand inelasticity of water in relation to price have significantly weakened the effectiveness of market mechanism currently employed by the CCP.
1) Lack of Institutional Reforms
First and foremost, it must be emphasized that fundamentally, the fact that water prices are regulated by the government and not calculated by pure market mechanism (such as supply and demand) mean that China has not truly embraced water pricing as a way to manage water use. Today, pricing bureaus have continued to have the ultimate decision making position in regard to pricing, and water tariffs do not cover the cost of supply, let alone the marginal cost of use. Generally water supply is still heavily subsidizedin China (Peng, 2010, pp. 3-22). This lack of commitment to using pricing mechanism will do little to curb water use, because unless price truly reflects the quantity of water supply available, it does little to encourage conservation. Thus it is not surprising that water demand hasn’t significantly responded to a rise in pricing water.
61 Second, CCP’s implementation of pricing mechanisms in the agricultural sector havebeen haphazard and its differentiated water charge methods for surface and groundwater will also do little to encourage water savings. In general, water prices for surface water are calculated on the basis of acreage of cultivated land and the type of crop planted, rather than on volume of water extracted (Han and Zhao,
2007, pp. 1472—1478;Lohmar and Wang et al., 2003).There is no restriction placed on the volume of water extracted, and little standardization of fee assigned per unit of irrigated land, which is highly dependent on local conditions (Calow and
Howarth et al., 2009, pp. 227—248).Therefore, the increase in cost of water is unlikely to affect the irrigated area and the amount of water used per family farm
(Wang and Huang et al., 2009, pp. 141—158). Indeed, in many cases, there are no instruments to measure volume withdrawn (Xie, 2009). Instead, the water scarcity and rise in prices have commonly led to two types of responses. One, some farmers shift to growing higher valued crops such as vegetables and fruits, which does little to ease the water usage because they require more water to farm (and it has been pointed out that changes in crop type dangerously shifts the spectrum of food security in China). Two, farmers move to using more groundwater, which is already a depleted resource (and its pricing will be discussed below). In any case, it is clear that the lack of volumetric pricing for surface water will do little to encourage water savings from the agricultural sector.
At the same time, groundwater is charged only on the basis of the expense of power and equipment for pumping the water from the well. Thus, its price is largely varied based on the depth of the well, what type of equipment and fuel is used
(Yang and Zhang et al., 2003, pp. 143—161), whilst the groundwater resource itself remains essentially a free good. There is also little control over the digging of wells,
62 and aquifers continue to be tapped into at a dangerous rate.This goes directly to explaining why groundwater has been so depleted in the Northern Basins. The situation has not been addressed by better regulating the price of groundwater. In the future, there may be even more regulatory challenges for groundwater managements. As photovoltaic pumping instruments become cheaper, it is foreseeable that the problem of groundwater over-exploitation will worsen unless better volumetric monitoring and pricing is put into place.
Furthermore, even with the artificially low prices of water, the ratio of water fee collection remain low. Nation-wide it is estimated that only 50 to 60 percent of irrigation water fees are exacted (Jiang, 2009).The governments’ leniency towards farmers is not surprising given the socio-cultural background of Chinese farmers.
One of the first battlegrounds of the Cultural Revolution in 1965 was based on a dispute over whether or not to charge farmers water fees on a volumetric basis. The suggestion of ‘capitalist’ incentives was seen as anti-Marxist and almost hereticalat the time (Nickum, 2010). Today, these communistic intuitions remain, and charging water on a volumetric basis may lead to social unrest because in the 3-H region, the agricultural sector is still dominated bysmall-sized subsistence farmers, who would not be able to pay higher water fees. Most farms don’t even have volumetric measuring facilities to keep their water consumption in check, or any means to calculate volumetric pricing (Liao and Gao et al., 2008).
Last but not least, the imprecise system of water rights also limits the effectiveness of pricing water, as it is unclear whether water permitsare be transferable or exchangeable (Huang and Rozelle et al., 2006, pp. 23—26; Liu,
2003; Yan and Weimin, 2010, pp. 1--4). It is generally accepted that there is no rights basis upon which reallocation of water resources can be compensated. So far,
63 transfer of water from agricultural to industrial use and allocation between provinces have been all been conducted by administrative means (Liao, 2008; Rong,
2009, p. 39; Bruns and Ringler et al., 2005). Neither water authorities nor individuals are allowed to sell water, which remains the property of the State
(Australia China Environment Development Program, 2006).Thus water authorities and individuals have little incentive to reduce their use of water because their reduction cannot be traded for economic gains. Water authorities on a local level tend to supply water as much as possible in order to collect water fees and charges in order to raise revenue for their own irrigation project.
2) Water’s Price Inelasticity
Many have studied the price responsiveness of pricing water in recent years, and scholars have shown that below a certain price threshold, demand for water is almost completely inelastic (Moore and Gollehon et al., 1994, pp. 859—874;
Gardner, 1997; Schaible, 1997, pp. 163—177; Iglesias and Garrido et al., 1998, pp.
26—28; Varela-Ortega and M Sumpsi et al., 1998, pp. 193—202;Berbel and
Gomez-Limon, 2000, pp. 219—238). That is, no matter the increase in the price of water, the demand will not decrease proportionally in response. Water’s price elasticity of demand is highly influenced by the type of water users and whether they have other substitutes and alternatives (Yang and Zhang et al., 2003, pp. 143--
161). Unfortunately in the case of China, where nearly 70 percent of withdrawal is from the agricultural sector, farmer’s demand tends to be particularly inelastic with respect to price. Moreover, the way in which water fees are charged is not uniform, and also does little to encourage water savings.
As it has been briefly mentioned before, most farmers in the 3-H region rely on small family based semi-self sufficient farming. Crop farming is a major
64 provider of rural employment, as farmers cannot freely reallocate in search of other modes of living. Most farmers’ profit margins are already low or negative, which makes high yields and irrigation a necessity (without irrigation, only summer crops could be produced). Without any substitutes, their demand on water will be irresponsive to changes in pricing, because their very livelihood depends upon irrigation. Therefore, raising prices of water will do little to encourage savings unless other social factors are also managed in a coherent manner.
65
E. Some Reflections
The above discussion illustrates just some of the inherent barriers to institutional and economic water governance that China has utilized in recent years, due to the nature of its semi-authoritarian fragmented state. It has show that though
China’s centralized political engine does have the power to control and price its
CPR, the effectiveness of its policies and prices are limited. In terms of its legal regime, the evolutionary way by which its water regulations and institutions was created has produced a system that is inherently fragmented, both vertically and horizontally, thus making enforcement difficult on a local level.
On the other hand, because the CCP’s commitment to economic instruments has been ambiguous, the pricing of water has had little impact. The lack of purely market based pricing based on supply and demand, the lack of volumetric pricing of water, and the lack of water rights have done little to incentivize water savings. This is partly due to the ideological difficulty the CCP has for pricing common poolresources, given its politically communist history, and partly due to the fact that water use from irrigation amounts to 70 percent of withdrawal, and raising the cost of water will have social inequity implications. 13 In 2013, though the Joint Standard on Water Resource Fee , written and coordinated by the NDRC and the MWR stipulated that in 2015, it will strictly enforce groundwater minimum tariffs as high as 4 RMB/m, it conscientiously noted that it will continue to support ‘agricultural water consumption by exempting or lowering water tariffs within certain consumption range’. From this one can infer that the government’s concern for
13 Particularly amid rising food and energy prices. An online survey at www.people.com.cn, reported in the Chinese media, indicated that more than 60 percent of Chinese citizens are opposed to seeing increases in their water bills.
66 social stability has curbed it from truly committing to pricing water to encourage water savings.
Thus, with barriers to water management from both economic and
legislative solutions, the water problems in the northern 3-H basins have continued
to worsen, and is even more under threat from increase demand from urbanization
for energy demands and climate change risks. Over the past few years, water
allocation has been increasingly shifted from the agricultural to industrial use,
which has the potential to create social instability in the north. Despite both
centralized and decentralized efforts to manage the waters, the push for water
saving has yielded only modest results. In 2010, it was reported that there was a
reduction of 8.2 percent in the water used for producing 10,000 yuan of GDP
(Freeman, 2010).As such, the current efforts will do little to contain the profound
water scarcity problems set out in Chapter 1, and the social and economic issues
they will created.
The institutional and social barriers to effective governance of water are
difficult to resolve, and it is unlikely to be fixed any time soon. Viewing the water
scarcity in the Northern regions within this contextgoes some way towards
explaining why large projects such as the South-North Diversion Projects are
underway, as it is a supply side solution that will ease the water shortage in the short
run.The following chapter will further explore the cultural aspect of water
management in China, and pose new explanation for China’s tendency toward big
projects.
67
CHAPTER 4
IV. CULTURE (S) OF WATER
68
A. Introduction to a Cultural Vantage Point
The legislative, economic and social context that water management exists in helps to explain in part, why the Diversion Project may appeal as a solution for the water scarcity problem in the Northern region. In Chapter 4 of this paper, the subtext of the diversion project will be explored, through investigating the ‘culture’ of water in China.
1)Culture, culture, everywhere
Everywhere it seems that cultural analysis is in ascendance as a new vantage point with which to view polarity or contradictions in policy and legislative choices
(Wallimann, 2013; Sarat and Simon et al., 2003). That culture exists in a space that is both explicit and implicit in the environmental arena and that its influence in both formal and informal governance should not be understated. As legal realism has recognized in the last decades, governments often rely heavily on the methodologies and constructs of social sciences for informing the exercise of governmental power.
The power of culture for affecting political agendas has proven extremely prescient, especially in the arena of propaganda and political mass communication (Cheek,
1997).This is unsurprising, for environmental laws, policies and instruments are rule forming constructs, aimed at managing social interactions, which means that it must necessarily interact with cultural ideas of the resource that they are attempting to regulate. Therefore, it is encouraging that legal studies have begun to emphasize viewing the law through cultural lenses, invoking narratives of its creation and construction (for more, see Sarat and Kearns, 2000).As Clifford Geertz’ pointed out, even law itself is a ‘distinctive manner of imagining the real’ (Geertz, 1983).
69 In the case of water resource management, water culture interacts with the individual and the political bodies made up of the individual, through their social relationship with resources. In 1993, the United Nations recognized the concept of
‘water culture’ with its 193 resolution for World Water Day (UNESCO, 1993). The
Director-General of UN’s Educational Scientific and Cultural Association
(‘UNESCO’) emphasized that water has a cultural function and vice-versa, and understanding the culture of water among the society and social processes for looking at water as a resource, noting that ‘the nexus between culture and nature is the avenue for understanding resilience, creativity and adaptability in both social and ecological systems. In this perspective, sustainable water use and, hence, a sustainable future depend on the harmonious relationship between water and culture. Consequently, it is vital that water management and governance take cultural traditions, indigenous practices and societal values into serious account’
(UNESCO, 1993).
The difficulties in speaking about a culture of water are the care with which generalizations must be made. The traditional way of studying culture as a ‘complex whole that incorporates art, morals, law, custom, belief and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ (Tylor, 1889)has been dismantled and vastly criticized (see, for example ‘Forget Culture’, Brightman, 1995, pp. 509—
546). It would be foolish to suggest there is one, monolithic ‘Culture’ that informs the entire rule making associated with water governance in China, which is far from being the case. The boundaries of political bodies as a single entity are continuously breached by globalization, the internet, and Chinese governance models are more comparative and pluralistic than ever. The incorporation of integratedwater resource
70 management into the new Water Law in China is a testament to the pluralism of
China’s governance model today (Rahaman and Varis, 2005, pp. 15—21). 14
Rather, culture is an additional tool with which one can build common links among the diverse knowledge strategies associated with water governance in China.
In Chapter 3, it has been shown that the limitations of economic and legislative tools has made meeting the challenges of water shortage in the 3-H basins a difficult, if not impossible, task for the CCP. Here in Chapter 4, the culture of water will proffer a subtextual view, and seeks to offer a new terrain of possibilities in explaining why the central government has moved to constructing projects such as the South-North Transfer. The cultural lives of water narratives will contribute to what Johnson called ‘asymmetries in the ability of individuals and social groups to define and realize their needs’(Johnson, 1986, pp. 38—80) and it exists in symbiosis with governance.Water, as it exists in the socio-historical imaginations of the people will to some extent, inform the way in which it has been governed, and the governance of water through policies and water projects. These practices in return imbricate the consciousness and understanding of water resources, constantly renewing and re-enforcing it at the same time. Such that, they have a powerful presence, how ever implicit and fluid they may be so that it floats upon a ‘moving hegemony’ (Raymond, 1977), 15 which can explain the ‘coexistence of discipline and
struggle, of subjection and subversion and direct attention toward a dynamic
analysis of what it means to be caught up in power’ (Yngvesson, 1989, pp. 1693).
14 IWRM evolved internationally with the global water partnership under the UN, incoporating water management paradigms from all over the world. 15 Raymond Williams defined hegemony as a ‘complex interlocking of political, social and cultural forces’ that sustains forms of inequality and domination.
71 2) Methodology
This chapter will begin with a brief discussion on the history of China’s hydraulic projects,which puts the current discussion of the South-North Diversion project in the context of China’s long history of engineering solutions for water management. Then, some cultural identities of water and its presence in Chinese consciousness will be channeled into understanding the importance of ‘governing the waters’ for the State.
Looking at water governance in China through a ‘culture’ of water as a tool of inquiry requires first that some parameters be built, as the field of relationships for something as ubiquitous as ‘water’ can be expanded ad infinitum . Therefore, the following chapter will primarily investigate the relationship of water to three cultural components in Chinese society, 1) classical philo-religious texts, 2) folklore and mythology and 3) water in the political consciousness of the ruling elite.
In the first part, metaphoric representations of water in Confucianism and
Daoism will be discussed so as to illustrate its important pseudo-religious position in Chinese thought. While Confucianism and Daoism were only two of many contending schools of thought that arose out of the fifth to third century BC, they have been the most enduring influences in Chinese culture(Yao and Zhao, 2010).A full explanation of the relationship between Chinese religiosity and its philosophy is far beyond the scope of this paper, and they have been amply studied and explained by Laurence Thompson (Miller, 2006). What is important in the context of looking at water in these philosophies is that Chinese religion has been largely a humanist or naturalist in character. Many scholars have observed that the Chinese religious tradition did not have the characteristics of reverence for a transcendental being or principle (Hall and Ames, 1987; Allan and Cohen et al., 1979). Rather, Chinese
72 culture has a religiosity that is based on a close relationship between root metaphors and Chinese thought, and that generally, it was believed that ‘by studying nature, one could understand mankind’ (Allan, 1997).Indeed, George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson have argued that we live in metaphors, and that metaphors are the most basic concept in a culture(Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Even dead metaphors such as
‘arms of a chair’ or ‘clock face’ are constantly re-enforce the perception of the object itself. Therefore this section will investigate the metaphoric representations of water in traditional chinese philosophy which will allow some insight into the cultural position water in chinese consciousness.
In the second part, the representation of water in Chinese mythology will be discussed. Mythology is important in the cultural sphere of reference because it is a particular type of speech that does not simply communicate an object, a concept or an idea. It has an entirely different mode of signification (Barthes, 1972). In the system of semiology, mythic stories have a tri-dimensional pattern which shifts the way in which meaning is transformed into cognition, and easily passes the subject of a myth into ideology (see Table 6 below). This makes it a particularly persuasive mode of communication, as it presupposes a signifying consciousness and is
‘justified by the very history of its writing’ (Barthes).
TABLE 5. MYTHS IN SEMIOLOGY 1. Signifier 2. Signified LANGUAG 3. Sign E { I. SIGNIFIER II SIGNIFIED MYTH III SIGN
{
This is why nations have been founded and consolidated on the basis of mythology
(Grandazzi, 1997) and why they still capture cultural analysis today.Here, narratives
73 of water in Chinese myths will be analyzed in order tounderstand how and why the rivers of China have been historically politicized.
The third and last part of this chapter will examine more recent political history of China and the influence of the CCP on how water has beenconceptualized since the Cultural Revolution. Of particularly interest in the context of water management, is the rise of technocrats in China’s leadership and bureaucracy.
Looking at the culture of power in the CCP political engine is important because water governance operates under its zeitgeist.It will be argued that the concentration of engineers and scientists in China’s ruling elite system hasnecessarily lead to a instrumental view of water, which then informs the method of its governance.
74
B. CCP’s Hydraulic Projects
Since the Chinese Communist Party became inaugurated in 1949, China has become the largest dam building country with over 22,000 large dams (dams over
15 metres in height), which accounts for nearly half of the total number of large dams in the world (World Commission on Dams, 2000). Currently there are plans to build another 290 more and the State Council has committed to increase hydro- power from 19 percent to 40 percent by 2015 (12 th FYP, 2011). Water engineering, flood control and dam building have preoccupied the CCP. When the US Resource
Delegation visited China in 1979, it recorded that from 1949 to 1972, over 12000 dams were completed at ‘amazing speed, more rapidly, in fact, than in the United
States where far more capital intensive methods are utilized’ (Nickum, 1979).
TABLE 6: DAMS COMPLETED BETWEEN 1949-72
(Nickum, 1979)
These do not take into account the hundreds of other small complex water control
systems have been built ranging from canals to small structures and tributaries
(Buckley, 2003; Dai and Adams et al., 1994).
75 In the 21 st century, investments in water projects have exponentially increased, characterized by the building of large dams, reservoirs, hydropower generation and water diversion projects (see Figure 10: Liu and Zang et al., 2013, pp. 633--643).
FIGURE 13. HISTORY OF WATER PROJECTS FUNDING
Most recently, the Three Gorges Dam is China’s most notorious daming
project, cited to have displaced 1.2 million people, caused 13 cities, 140 towns and
1350 villages to flood. The length of its reservoir is more than 600 kilometres, and
is said to be an engineering feat that rivals the building of the Great Wall
(International Rivers, 2010). It has been the source of much controversy, due to the
spiraling costs, changes of building plan, issues of corruption and human rights
violations. Since its completion, it has drawn even more ire from international
communities because it has caused new landslides, water pollution and contribution
to structural problems (China Daily, 2010). In 2007, the Secretary General of the
Yangtze River Forum told the Wall Street Journal that the possible issues were
much worse than originally expected (Oster, 2014).
76 Of course, the construction of water works on a large scale is nothing new to
China, which has had a long tradition of manipulating the waters. The work on the
Grand Canal, which is the longest artificial river in the world, is said to have begun in the Spring and Autumn Period, around 720 to 481 BC and has had a history of
2500 years. The Dujian Yan irrigation system in Chengdu is said to be the most admirable example of an integrated ancient hydro-engineering project (Smil,
2004)and it was constructed in 230 BC to divert a flood prone river bed into 520 branches of canals totally 1,165kilometres, with further dikes and dams down the flow. The vast creations by hydraulic engineers have been well documented by
Joseph Needham in his encyclopedic work Science and Civilization in China and well encapsulated in Water Engineering in Ancient Civilisations (Viollet, 2007).
Upon reviewing the history of water governance projects in China, the intuitiveness of Wittfogel’s ‘hydraulic state’ thesis seems clear. The South-North
Diversion Project is but one participant in a long history of large water works stretching backin time, adding to the landscape of its water management culture.
The following parts of this chapter will seek to examine how such a system may have formed over thecourse of Chinese history.
77
C. Water in Chinese Culture
It is a great testament to the importance of water that emerging from their
aquatic homes, our vertebrate ancestors did not abandon their watery medium, but
took it with them in their very cells. Water is intricately veined with the flow of
humanity, with pieces of bone excavated along the Awash River in Ethiopia and a
piece of jaw excavated beside an ancient lake in Kenya: Ardipitehcusramidus and
Australopithecus anamensis, they are about 4.4 million years old. Human life and civilization developed within easy range to lakes, rivers, seas, at the Tigris and
Euphrates, the Ganges, the Yangtze, the Nile….as agriculture developed in the rich deposits of the floodplains, as irrigation harness the water for crops (Hass, 2010).
Now, rivers supply 20 percent of the world’s electrical power, through hydroelectric dams and thermoelectric power plants. Their names are still magic – Amazon,
Congo, Mississippi, Niger, Tiber, Seine, Ganges, Yellow – rivers still appear in the consciousness of the modern world, in imaginations and nostalgic memoires, in poetry and mythology. T. S. Elliot once wrote of the Mississippi in Saint Louis, ‘but
I think that the river is a strong brown god’. ‘Under various names,’ wrote Czesclaw
Milosz, who grew up along the Neman in Lithuanian, ‘I have praised only you, rivers. You are milk and honey and love and death and dance’.
The effervescent intimacy between water and culture has carried throughout time for centuries. For China, the centrality and instrumenalization of water in the cultural imagination has transformed it from being simply a CPR to a figurative representation of a resource that can serve to legitimate the exercise of power by its rulers. Three aspects of its conceptualization lends to this argument: 1) how it is idealized andinstrumentalised the philosophy of LaoZi and Confucius; 2) how it is
78 represented and politicized incosmogony of Yu the Great and the ensuing folklores;
3) how it is informed by the Cultural Revolution and the rise of a generation of technocrats in the ruling system, whose mechanistic view of nature is refracted through the Marxist bureaucracy back onto its historical roots, and doubly reinforces the engineering solutions.
1) Water in Confucianism and Daoism
‘Have you not seen how the Yellow River, which flows from heaven And hurries toward the sea, never turns back?’ - Li Bai, translated by A.C. Graham
As one surveys the metaphor of water in Confucian and Daoist text, it is clear thatChinese culture has a fundamental reverence for the ‘teachings’ of water, which generates two important distinctions from Occidental thought. First, water is revered, and metaphorically linked to the ethics of ‘good’ governance and ‘good’ living; and second, one’s understanding of natural resources is never without man
(as viewer). That is to say, there has never been a non-anthropogenic way of looking at water inChinese culture, as opposed to the idea of ‘wilderness’ found in the works of Thoreau and Muir(Oelschlaeger, 1991). This point will become important in the following parts of this chapter, in the discussions of politicizing the rivers.
It is interesting to note is that Chinese folk rites do not have a specific deity
(it is more focused on ancestry worship). The term often used for the supreme force is ‘tian’, meaning literally sky (Callicott and Ames, 1989; Allan, 1991; Allan, 2014, pp. 1-46). The fact that a natural phenomenasuch as ‘sky’ can be the supreme entity,to which all of Chinese culture owes its creation to, is important in terms of how a relationship between human and nature is formed. If one can look to the a natural phenomena for worship and guidance, then it is unsurprising that in both
79 Confucianand Daoist thought, one can find humans looking to nature for ethical guidance (Confucius. and Waley, 2000). In this way, both philosophical thought are
‘naturalist’, in that they are based on the observation of natural things.
In Confucius, the reverence to water is well documented in the
Analects ,where he is frequently observing the behavior of water, noting ‘the intelligent finds joy in water’ 16 and that ‘there is an art to looking at water’. 17 In
Mencius, water metaphors are the basis on which Confucius reasons the nature of
man. When asked about whether mankind is good or evil, Confucius replied ‘'man's
nature is like water whirling round in a corner. Open a passage for it to the east, and
it will flow to the east; open a passage for it to the west, and it will flow to the west.
Man's nature is indifferent to good and evil, just as the water is indifferent to the
east and west’, and that ‘life is what we call nature’. 18 Further, he teaches that the
most admirable principles on which a man can model himself is found in the ways
of water, saying:
“Water, which extends everywhere and gives everything life without acting is like virtue. Its stream, which descends downward, twisting and turning but always following the same principle, is like rightness. Its bubbling up, never running dry, is like the way. Where there is a channel to direct it, its noise is like an echoing cry and its fearless advance into a hundred meter valley, like valor. Used as a level, it is always even, like law. Full, it does not require a ladle, like correctness. Compliant and exploratory, it reaches to the tiniest point, like perceptiveness. That which goes to it and enters into it, is cleansed and purified, like the transformation of goodness. In twisting around ten thousand times but always going eastward, it is like will. That is the reason that when a gentle man sees a great river, he will always look upon it.” (Allan, 1997).
Not only is water revered then, it is a figurative representation for the ethics
of how best to conduct oneself. Lao Zi goes further to teach that water is
16 VI, 22. 17 VII, 24. 18 XXI,1.
80 metaphorically a lesson for good governance and leaders should behave like water.He interprets water to have the characteristics of exemplary leadership, because despite all of its powers it accepts the lowest place: ‘all streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power…if you want to govern people, you must place yourself below them. If you want to lead people, you must learn how to follow them’ (Johnston and Hiwasaki, 2012). Moreover, he has emphasized that ‘the highest good is like water’(Lewis, 2007).
These metaphors of the virtues of water illustrate two important aspects of understanding water in traditional Chinese culture. First, water has been conceptualized and heightened as a resource in the common consciousness as animportant principle upon which man and civilization must understand in order to live a good life, and by extension, a good leader. Second, and more subtle, is the fact that in all the considerations of water in classical texts, water is never discussed in absence of the discussion about mankind. As it was shown, water as a resource is viewed through the eyes of LaoZi and Confucius, and then metaphorically used to illustrate the principles of living. Water itself does not exist in abstract, and is constantly evaluated through the eyes of man in anthropomorphic terms. This anthropomorphic view of water is important when one compares it to the romanticism of nature as ‘wilderness’ in western societies by late 19 th century,
where writers and painters elated the concept of nature in the absence of man
(Callicott and Frodeman, 2009)upon which contemporary western environmental
philosophies such as deep ecology have been built. Deep ecologic is a philosophy
that arose out of Scandinavia in the early 1970s, which has argued for the intrinsic
value of natural resources in absence of man’s intervention, and that they must be
protected for their own sake (Naess, 1972). The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess
81 described nature as being of more than just instrumental value to humans,and the deep ecology movement has led to the creation of national parks in many western countries as a place of ‘wildness’, set away from humans, so as to ensure its conservation. 19 However, in comparison, such a philosophy towards nature has
never existed in traditional Chinese thought. Water, as it has been seen, is always in
the human world, being interpreted by man, interacting with the social discourse of
‘things’. This instrumentalization of water, coupled with the reverence for it and its
metaphoric relationship to the ethics of living and leadership, has placed the ‘water’
in the perfect position to be politicized, as the next part will elaborate.
2) Water in Mythology
‘Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestations. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in sciences and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth’ – Joseph Campbell
There are many flood narratives in the myths of the world, ranging from the adventures of Gilgamesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh to God’s flooding of earth in the
Bible. The power of myths and folklore is that they are ubiquitous in the common consciousness of people. For example, who would not be familiar with the story of
Noah and his ark full of animals in the Occidental world? Similarly, it would be difficult to find someone in China who does not know of the story of Yu, the Great.
It will be shown here that the importance of water and its anthropomorphic understanding discussed above is further instrumentalized in the mythology of Yu,
19 American Wilderness : A New History: A New History, chapter 5 Natural history, romanticism and Thoreau. 73-91..
82 and it will be argued that this myth has politicized the waters and rivers of China ever since.
First accounts of the mythical flood are scattered through numerous works, some like the Zhou Odes date as far back as 1000 BC (Lewis, 2006). Some are cosmogonies that explain the creation of earth from the flood, others are more historical, accounting for the creation of the first dynasty in China, the Xia Dynasty.
In any case, Yu is the central figure in most of its accounts. The flood myth for
China is recorded thus in Mencius:
“The world was generated long ago; there is a time of order, and then a time of disorder. When it was the time of Yao, water flowed counter to its current and in undated the central states. Snakes and dragons lived in it. The people had nowhere to settle. Those in the low lands built nests and those on high, made cave dwellings. The Documents say, “The deluge is a warning to me.” By “deluge,” it means “water everywhere.” [Yao] had Yu control it. Yu excavated the earth and channeled it to the sea. He drove away the snakes and dragons, banishing them to the grassy marshland. The water moved along courses in the earth; these were the Jiang (Yangzi), Huai He (Yellow River), and Han. The dangers and obstacles receded and the harm to people by birds and beasts diminished. Only then did people obtain level land to live on.” (Lewis 2006)
In the work of SimaQian (a official who recorded the legend of Yu the
Great), he wrote ‘the documents of the Xia Dynasty tell us that Emperor Yu spent thirteen years controlling and bring an end to the floods and during that period, though he passed by the very gate of his own house, he did not take the time to enter. Of all the rivers, the Yellow River caused the greatest damage to China by overflowing its banks an inundating the land, and therefore he turned all his attention to controlling it’ (SimaQian, translated by BurtonWatson).SimaQian goes on to describe in detail the dredging of the bed of the river (rather than diking it as his father had tried unsuccessfully) and guiding it to the sea. Some incarnations of the myth go even further to say that Yu was a great dragon spirit that defeated the
83 flood god(Zhao, 1989, pp. 231—246). It is said that when Yu died, the people could not accept any other successor but his son, thus began a long tradition of hereditary succession and the first Chinese dynasty, Xia.
Water is conceptualized in three important ways in the myth of Yu. First, water embodies power. In the Mencius version of the story, snakes and dragons lived in it. In other retellings, the river itself was a dragon, or a revered water god.
The animalization of rivers as ‘dragons’ is especially meaningful as dragons are emblems of imperial authority in ancient China. It is difficult to know which came first, whether the rivers were believed to be the personification of dragons and their power made them a symbol for imperial authority, or vice versa. In any case, the flood myth incorporated the two symbolically, which is further affirmed by the deity of ‘river dragons’: both the personification of the river as a god, which is worshipped by the locals, also as an animalized representation of the authority of the emperor. Today, many of the names of Chinese rivers still contain the word
‘dragon’ and the two are inextricably linked in the Chinese consciousness (Zhao,
1989). This reverence echoes the elated metaphoric tone of Dao Zi and Confucius, and reinforces the importance of water in the cultural landscape of China.
Second, waters are a force that can be channeled by humans for the greater good. In the Mencius version of the myth, water is represented as a chaotic force that threatens the livelihood of people. When it flooded, people had nowhere to settle. Its power and menace was an impediment for human development and a problem for society. Again, this concurs with Daoist and Confucian thought. Water is an instrument here, that must be channeled by humans so that it will cease being a threat to people’s livelihood. Its power to destroy is only matched by its ability to
84 nurture, and it all depends on how humans can interject themselves and manipulate the river.
Third, this myth has instilled in the Chinese consciousness a relationship
between controlling the waters, good governance, and leadership. The emphasis of
the dangers of the river and the ingenuity of Yu’s solution also adds to the ‘merit’ of
hydraulic solutions for water control. Though the story of Yu never returning home
in thirteen years may have been exaggerated, his dedication to the task importantly
marries the control of the water to the idea of good governance. Inthe figure of Yu,
three powerful figures are unified, ‘the dragon, the emperor and the water
controller,’(Zhao, 1989, pp. 231—246)promoting the idea that the waters of China
are resources, which must be controlled and harnessed by man so that the
population will flourish and be protected.Following this myth, many rulers and
dynasties have used the imagery of the management of water to legitimize imperial
power in China.
Indeed, the political aspect of water is well establishedin China if one looks
to the history of the Huang River (one of the 3-H river basins that has been the
subject of this paper), also known as the Yellow River (it earned its name due to the
colour of its sediments). No river in China has been more politicized than the
Yellow River, whose colouris the imperial colour of China itself. It is said that
‘there are hundreds of rivers in China, but there are only four major ones. Of these,
the Yellow River is the most prominent’ (Chang and Owen, 2010)and traditionally
it is described as the ‘mother river’ (Ma, 2004). Its power in times of flood has
made it intensely present in Chinese thought, such that it has been worshiped as a
god and offered human sacrifice (Granet, 1958). Since its conception in the myths
of Yu, controlling its floods became a powerful tool for legitimatizing emperorship
85 and epitomizing good governance for following dynasties (Davids and Others,
2006, p. 59) and it has been continuously diked and dredged by governing powers over the centuries (see for example, its extensive documentation in Needham and
Ling, 1971, Elvin and Liu, 1998).Needham cites Wilhelm in his work that when one looks to the hydraulic work that the yellow river has undergone, one can observe that ‘two basic features of Chinese agrarian society were incorporated into one: regulating waterways and organizing corvee labor’. Its manipulation by governments over the course of history have been well documented in the works of
SimaQian, the work of Pierre-Louis Viollet (Viollet, 2012), Christian Lamouroux
(in Elvin and Liu), and will not be repeated here. Only to say, the relationship between the Yellow River and politics has ebbed and flowed throughout Chinese history, demonstrating that water have influenced political activities and is then, in return, ‘incorporated into the game of human politics and changed by it’ (Zhang, n.p). In China, ithas been the stage and battleground for politics for centuries, and served as an emblem for legitimizing ‘good governance’ and governments.
Thus, the mythic portrayals of water coupled with the reverence for water and its anthropomorphic views throughout Chinese traditional thought have created a specific cultural view towards water governance. Water is powerful, instrumental and its governance is symbolic of good governance of the State. Therefore, controlling the waters and rivers in China has a legitimating effect on whoever is able to do so. This resonance should not be understated, as it may have created a subtext in Chinese water management where human intervention of the waterways is encouraged so as to legitimize State power. This will become significant as the next part of this paper discusses the rise of the elite in the CCP.
86 .
87
3) Water for Technocrats
‘Wave upon wave, each pushes past the last in the Yangtze River’ - Chinese Proverb
‘10 thousands things change but theynonetheless remain essentially the same’ 萬變不離其宗 － Chuang T’zu, <
In the narrative of how water is conceptualized and governed over the course of Chinese cultural heritage, it is necessary to consider carefully the influence of the
Marxist, Maoist and post-Mao ideology for the past 30 years. It will be shown here that dueto two epochal developments in China’s revolutionary history: the adoption of Marxist values for labour and the Maoist reforms in education, China has favoured engineers and scientists in forming its political personnel. Following Deng
XiaoPeng’s move towards economic development, the rise of technocrats in China was inevitable. When one takes into account the cultural heritage of the power of water governance discussed previously, it further explains the tendency towards project governance of water in China. The work in this part of the chapter is greatly indebted to the extensive works done by Joel Andreas and Li Cheng (Andreas,
2009; Li, 2001) whose primary interviews with Tsinghua students and teachers have formed the landscape of the study of Chinese technocrats. Both have argued that
China’s political institutions today resemble that of a ‘technocracy’, that is, the governance of a society by a group of experts who develop social policy on the basis of technological principles. Though their arguments have been soundly developed, the veracity of their claim is beyond the scope of this paper (as the definition of technocracy is still contested, for more information, see Burnham,
88 1941; Galbraith, 1967; Ellul, 1964). What will be focused upon is the process that institutionalized a generation of engineers and scientists as political leaders in
China, whose mechanized view of water resources has inevitably led to an era of engineering solutions. It will be illustrated here, that though Marxist, Communist ideology and the ancient Naturalism of Dao are drastically different, they eventually converge to the point of anthropomorphic instrumentalisation of water. It is as if the two are beginning on divergent points on a sphere, only to meet again in coherence.
It is as Chuang T’zu noted, everything may change though perhaps, they remain the same at the core of things.
Value of Labour in Marxism
The CCP was ultimately founded on the ideology of a classless society based on the work of Marx, in which labour was re-envisioned. He asserted that the
‘the greatest division of material and mental labour is the separation of town and country’, and the domination of property is one that has taken over the relationship between the two, creating un-egalitarian societies, and the relationship is further stripped by the separation of production and commerce (in ‘Opposition of the
Materialist and Idealist Outlook’, Marx and Engels et al., 1972). In his work on communism, he sought to eliminate the distinction between mental and physical labour (Meisner, 1982). In this way, pure intellectualism (mental labour) was associated with the bourgeois and against the egalitarian thrust of Marxism.
Thus, when CCP formed after the 1949 Chinese Revolution, controlled largely by peasant revolutionaries, in the stream of Marxist/Leninist philosophy, the first acts of the new regime was to dismantle the old system of elites who had political, economic and intellectual capital. This movement away from intellectualism allowed Mao to drastically change the nature of education for future
89 generations, and create a new system of political elites (Schurmann, 1968; Chen,
1975; Baum, 1964, pp. 1048-57; Macfarquhar, 1960).
Mao’s Education Reforms
‘I have just drunk the waters of Changsha And come to eat the fish of Wuchang. Now I am swimming across the great Yangtze, Looking afar to the open sky of Chu. Let the wind blow and waves beat, Better far than idly strolling in a courtyard. Today I am at ease. "It was by a stream that the Master said-- 'Thus do things flow away!' " Sails move with the wind. Tortoise and Snake are still. Great plans are afoot: A bridge will fly to span the north and south, Turning a deep chasm into a thoroughfare; Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west To hold back Wushan's clouds and rain Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges. The mountain goddess if she is still there Will marvel at a world so changed.’
- Mao ZeDong, <
The distrust of the intellectual elite meant nearly a quarter of a century of
attacks on intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution in an attempt to strip class
distinction between the educated elite and the workers. The Revolution was
launched in May 1966, when Mao proclaimed that bourgeois rightist influences are
gathering, which lead to millions of persecutions of anyone who was educated and
mass displacement of students during the ‘Down to the Countryside Movement’
where people of the age to enter into universitieswere sent to physical labour tasks,
rather thanallowed to study purely ‘intellectual’ pursuits.In universities such as
Tsinghua University, allegiances to the party had to be assured if one was to remain,
90 and many students who affirmed their ‘red’ party loyalty were still sent to the countryside. Yet despite his strong attempt to deemphasize education and mental labour, Mao’s ‘red and expert’ comment noted that ‘there is no doubt that politics and economy, and politics and technology should be united. It has been so in the past and will be so for ever. This is what red and expert mean. In future, the term
‘politics’ will continue to exist but in a different sense… Politics and technology must be combined together. In agriculture, this means carrying out experiments; in industries, understanding advanced models, trying out new techniques, and producing new goods’. This phrase installed a new era in the Chinese education system, the preference for ‘red’, meaning party loyal individuals who were ‘experts’ in industry that would advance technological work for China’s development (Li,
1992, pp. 898—899).So despite the wide persecution of intellectuals, a small group of technical experts were left unharmed, and sometimes, even encouraged in their work. Specialized schools were encouraged to ‘not spend much time on politics…to the neglect of specialized studies’ (Baum, 1964, pp. 1048-57). From the wide range of interviews and experiences gathered from this movement, one particular labour experience by students at Tsinghai is worth recounting here:
‘The previous summer [in 1970] most of the faculty of the water conservation department had been dispatched to various sites along the Yellow River. In line with Mao Zedong’s education philosophy…the top leader of the worker’s propaganda team, had declared that if the department remained on the university campus…it would continue to be “isolated from practice.” Instead….the university’s new leadership decided the appropriate place for the department’s work was on the banks of the Yellow River, where it could conduct “open door education” and practical research….For the next seven years, classes were held along the river….[Students and teachers] took part in solving the silting projects at the Sanmen Gorge dam and trained commune members to prevent soil erosion, build and maintain irrigation facilities, repair dikes and construct small dams for irrigation, flood control, and electricity generation. They promoted methods to prevent
91 soil erosion and tried to convince village leaders not to plant crops in mountainous terrain.’ (Andreas, 2009)
This episode shows that though Mao was essentially against the idea of creating a class of tertiary educated people, there was some room for compromise in the area of science and engineering (Meng and Gregory, 2002, pp. 935—959).In
1968, his July 21 Directive furtherexplained ‘it is still necessary to have universities; here I refer mainly to colleges of science and engineering. However, it is essential to shorten the length of schooling, revolutionize education, put proletarian politics in command, and take the road of the Shanghai Machine Tools
Plant in training technicians from among the workers’ (Andreas, 2009, 167). This is important because the Cultural Revolution decade is generally perceived as one of the most tumultuous period for Chinese system of knowledge, which fundamentally eroded its quality of teaching and education, and Mao continued his efforts against intellectual development with relentless campaigns against ‘rightist tendencies’
(Andreas, 2009, 167).Yet clearly, some level of schooling was permissible for practical knowledge and manual skills, because for Mao, the development of technology is a way to ensure the survival of the Chinese nation (Ouyang, 2003, pp.
177—193).The pragmatism of a technical education made it more defensible against the warring of ideologies during the Cultural Revolution, leaving its studies more intact than other disciplines.
Rise of Engineers post-Mao
Mao’s reluctant allowance for the continuation of studies of practical sciences throughout the Cultural Revolution and his preference for ‘red experts’ placed individuals with advanced studies in sciences or engineering in the most favourable position after Deng XiaoPing came into power. Following the death of
92 Mao in 1976, a new era of Communist Party politics was brought into place which championed a pragmatic approach of state governance, the same sense of pragmatism that saved the institution of scientific learning from Mao’s cultural revolution previously. Scientific management became the slogan of the new epoch, as well as the practice toward economic reform. The importance of education and technology for economic growth was emphasized and the program of hiring students and young teachers from the leading tertiary education centre Tsinghua
University was supported by Deng, who said that ‘after years of training, [they will] become a red and expert force for carrying out political work’ (Andreas,
266).Additionally, Hu Yaobang, the party secretary in 1980 notably also concurred that the Party should establish ‘the concept that all leaders must be trained specialists’ (Chen, 34). Their endorsement solidified the University as the centre of academic progress in China in the 1980s, attracting both high level government officials as professors and the best applicants from China (Li, 1992).
From this period, over a million specialists were recruited and a third generation of leaders formed in Beijing (Li, 1992, pp. 898—899). From 1978 to
1998, the number of college educated individuals that formed the Politiburo increased from 23 percent to 92 percent, the Party Central Committee from 26 percent to 92 percent and the State Council from less than 30 percent to 95 percent.
At the same time, engineers were considered to have the best qualification to be administrative and political leaders (Andreas, 2009, 239) over 73.8 percent of ministers and vise ministers in China studied Engineering and natural sciences in
1988 and more graduates from Tsinghua University rose to high level leadership positions since 1988 than any other university in China due to the strength of its engineering program (Li, 1992, 288; Li, 1994, pp. 1—30). By the 17 th National
93 Congress in 2007, every member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo wasan engineer by training, and its President Hu Jintao was a graduate of Tsinghua
University. 20
Technocrats’ Rule over Resources
This Cultural Revolution and its creation of a new class of leaders, trained in sciences rather than humanities, has a fundamental influence on how water is conceptualized in the elite governing bodies in China. One can intuitively sense that having such scientific background instilled in the elite educative process will necessarily affect the way resources are viewed by such an individual, who has undergone purely technical education. They may have a tendency to approach water resources as a problem solving exercise, and view it in abject quantitive terms. This may create an undercurrent of a cultural preference for engineering solution, which can go towards understanding why large hydraulic projects are still being instigated in China.
The extent to which the rise of technocrats in Chinaand its instrumentalized view towards water resources has influenced its water policies will never be precisely known. What is important to notice here is that there is a coherence when one looks at the conceptualization of ‘water’ in ancient China and post-Mao regimes, in that both have a tendency towards instrumentalizing water as a resource, to be formed and harnessed by human efforts. They both resonate a view of water that is anthropomorphic and political. This, in additionto the ancient reverence for water further compounds the view towards water as an object to be controlled and managed. Indeed, the CCP’s projects can be seen as one in a long history of water
20 By contrast, on current Politiburo, six of the seven members of the new Politburo Standing Committee, the party's top decision-making body, trained in social sciences and the humanities.
94 management narrative in China, in which a benevolent leader is proving his legitimacy and good governance by managing the waters for China.
95
CHAPTER 5
V. CONCLUSION : NO OTHER WAY BUT SOUTH -NORTH
96
As this paper has demonstrated, water exists in a complex system of governance, ideology and culture. In the legislative and policy sphere, its management lies at the nexus of energy, urbanization and food production, and therefore the way in which it is allocated has enormous social implications. The social aspects of governing water has been ever present in the cultural consciousness of mankind, which then in return, affects its governance. The interaction between all these aspects of water builds a multiplicit network for feedback mechanisms, which means that looking at how and why water is controlled has to take birds-eyed view across the contextual and subtextual frameworks surrounding waterin order to gain a holistic picture. This paper has taken the South-North Diversion Project as a point of entry into this intricate arena of inquiry, and asked whether such a project is justifiably in the Chinese water governance context.
Part two of the paper has shown that for a country as geographically large and diverse as China, managing its scarce water resources has proven to be an immense challenge in recent years because of the growing social inequity due to shifts of water allocation from the agricultural sector to the industrial sector. This is amply demonstrated in the uneven distribution of water between the South and the
North where the temporal shifts of water resources has worsened, making the 3-H basin highly at risk of water shortage. This problem is aggravated by the fact that population and energy resources such as coal dominate the Northern region, and the future demand from increasingly urbanized residences in the area has created an new allocation problem: the distribution of water allocation between the agricultural and the industrial sector. In a way, the South-North Diversion Project is simply a way in which China has tried to answer its imbalance spatial water availability and
97 secure water resources for the urbanizing community in the North without further disrupting the social inequities in the region.
Part three of this paper inserts the water scarcity problem into the policy making context, and illustrated that such supply-side solutions are employed because there are inherent institutional barriers to enforcing demand-side management in China. Legislatively, China’s current political arrangement is paradoxically hung between a semi-authoritarianism and fragmented, decentralized state. As such, there are horizontal and vertical fissures in its institutional arrangement, which creates barriers for implementing policies for water governance. Economically, the pricing incentives for water control will do little to encourage water savings because nearly 70 percent of water is used for irrigation, and farmers’ have a inelastic demand response to pricing changes. This is partly due to the fact that most are small and subsistence farmers, and also because of the lack of institutional support in place (for example, volumetric pricing and control of groundwater drilling). These institutional barriers explain why demand side policies have yielded little result in China, despite its development over the past decades, and further illustrates why the Diversion Project may be taking place.
The final part of this paper delved into the cultural subtext of water management by looking at the mythic, metaphorical and political representations of water in Chinese history. It suggested that an undercurrent carries water management in China. In the cultural subtext, water isinstrumentalised, politicizedand a legitimating tool for those who govern it. Historically, water in
Chinese thought has always been a revered entity to which and from which politics flow. The inception of the CCP and the post-Mao era of technocrats have created a culture of engineering solutions to a ‘water problem’, and compounds the
98 instrumental idea of water as a body to be controlled by man. Thus, the ‘big project’ culture that has formed under the CCP is but one in a long history of Chinese hydraulic works that uses water management to legitimate a ruler’s power and control.
Therefore, taking into account all three aspects of water issues, the hydrological reality of water scarcity, the context of water governance and its cultural subtext, China’s South-North Diversion Project can be viewed as an inevitable solution to an impossible problem. In order to protect the social security in the Northern regions, increasing water quantity supplied is one of the few options available for the CCP as demand-side solutions will have limited success in the immediate future. The North needs water, and it needs it fast. If the CCP succeeds in bringing water from the Yangtze to the Yellow river, it will also emblematically follow a long history of water governance myths that serve to legitimate the power of China’s ruling elite.
99
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