Dams on the Mekong

A literature review of the politics of water governance influencing the Mekong River

Karl-Inge Olufsen

Spring 2020

Master thesis in Human geography at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences

UNIVERSITY OF OSLO

Words: 28,896

08.07.2020

Dams on the Mekong

A literature review of the politics of water governance influencing the Mekong River

III

2020

Dams on the Mekong: A literature review of the politics of water governance influencing the Mekong River Karl-Inge Olufsen http://www.duo.uio.no/

Summary

This thesis offers a literature review on the evolving human-nature relationship and effect of power struggles through political initiatives in the context of Chinese water governance domestically and on the Mekong River. The literature review covers theoretical debates on scale and socionature, combining them into one framework to understand the construction of the Chinese waterscape and how it influences international governance of the Mekong River. Purposive criterion sampling and complimentary triangulation helped me do rigorous research despite relying on secondary sources. Historical literature review and integrative literature review helped to build an analytical narrative where socionature and scale explained Chinese water governance domestically and on the Mekong River.

Through combining the scale and socionature frameworks I was able to build a picture of the hybridization process creating the Chinese waterscape. Through the historical review, I showed how water has played an important part for creating political legitimacy and influencing, and being influenced, by state-led scalar projects. Because of this importance, throughout history the Chinese state has favored large state-led scalar projects for the governance of water. This water governance was primarily influenced by the modernist-like Confucian school of thought that espoused recreating nature in humans’ image. The historical review showed how path- dependent socionatural relations and scalar preferences in water governance have evolved throughout history in order to develop characteristics that influence contemporary Chinese participation in, and interaction with Mekong governance institutions.

Even though there exist different scalar projects with water governance in mind, all three of them create a scale mismatch were the scale of governance impacts the sustainable governance of the Mekong River for all its people and animals relying on its waters. Through the new scalar project of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism, China is contributing to a reproduction of a Chinese socionature with the Chinese water machine constructing dams all throughout the Mekong region. By using this framework, it is possible to create novel understandings of Chinese interactions with current international Mekong institutions. The framework highlights how national political processes influence a state’s participation with international institutions. This framework can thus be used by policy creators to anticipate how different states will interact with different international institutions based on analysis of current socionatural relations and scalar arrangements.

Preface

The work on this Master thesis have been an educational process that have provided a plethora of useful experiences and knowledge. I want to primarily thank my excellent supervisor, Andrea Nightingale, who have been a great help to writing and finishing this master thesis. I want to thank all teachers and students who enabled my academic and personal growth during the last two years. Finally, I would like to thank all my friends and family whose support during the challenging times the last semester have been crucial for my mental wellbeing and getting over the line.

VII

VIII

Innholdsfortegnelse

1 Introduction ...... 1 2 Research questions...... 5 3 Methodology ...... 7 3.1 Literature sampling...... 7 3.2 Analytical methods ...... 10 4 Literature review...... 13 4.1 Politics of scale ...... 14 4.2 Poststructuralist scale ...... 17 4.3 Scalar politics ...... 20 4.4 Scale in political ecology ...... 21 4.5 Scale weaknesses...... 24 4.6 A Chinese ‘nature’...... 25 4.7 Socionature ...... 27 5 History ...... 32 5.1 Philosophy ...... 32 5.2 Early history ...... 35 5.3 The Grand Canal ...... 37 5.4 River diking and the Yellow River ...... 39 5.5 Exporting socionatural habits and scalar arrangements ...... 40 5.6 Modern history ...... 42 5.7 The Mao era ...... 44 5.8 The Reform era ...... 47 5.9 The Three Georges Dam ...... 50 6 The governance of the Mekong ...... 55 6.1 Mekong introduction ...... 55 6.2 The Greater Mekong Subregion ...... 56 6.3 Mekong River Commission ...... 58 6.4 Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism...... 61 6.5 Power relations on the Mekong ...... 63 7 Conclusion ...... 67 8 Sources ...... 70

1 Introduction

Transboundary conflicts over dams and use of river water is becoming increasingly politicized as global climate change, population explosions and increased consumption is making fresh water more important than ever. The Mekong River being one of the most important in South- East Asia is no exception (Abbs, 2017). Fuelled by the preference and need for large-scale water projects for the Chinese political elite’s power, an increasing number of Chinese dams on the upper reaches of the Mekong have been constructed the last decades. This have raised questions about the environmental impact and influence on droughts from their downstream neighbours and multilateral governance institutions. This thesis will look at what influenced the building of these dams, and subsequently how the Chinese interact with their downstream neighbours.

Much of the focus on large dam development projects have been focused on potential resettlement of people affected by their construction, but less attention has been given to population living downstream of dams whose livelihoods have been affected (Richter et al. 2010). This thesis will join a growing number of articles looking at Mekong River governance. It does so through analysing the Chinese national context, and how this influence Chinese participation in Mekong River governance institutions. Context in this thesis is conceptualised as socionatural relations and scalar politics, related to the expectations, norms and governance of socionature, and water in particular.

The aim of this thesis will thus be to combine two theoretical frameworks central within political ecology and human geography, that of socionature and scale to first give a comprehensive discussion on the trajectory that created the current Chinese socionature and then to analyse three Mekong river governance initiatives through the Chinese perspective. In so doing this thesis will show how combining these two frameworks can help in describing considerations that states use when participating in governance institutions like on the Mekong River.

I use a broad definition of water governance as concerning institutions and mechanisms that influences decisions made about water. It is important to distinguish between government, as a political authority, and governance, referring to a process where multiple actors, including governmental and non-governmental partake in the decision-making process (Norman et al.,

2015). Thus, governance is processual in nature discussing relations between multitudes of actors.

Within human geography literature scale have been used to study different features of governance. Within political ecology, scale have been useful in conjunction with other frameworks like socionature to deconstruct simplistic ‘truths’ about relationships between society and the natural environment (Perrault et al. 2015). Political ecology’s focus on power and justice means that scale have been used in “efforts to explain local human–environment systems in relation to larger regional and historical factors” (Sayre, 2015, p. 504). However, in most of the papers discussing resource governance and scale, scale is used to explain political processes or the construction and framing of different scalar politics and identities (Neumann, 2009). In this thesis, I will look at two facets of scale as the two research questions (RQs) correspond to scalar construction and interaction within and between different political projects. In so doing, scale allows me to analyze how the Chinese elites have used scalar projects related to water to reify their power throughout history and today.

Socionature theory is used by political ecologists to understand the complexities of human – nature relationships (Castree, 2020). It does so by combining the natural and the social into one socionature, thus revealing hidden power relations of the processes of its becoming (Desfor and Vesalon, 2008). Swyngedouw (1999; 2007) uses the Marxist inspired concept of production of nature to create a processual research perspective where the different trajectories of objects becoming socionatural hybrids can be used to understand the power relations that influences the construction of waterscapes – part social, part natural hybrid landscapes.

In this thesis, socionature is a concept that enables me to unpack networks that influence the specific contested trajectories of human – nature relations connected to water governance that evolved through Chinese history and continues to happen today. The historical analysis will thus focus on the process of hybridization that shaped these human – nature interactions through networks of power that used scalar politics to create the contemporary Chinese waterscape. By describing the different trajectories that altered socionatural landscapes into hybrid waterscapes this thesis is attempting to break with conventional society – environmental binaries that often is used in social science analysis.

Even though the borders of China have been changing throughout history and the current state include over 50 minorities, for simplicity and a sense of continuity throughout the narrative

2 history that is included here, I will refer to the Han people’s history of central China as ‘the Chinese’ and ‘Chinese history’. The Chinese state having one of the longest running, and best documented, continuing history offers an excellent opportunity to understand long-term evolution and influence of a socionatural trajectories. Through large state-led projects like the Dujiangyan and the Yellow River dikes, the political elites showed how they could conquer and civilize nature in order to create a harmonious world thus ensuring political power and legitimacy.

These projects together with numerous other cases like the more recent Three Gorges Project paints a narrative far away from any romanticized eastern Daoist harmony with nature. The scalar significance to the Chinese way of governance that continuing water projects like the Yellow River diking and maintenance of the Grand Canal have had on the power of political elites in the central government cannot be understated, as these elites have used such projects to assert and solidify their own political power. By looking at conflicts of Chinese ambitions with the Mekong through a socionatural and scalar lens, this thesis will argue that Chinese scalar arrangements and socionatural relations influences Chinese participation in Mekong institutions thus creating scale mismatches for the sustainable governance of the transboundary river.

The Mekong River have been shifting from a region with geopolitical conflict into one of economic cooperation (Hirsch, 2010). This shift have been helped by the Asian Development Bank funded Greater Mekong Subregion institution, which from the start of the 1990s have rescaled the River’s waters into one of state-led economic development (Sneddon and Fox, 2012). Only a few years later, the four downstream countries of Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam formed the Mekong River Commission in a bid to govern the Mekong River in a sustainable fashion. The Mekong River commission protested large dam building projects on the main channel of the river and were therefore ignored and contested by the developmental focus of the Greater Mekong Subregion (Middleton and Allouche, 2016). In 2016, the Chinese state created their own institution, the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism as a direct rival to the other two water governance institutions. Through it, the Chinese have shifted focus away from water governance onto economic cooperation and silenced downstream opposition to their own upstream dams through developmental finance and funding of downstream dams (Biba, 2018), thus creating potential for scale mismatches.

The rest of this paper will go as follow, first a statement of the two RQs that will guide this paper. Second, a methodological discussion looking at the data collection, analytical methods and ethical issues with this research. Third, follows two theoretical chapters introducing and discussing scale and socionature and of how the two frameworks complement each other. Then follows a historical discussion with the aim of answering the first RQ. Next, a discussion of the governance of the Mekong River with an aim to answer the second RQ. Finally a summary and conclusion of my arguments.

2 Research questions

Following years of increased dam construction in China for water security, flood prevention and electrical development there are today an estimated 90,000 dams all around the country, up from an estimated 22 in 1949 (Wong, 2016). “The Chinese government often regards the Mekong River as an essential resource for the development of the country’s hydropower and has placed a strong emphasis on exploiting water resources to increase hydroelectricity outputs” (Shen and Xie, 2018, p. 720). This importance is evident, as the Chinese have built eleven large hydropower dams on the mainstream of the river since 1995, with 20 more projects planned on the Mekong and its tributaries (Wong, 2018; Eyler et al. 2020). Several factors like climate change (Shen and Xie, 2018), melting of Tibetan glaciers feeding the Mekong River doubling in the last two decades (Maurer et al. 2019) and electricity demand in the region (Middleton and Allouche, 2016) have increased the importance of the Mekong situation.

Despite all of these dams, China is facing colossal problem with regards to water security (Abbs, 2017), as the country is experiencing an endemic air and water pollution problem with above 80% groundwater polluted and many freshwater rivers not fit for drinking (Currel and Han, 2017). This has partly been caused by the continuing focus on economic development above all, partly because of a lack of environmental deputies in the National Peoples’s Congress, which leads to environmental protection to be underappreciated in the face of conflict with industrial policy (Meidan, 2007). These endemic issues caused Xi Jinping in 2012 to highlight ‘Ten Grave Problems’ for China, two of which were environmental pollution and lack of a stable clean energy-supply (Christensen and Xing, 2013).

This thesis will thus offer a literature review on the evolving human-nature relationship and effect of power struggles through political initiatives in the context of Chinese water governance domestically and on the Mekong River. A description of the Chinese context influencing contemporary water governance will be shown through understanding the socionatural and scalar preferences that both influenced and were influenced by the important task of water governance throughout Chinese history. My analysis will then argue that the Chinese socionatural relations and scalar preferences shape Chinese participation in international governance institutions and create scale mismatches with regards to sustainable water governance at all scales and for all users on the Mekong. Covering theoretical debates on scale and socionature to understand the construction of the Chinese socionature and how it

5 influences international governance of the Mekong River. This paper can thus be formulated into two RQs:

1) What kind of scalar politics and socionatural relationships influence Chinese governance of water, and how has it evolved through history? 2) How do the socionatural relationships and the scalar politics in China affect the Chinese governance of the Mekong River and potentially create ‘scale mismatches’?

3 Methodology

To explore these RQs, I will do a literature review. This literature review will rely on second- hand sources for the theory discussion and empirical examples. Several key concerns led me to choose a literature review instead of collecting primary data myself. First, is time constraint and cost of travel to Asia in order to gain access to primary data for a five-month master project. Secondly, since the aim of this thesis is to look at interstate intergovernmental actions on a politically contentious topic with a focus on Chinese actions, issue of access to potentially sensitive and contentious information arise. Thirdly, this literature review is aimed at providing new theoretical insights to existing literature to provide novel insights through the theoretical framework.

3.1 Literature sampling

Literature selection happened in two stages. The first stage was motivated by an interest in scale theory to explain social phenomenon and were done during initial problem formulation for this thesis. This initial literature sampling was done in a snowballing fashion through finding key literature reviews concerning scale, like Harris and Alatout (2010), MacKinnon, (2011) and Sayre (2015), and socionature theory, with Swyngedouw (1999; 2007) and Bridge (2009), then snowballing using their sources and their theory discussions. The second stage of literature selection that relates directly to the analysis were primarily based on a pruposive criterion sampling (Hay, 2016) through internet and database searches. I think purposive sampling is not the most accurate description here, but I looked for texts that allowed me to discuss the theoretical frameworks using the cases they had used. I bound the focus of the socionature review to be focused literature that used socionature to discuss water governance and on Chinese history articles specifically focusing on the Chinese human-nature relationship throughout history, and the Mekong River case to focus on academic articles and news discussing Chinese dam building and Chinese interaction with downstream countries and international institutions.

During the initial research question deliberation for this thesis, review objectives as described above were defined in terms of relevance to the research question and language. I discovered two things, that Chinese socionatural history was absent from the review literature and most of

7 the historical literature discussing China were primarily interested in the human-human relations instead of human-nature relations. After some discussions with professors and academic staff, I learned that the academic freedoms in China were increasingly tightened similarly to what Teon (2019) describes with journalistic freedoms. It was recommended that doing critical research on China was best done outside of China itself, and I therefore decided to take a semester in Taiwan to help in gathering the necessary literature required for this review.

This paper will primarily rely on English language sources, which creates several issues when researching the Chinese case. First, it may lead to missing important information available in Chinese, but as the translation of Chinese sources is seen as exceedingly time consuming, and my current Chinese level might lead me to miss important nuances in Chinese formal academic writing. Secondly, English language sources might be unduly critical when discussing Chinese governance of the Mekong River.

Thirdly, using English language sources to study China brings forth issues of positionality and colonial practices when doing research. Me being a white, European researcher doing research and claiming expert knowledge of a case in the Global South could lead to colonial criticism of research in general and white expertise knowledge (Hay, 2016). In order to use a ‘critical self- reflexivity’ (Hay, 2016), I consciously selected literature with Chinese, downstream and international perspectives on Chinese history and the Mekong case in order to avoid privileging one point of view over the others. When doing socionatural or scalar research it is important to remember that both choosing, and thus legitimizing, what observational scale one applies when doing research is important (Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2012). When creating narratives and describing practices of socionatural production the researcher will influence the production process as “knowledge and practices are always situated in the web of social power relations that defines and produces socionature” (Swyngedouw, 1999, p. 448). When writing this thesis I had to be conscious about not naturalizing and legitimizing one specific way of producing socionature or scalar arrangements over others in attempt at staying as neutral as possible. This was done by acknowledging the multitude of motivations and needs for all the actors of the Mekong River through discussing both positive and negative impacts of the different ways of producing socionature while reserving judgement on any one correct way to govern.

For this paper. I used a variety of different sources ranging from academic peer-reviewed journal paper, academic books, newspaper articles, and internet based articles. These sources

8 will be found using purposive sampling, mainly through online databases like UiO Oria, Google Scholar (GS), and Google itself. Using online databases leads to issues related to search algorithms, terms used when searching and what kind of data is available. In order to provide a clear picture of the Mekong River case I used substantial time searching for different sources on the different search engines with a multitude of different search terms. The primary database used in writing this thesis was GS, with search terms such as the ‘Chinese dams’, ‘China dam building’, ‘Mekong River dams’, ‘Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism’, ‘Mekong River Commission’, ‘Greater Mekong Subregion’, ‘Lancang dams’ and ‘China Mekong’, sorted by relevance and date, looked through different time periods, and read through several pages of the search results.

Since these are publicly available papers, I did not expect to find the most relevant policy documents or strategies from Mekong states. These articles contained the analysis and data of other researchers or journalists written with different biases and purposes. Some of these contained parts of primary data like direct quotes, but most did not. Some articles being deemed overtly positive or negative towards China were considered as less reliable, and were thus not used. The most detailed information were located in articles concerning the above-mentioned three international governance institutions within international relations frameworks. This impacted the literature review as it meant I had to focus the review on available information which was focused on the three mentioned institutions.

Literature used for RQ1 number Book chapters in history works 8 Historical journal articles – Chinese author(s) 4 Historical journal articles – western author(s) 12 Project report 1 Total 25

Sources used for RQ2 Number News/non-academic article 7 Western author(s) academic journal article 9 Chinese author(s) academic journal article 5 Other Mekong country author(s) academic journal article 2 Total 23

This thesis include papers written by a range of different scholars from Chinese, other Mekong and western perspectives. Critical source selection and complimentary source triangulation were crucial in order to verify information and provide some sense of authenticity, weighing up somewhat for the lack of primary sources (Hay, 2016; Nightingale, 2020). Triangulation were used so I could study the same Chinese governance activities described in the literature that were collected by authors using different methods of data collection in the literature. This has allowed me to show how the concepts of scale and socionature can be used in order to highlight the national context, which in turn influences international environmental governance. Since this thesis is a literature review, there are some limitations of access to information and the lack of clear causality.

3.2 Analytical methods

Since this paper is working with two RQs, one analytical method does not necessary cover both questions. The two analytical methods correlating to the RQs are historical analysis and integrated literature review. Historical analysis was chosen because it has a long history in socionature research because of its usefulness in describing spatial-temporal specific contexts through understanding the contested creation of the present. Integrative review was chosen because it allows me to create an analytical narrative on common themes related to scale and socionature in secondary sources. I will briefly discuss them both here.

Historical analysis has long history within political ecology (Davis, 2015). Davis (2015) argues that historical methods in political ecology guards against what she calls ‘apolitical’ analysis. Since this thesis is relying secondary sources, I performed a literature review of Chinese environmental history with a focus on water governance. The key objective of this literature review was to review Chinese water governance, in what way they were organized and how they were carried out. This was done in order to create a picture of the Chinese context concerning water governance, conceptualized as socionature and scalar preferences, to illustrate whether this historical context can be seen to influence contemporary governance and international politics. This literature review allowed me reconceptualize the topic in order to provide new way of thinking about Chinese environmental history. Historical investigation, through showing the political and economic forces that have enacted historical development trajectories politicizes environmental change and socionatural relations (Davis, 2015).

During my semester in Taiwan I attended an interactive seminar on Chinese environmental history that provided an entryway into the historical literature review. This was supplanted with database searches using Google and Google scholar with keywords like ‘China human nature relationship’, ‘Chinese human nature relationship’, ‘China environmental history’ and ‘China socionature’. I chose to do this literature review to answer RQ1 because it helps to show how path-dependent socionatural relations and scalar preferences in water governance have evolved throughout history in order to develop characteristics that influence contemporary Chinese governance activity on the Mekong River to be discussed in RQ2.

The second analysis method that responds to RQ2 is an integrative literature review. The reason for choosing this method was because it allows to “combine perspectives and insights from different fields or research traditions” (Snyder, 2019, p. 336) to synthesize literature on a given research topic such that new perspectives and framework on the topic are generated (Torraco, 2016). The rapidly evolving situation on the Mekong River with the construction of the Chinese led Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism in 2016, and resulting interactions between new and inherited scalar projects makes a literature review of the Chinese governance of the Mekong and resulting politics especially useful now. The literature used for this review all contained information about Chinese governance actions and subsequent political interaction with other states. The selection of literature was therefore based upon a thematic focus (Torraco, 2016) of these actions and interactions as well as theoretical framework used to analyse these. Because of the focus on the Chinese state’s interaction with other states with regards to water governance, up to date academic literature on current action were lacking after 2018. Several longer essays and news articles were included in the literature review to fill the most recent activity.

The literature were primarily peer-reviewed academic journal articles (16) and news articles or press releases (7). The majority of the academic journal articles were written by western author(s), followed by Chinese and other Mekong Country authors(s). In two occasion there were both Chinese and western authors, but since all authors were hired at western universities they were categorised as western. I chose to define the different articles in this way because it highlights the positionality of the author(s) and the diversity of viewpoints included in the analysis.

Chinese activities and interactions were synthesised so as that “new knowledge or perspective is created despite the fact that the review summarizes previous research” (Torraco, 2016, p.

421). This synthesis of literature concerning the Mekong River case and the above-mentioned theoretical framework allows a new story to emerge from the literature where scalar preferences and socionatural relations of one country influence international politics of the surrounding states.

4 Literature review

Water challenges the traditional scale of politics as water flows through “geopolitical boundaries, political jurisdictions and property ownership conventions” (Norman et al. 2015, p. xvii). Since a river like the Mekong River flows through several geopolitical boundaries on its way to the South China Sea, it pits upstream and downstream users against each other generating disputes and conflict. Water ownership in general and possession and use of the river water on the Mekong is a complicated issue of governance, cooperation is necessary but not always practiced. Attempts at governance of water, and indeed other resources, may lead to scale mismatches (Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2012) as the jurisdictional authorities’ scale often does not match the geographical scale of the biophysical processes and resources that they are charged with governing. This is clearly happening with the Mekong River, as the only governance institution with broad participation is the Chinese controlled Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism (LMCM). Thus, water with its assorted socionatures challenge both the scale of politics and the politics of scale. Thus, to understand water governance in this region a relational view of the scalar politics are necessary in order to understand how politics are shaped by national context and domestic and international power interactions.

I argue the relational aspect of socionature theory and scale allows to combine the two into one framework in order to analyze both underlying history and thought and their effects on contemporary political projects. Indeed, some have already drawn the same connection. Perhaps the most well-known example, and indeed the inspiration for some of the theoretical choices in this paper, is Swyngedouw with several papers using scale and socionature, separately and together, to understand water governance better (Swyngedouw, 1999; 2004; 2007). In the 1999 article, Swyngedouw shows how the Spanish nature during Spain’s modernization period was produced into a socionatural ‘waterscape’. This production of socionature was done through political construction of scale by central state-led hydraulic projects that both served a national unification strategy and solidified state power versus the local. Through the scalar construction of both the problem (water shortage) and the solution (the state hydraulic projects) the state altered existing power structures and constructed a new Spanish socionature through the governance of water (Swyngedouw, 1999). Not all authors agree with Swyngedouw’s politics of scale inspired focus on scale being motivating factors for political projects and this tension plays an important part in structuring scale debates.

Drawing from another set of conceptual commitments, for example, Shapiro (2001) makes a useful distinction between proximate and ultimate causes. Proximate causes are the events that trigger another event happening, while ultimate causes can be understood as the real reason for something happening. An example from the later historical review could be, the proximate cause of a flood is heavy rain, while the ultimate cause might be years of hydrological construction leading to silting and weakening dikes. Shapiro (2001) argues that ultimate causes can be understood through examining a combination of social, political and cultural issues. It is the discussion of socionatural relations and scalar aspects thought of as ultimate causes that is the focus of this chapter of the thesis. These ultimate causes plays an important part in terms of understanding Chinese actions related to the international governance of the Mekong basin.

Scale have been used to study a wide variety of topics in social sciences, from Marxist economy (Brenner, 2019), to globalization (Swyngedouw, 1997), to urban development (Brenner, 2004), to a wide array of natural resource governance like forestry (Alhborg and Nightingale, 2012) and water (Swyngedouw, 1999; Harris and Alatout, 2010). Bringing back all the way to the 70s with Lefebvre, the current conceptualizations of scale have a long history (Brenner, 2019). Most of the theoretical conceptualization of the most common concepts happened in the 90s and early 2000s (Sayre, 2015). Yet much confusion still exists with many claiming the concept still lacks clear definitions, operationalisations and consistency, especially as the term is also widely used in other disciplines with other definitions such as biology and ecology discussing similar topics like resource governance (Neumann, 2009; Sayre, 2015; Brenner, 2019). To unravel this confusion, and to explain how political projects create scalar arrangements, it is necessary to understand how scale is conceptualised. This theoretical review will discuss four stances within this scale debate, the first three emerging from human geography, while the last draws on political ecology scale theorization. These stances can be distilled into the broad categories of politics of scale, poststructuralist scale, scalar politics and political ecology scale.

4.1 Politics of scale

The first category, politics of scale was the first critical scale theorization and laid the groundwork for subsequent scale conceptualization. Most of the earlier research on scale in human geography were undertheorized and worked on the assumption that scales were pre- given spatial entities that could be researched (Sayre, 2015). These scales were predominantly hierarchical and usually contained three (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987) or four (Taylor, 1982) 14 scales that contained some variation of the household – local – regional – national –global (Sayre, 2015). In these hierarchical models, each scale was pre-given certain characteristics like favouring the local as more ontological real, but powerless and the global as less real, but powerful. Leading up to the politics of scale debates scale was thus thought of as pre-existing, fixed, hierarchical with power flowing from the global down towards to local and household and had ontological characteristics (Sayre, 2015).

Then in the 80s and 90s, several key authors developed scale as an analytical concept to focus on the “social construction of scale through the strategies of various actors, movements and organizations, this research overturned the traditional conception of scales as fixed and external to social processes” (MacKinnon, 2011, p. 21). Scale was not pre-existing anymore, and with Taylor (1982) leading the way for a wave of research on different ways in which scale was socially constructed. One of the key texts related to water is Swyngedouw’s (2007) article on how capitalism helped dynamically construct the scale of politics in Franco’s quest for an ‘ideal’ Spanish waterscape. Swyngedouw’s (2007) article is one of many politics of scale works inspired by Marxist understanding of capitalist economy that shows “the politics of scale as central to capitalist restructuring” (Sayre, 2015, p. 510). Important to the research on politics of scale is the fact that since scale were socially constructed, it also meant that specific scalar constructs were historically contingent and thus open for political contestation (Neumann, 2009; Norman et al. 2012; Sayre, 2015) opening up for new research and new opportunities for political activism.

Swyngedouw (2007) argues similarly to many Chinese historians on China (e.g. Shapiro, 2001), that the Spanish case is exceptional with regards to water as it is the place in Europe where water shortage and water governance has been the most significant. Swyngedouw shows how Franco and his allies used socionatural projects like large dam constructions to create ‘networks of power’ that when sufficiently dominant could alter Spain’s physical landscape. Swyngedouw here argue, similarly to MacKinnon’s (2011) scalar politics that I will discuss later, that through using networks scale can be understood as effects of power struggles that creates relational scalar networks that interact with already existing scalar arrangements and power structures. Swyngedouw’s (2007) uses scale and the construction of socionature in a correlative manner, connecting it with networks to further theorise power in scalar projects thus allowing analysis of successful scale jumping and re-scaling of the Spanish waterscape. This connecting of scale and networks are important to understand how the Chinese waterscape was constructed

15 historically, and later to understand power relations constitute governance institutions on the Mekong River.

Politics of scale altered scale conceptualization towards being more heterogeneous, not fixed, contestable and constructed by larger political processes and social relations (Swyngedouw, 1999). Originally drawing from Marxist ideas, scale was viewed as a “socially constructed instrument of power which embodies and expresses the underlying power relations between actors” (MacKinnon, 2011, p. 24). Other Marxist inspired structuralist leanings also influenced scalar theory in the 90s and early 2000s as scale characteristics and scalar interactions were understood to be shaped by the struggle between powerful and exploited groups in society (MacKinnon, 2011). Smith’s two concepts of ‘scale jumping’, moving from one scale to another higher scale, and ‘scale bending’, reconstructing already existing scalar characteristics at any given scale were also important additions to the politics of scale category (MacKinnon, 2011). These terms show the strength of politics of scale as scale are fluid and open to contestation and reconstruction, and some weakness that constructivist approaches critiqued it off, as they portray some degree of fixity and hierarchical understanding of scale.

Another important contribution was Brenner’s scalar structuration theory that posit that scale are socially produced, relational where both horizontal and vertical interactions occur, non- hierarchical, heterogeneous but still creating ‘scalar fixes’ that are structures with a certain degree of fixity and stability as an outcome of scalar power structures and interactions (Brenner, 2019). This theory importantly brings the matter of time dimension to scale as scalar construction “occur through the path-dependent interaction between inherited scalar structures and emergent regulatory projects and strategies which aim to transform these inherited arrangements” (MacKinnon, 2011, p. 25). This is similar to how scalar politics understands scale that I will discuss later and show theoretical overlap as the different theoretical categories develops and interacts. Through many of the historical cases and with an explicit focus on scale as a motivating factor, I would argue that scalar fixes becomes an important analytical tool not just for the political processes necessary to ‘fix’ them but also to show their importance to networks of power through the amount of work necessary to maintain them, like with the Grand Canal. Of the four mentioned categories, chronologically politics of scale was the first critical scale conceptualization and thus played an important part in structuring later scale conceptions

4.2 Poststructuralist scale

Poststructuralist scale initially emerged as a critique of the politics of scale, and played an important role in further developing scale away from its earlier stage of being pre-given spatial entities with fixed characteristics. The reason for including it here is the development of discourses and social practices as important aspects scale maintenance. Poststructuralist scale thus theorize beyond the initial construction of scalar arrangements as well as contesting the ontological nature of scalar fixes. Poststructuralist scale viewed previous scalar conceptualizations as too hierarchical and fixed, and wanted to develop a relational sense of space and scale as emergent, numerous and open. At its core, the difference between the Marxist inspired politics of scale and poststructuralist scale is that the former thinks of scale as an ontological material entity while the latter views scale primarily as an epistemological construct (MacKinnon, 2011). The poststructuralist view of scale is that scales are socially constructed first through discourses then social practices that become part of identification and place- making for individuals and groups that seek recognition or other forms of advantage over others (Harris and Alatout, 2010).

According to Harris and Alatout (2010), one of the important works in the poststructural category of scale is Kaiser and Nikiforova’s (2008) introduction to the concept of the performativity of scale. The performative approach to scale places importance on the iterative and contested dynamics of scale constructions (Harris and Alatout, 2010). Kaiser and Nikiforova thus moves away from purely looking at the construction of scale like the politics of scale to focusing more on the maintenance of scalar notions that occurs through repeating citations creating a scalar discourse that lend the appearance of scalar fixity. Such discourses are created through “’the reiterative and citational practices by which discourse produces the effect’ (Butler, 1993, page 2) of scale” (Kaiser and Nikiforova, 2008, p. 543). Poststructuralist scale is therefore interested in analyzing the discourse devices that goes into creating scalar constructs as well as the iterative practices that goes into maintaining the “timespace conjunctures and ruptures between place and identity” (Kaiser and Nikiforova, 2008, p. 537) that scale creates. Through looking at the maintenance of scale, it allows to examine how scalar practices and discourses in the Mekong have changed over time as they encounter contestation and attempts at scale bending.

The scale debates in the 2000s between the Marxist and political economy inspired politics of scale with a focus on material processes and the poststructuralist constructivist notions of scale like Kaiser and Nikiforova’s performative scale made the scale concept lack a clear definition and where used in competing ways leading to confusion (Neumann, 2009). This led many authors such as Neumann (2009) and Sayre (2015) to argue that the lack of theoretical clarity that came out of these debates limits scale when analyzing the politics of water governance. Their argument is that the lack of clear definitions both hinder rigorous and good analysis as there are few clear definitions and operationalizations to the use of scale, thus making it impossible to compare studies as there are no clear definitions, researchers use scale to mean different things and unreflectively engage with scale theory. Norman et al. (2012) argue that such conceptual ambiguity becomes an even larger issue when ideas and terminology is exported into governance and policy arenas and lexicons become unclear. Marston et al. (2005) took this a step further when they called for a stop in using scale as an analytical device because of similar concerns.

Kaiser and Nikiforova (2008), in their paper on poststructuralist scale strongly disagreed with Marston et al. (2005). They argued that scale is a powerful tool for researchers to unearth and analyse hidden power dynamics that relies on scale, thus agreeing with politics of scale and their explicit focus on scale. Their response to the critique was to shift focus to the performative actions of discourses that reifies and apparently fixes scale to existing power dynamics instead of on their process of initial construction. Following on this, Harris and Alatout (2010), similarly to this thesis, argued for a mixing of different conceptualizations of scale by using performative approaches and politics of scale to the study of water governance. Similarly, Chung and Jiang (2016) argue that there are two theoretical moments of scale that one should pay extra attention. The material political where scale is produced and seemingly fixed through socio-political initiatives and scale as a ‘device’, shaping relations of power and representation within those initiatives (Chung and Jiang, 2016). Using scale as an analytical tool then allows to both analyse political processes that construct and hides power relations, like power within political institutions on the Mekong, and the discourses and actions that supports Chinese actions throughout history and on the Mekong thus ‘fixing’ scalar power relations.

Opposite of Neumann and Sayre, Norman et al. (2015) argue for the positive benefits of this theoretical plurality as they show how this plurality broadens the theoretical contributions to scale and water governance. Although transfer to governance practitioners is still an issue, but

18 since most concepts in the social sciences are continuously developing I would argue that a conceptual plurality would allow academic researchers to choose from different conceptions of scale to better fit their specific case, context and data, and in the process continuing to develop scale theorization.

Harris and Alatout (2010, p. 148), similarly to Swyngedouw (1999; 2007) with Spain and like Zhang (2013) implicitly did with China, argue that paying attention “to scalar constructions of water, in particular, is crucial to understand processes related to state and nation building be those contemporary or historical”. Harris and Alatout (2010) show the importance that the politics of water governance and its resulting scalar politics in the upper Tigris/Euphrates and Jordan River basins through practices and discourses continuously consolidate and strengthen notions of state, nation and territory in Turkey and Israel. This is done through demonstration of technical ‘facts’ concerning geography and water that although seemingly apolitical still works to reify and consolidate legitimacy and networks of power of the states and their role in the governance of socionature. This state building aspect of scalar projects that create new socionature is not exclusive to water governance but can be seen in a multitude of scalar projects. Harris and Alatout (2010) fruitfully uses a multi-scalar perspective that allows the focus to move away from strictly focusing on the state and towards multiple spatial and temporal scales and levels like the intra-state, regional and global processes. The analytical focus on technical data and multi-scalar perspective are both helpful in analysing the complex landscape of Chinese social practices and their relation to state building, and participation in Mekong institutions.

However, what the scale debates showed was a clear need for better definitions of scale as an analytical tool and a more nuanced understanding of the underlying politics that created and upheld different scales and scalar constructs (Norman et al. 2012). Especially needed was a “closer attention to the power nexus of who (or what) is included and excluded in the discussions and constructions of scale” (Norman et al. 2012, p. 54). Many believe that the tension that these debates created allowed for a more fruitful way of defining and using scale through focusing on scalar interrelationships and viewing scale as a process (Norman et al. 2012). It is these shortcomings that that the later scalar politics tries to deal with.

4.3 Scalar politics

Scalar politics is created by social actors through political projects that create scalar arrangements that become material entities that cannot be reduced to just these actors and the discourse that maintain it. MacKinnon’s (2011) scalar politics thus seeks to fuse key notions of the above-mentioned two categories of scale. He argues that this is possible because of significant conceptual overlap, the social construction of scale, the fluidity of scale, and how scale fits into larger sociospatial processes. By adapting a critical realist view of ontology compared to a constructivist one, MacKinnon seeks to analyse both the material and discursive notions of scale by viewing it as a material entity that has underlying processes that create specific scalar processes and outcomes. Scalar politics, according to MacKinnon (2011), has four key foundations all of which I will introduce here.

First, and most significant according to Norman et al. (2012), is that scalar politics moves away from primarily focusing on scale towards political initiatives and projects that are scalar in nature and have scalar repercussions thus moving away from the explicit scalar focus (MacKinnon, 2011). Although the specific roles and significance wary, these political initiatives concern themselves with influence and control over social activities and power, and the scalar arrangements are usually a dimension of this power being exercised. Scale therefore becomes “an important dimension of political activity rather than the prime focus” (MacKinnon, 2011, p. 29) thus avoiding critique about scale being uncritically seen as a conceptual given. Scale are no longer an ontological object or an epistemological concept but an ‘object of inquiry’ into larger social and political processes. In this thesis, scale works to enquire into two related aspects of Chinese state activity, using historical water projects the political elites solidified central power through specific scalar arrangements and for those scalar arrangements to later influence international politics with other Mekong states.

Secondly, scalar politics highlights the deliberate deployment and use of scale by different social actors (MacKinnon, 2011). This deliberate use of scale happens through ‘everyday scalar discourses’, which are deployed by social actors of all kinds to make the scale of political initiatives seem as legitimate and natural as possible. Importantly these “constructions are often linked to the efforts of particular actors, organizations and movements to ontologically ‘fix’ or ‘undo’ scales as material expression of emergent power relations” (MacKinnon, 2011, p. 31).

Scale are not ontologically given, but actors through discourses attempt at making scalar arrangements seem fixed and legitimate to gain power.

Third, MacKinnon (2011) draws on previous work on scale being path dependent by focusing on pre-existing scalar structures. Scalar politics focuses away from the construction or the maintenance of specific scalar projects onto the process of interaction between existing scalar arrangements and emerging political initiatives (MacKinnon, 2011). This is the last element of scalar politics as MacKinnon (2011) argue that emerging political projects are not scalar, but have some scale dimensions that appear when they interact with path-dependent inherited scalar arrangements. Because of this, different political initiatives prefer some inherited scalar arrangement to others, reshaping and altering existing scale structures in line with Smith’s scale bending while simultaneously being influenced by these existing power structures and scalar arrangements. By not focusing on scale, and arguing that political projects are not scalar themselves, MacKinnon overlooks important aspects of scale like its relation to state-building and territorial consolidation that will be seen throughout Chinese history. I would argue with this thesis that certain political projects, especially concerning the governance of water, are inherently supposed to be scalar in nature as it serves the purpose of the state.

The role of the researcher according to MacKinnon (2011) is to focus on interactions between emerging and existing political projects at specific spatial and temporal contexts. Sayre (2015) claim this follow a trend in scale research after the initial scale debates of the 90s and 2000s that have moved towards empirical studies instead of theoretical ones. This thesis bucks this trend by instead focusing on actions that reify scalar arrangements in China, and how scale is used as a device to shape power relations within international institutions on the Mekong. In order to make sense of the intricate, overlapping politics of Mekong river governance, looking at it through the lens of scalar politics can therefore help explain how the Chinese are able to exert their influence beyond their political borders.

4.4 Scale in political ecology

The above-mentioned scalar categories are mainly concerned with social processes, however when discussing biophysical processes these scalar categories are more problematic. Political ecology, which are focused on the intersection between nature and society and with human- nature relationships (Perrault et al. 2015), brought scalar debates and conceptualization further

21 through a fruitful debate with scale in other research fields other than social science. Scalar concepts have been central in political ecological work towards better understanding human- nature systems and how they influence and are influenced by local, national, global and historical factors since the emergence of the field in the 1970s (Neumann, 2009; Sayre, 2015). Political ecology has therefore continued scale theorization to also include natural processes as well as social ones. I will here discuss two important points that political ecology scale has introduced and some common definitions.

The first important addition to scale theory is the distinction between operational and observational scale. Operational scale are the actual attributes of a phenomenon in the real world, while observational scales are “epistemological tools, chosen and applied by the observer, to make sense of those phenomena” (Sayre, 2005, in Sayre, 2015, p. 507). These coincide with the above mentioned debate between politics of scale and poststructuralist scale as operational scales represent ontological moments of material phenomena and observational scales are the epistemological moments of people attempting to comprehend those ontological moments in the real world (Neumann, 2009; Sayre, 2015).

Since material phenomena, such as political projects or economic activity, occur at different operational scales, it is important to choose the best possible observational scales that suit any given phenomena in question (Sayre, 2015). Any social, political, economic, intellectual, and ecological process will all have specific operational scales that calls for a match in observational scale. This seems rational at first, but problems emerge when there occurs a ‘scale mismatch’ between ecological and social processes (Cumming et al, 2006). This mismatch occurs when there are incompatibilities between the scales of ecological processes and the scales of political organization in charge of governing these processes leading to disruption of governance or other inefficiencies occur (Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2012). A good example of this is the focus of this thesis where the state, accounting for both operational and observational scale (Sayre, 2015), mismatching with the ecological process of the Mekong River running through several states borders and territories.

The second important addition to scale made by political ecologists is the distinction between scale and level (Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2012; Sayre, 2015). This distinction came about through conceptual confusion and conflation of scale when social science scale and scale in ecology and biology interacted (Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2012; Sayre 2015). Level is defined as “locations along a scale … which in a hierarchical system refers to levels of organization,

22 characterized by the rate of a process” (Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2012, p. 2). This definition is based on heuristic framework of hierarchy theory in ecology where level is defined in a “loosely functional sense (e.g., organism, population, community)” (Sayre, 2015, p. 509). These hierarchies are not top-down like the initial conceptualization of scale introduced earlier but a constitutive hierarchy where “phenomena at a “lower” or smaller scale may display different patterns when aggregated at a “higher” or larger scale—patterns that are irreducible to their smaller-scale components” (Sayre, 2015, p. 509). These levels do not fall under operational scale as they are not ontological in nature, but are observational scale as they are epistemological definitions used by the observer (Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2012; Sayre, 2015).

Scale in ecology similar to human geography is thought of as constructed, albeit in a slightly different way (Neumann, 2009). In ecology scale is thought of as “agreed upon measures, e.g., millimeters, kilometers, seconds, hours, that exist in the minds of observers, and as such are social constructions, yet they are also abstractions of proportional relationships in nature, and thus have a physical basis to them” (Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2012, p. 2). This definition is close to observational scale befitting an operational scale as introduced above. The fact that both social science and ecological definitions of scale view scale as constructed opens up possibilities for conceptualizations of scale to study both natural and social phenomena simultaneously (Neumann, 2009). Since scale and level is used by the observer in attempts at making sense of and ordering the world, and that both social processes and analytical outcomes are produced by observers and actors, scale is inherently political because, how one sees and orders the world is a subjective process influenced by each observers subjective realities including history, knowledge and gender (Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2012). How scale is constructed, how it is fixed and what scales and levels are chosen as observational scales are political as Ahlborg and Nightingale (2012) show in their study of the Nepalese forest industry.

Because scale is political Ahlborg and Nightingale (2012, p. 3) argue that scale can be “used to refer to dimensions of time, space, or quantity, or the scale of observation, i.e., the “spatial, temporal, quantitative, or analytical dimensions used by scientists to measure and study objects and processes” (Gibson et al. 2000:219), recognizing that these are socially framed”. It is important to avoid only focusing on such a narrow observational scale akin to much of the physical science work in ecology and biology. However, as Ahlborg and Nightingale themselves do in their paper on Nepalese forestry, they use scale in relation with other aspects like knowledge structures between actors at similar and different levels of organizational scale.

The relational nature of scale can be epistemological, as MacKinnon’s (2011) scalar politics argue for a focus on the interactions between different levels and scales and between inherited and emerging political projects. It can also be ontological as “having to do with how processes operating at different scales interact in ways that are not simply aggregative or linear but instead produce qualitatively distinct material consequences” (Sayre, 2015, p. 509). I would argue that the relational aspect of scale is what makes the concept analytically interesting as it allows greater examination of processes that supports and contest scalar arrangement as well as what they mean for other aspects like state building and power.

To summarize, scale can be thought of as dimensions used for observation and the levels within those dimensions, scale is seemingly fixed material entities that are both altered and supported by discourses that frame issues in a certain scalar way, and the relations and interactions between different scales, levels and scalar projects. Scalar politics allows me to show how political elites in China through water governance framed political power relations in a scalar way and then subsequently through history continually supported these scalar arrangements to fix them in place in the face of contestation. In the Mekong case, scale as a device brings to light the hidden power networks that shape relations within political institutions showing why various governance institutions on the Mekong have failed at preventing scale mismatches related to water governance.

4.5 Scale weaknesses

Scale, like most theories in the social sciences has several weaknesses or limits. Most of these limits mirrors its strengths in nature as the concept was traditionally conceptualized for certain contexts. Knowing what they are and how to ameliorate them will produce a more rigorous and better understanding of the RQ at hand. I will here discuss two weaknesses and use them to argue for why using scale with socionature can lead to novel understandings.

The first limitation of scale is that it represent one way to look at the world, primarily focused on political initiatives. There are of course several ways of understanding an issue, and using scale together with other frameworks and disciplines like ecology or through a lens of justice, like much political ecology work, helps ameliorating this scale limitation (Norman, 2012; Norman et al. 2015; Perreault et al. 2015). Using socionature and scale together will help to

24 gain a better understanding of the politics and hidden power relations, and societal construction of nature when discussing water governance.

The second limitation is that a focus on scalar theory risks losing a better understanding of the individual scales in question like other aspects of water governance that does not deal with scale per se, like individual experiences, discourses, and histories. Anthropological theories are an excellent example of this, like the moral economy where the key idea is that “contemporary economic and political interactions are shaped by norms with much deeper cultural and historical roots” (Tilt, 2014, p. 14). Tilt (2014) argues that the moral economy of water allows the researcher to analyze a society’s core values like competing priorities and goals that impact water users, communities and governance agencies. By looking at the socionatural development through a historical review, it will help to historicize and add contextual depth within scales to the scalar analysis of water governance.

Similarly, Perramond (2012) argue that even though most water users and governance practitioners actively engage in scalar politics, they are not aware of the theoretical debates or notions of scalar politics. Scale is thus seen as an analytical framework that does not influence actions of water users in everyday water governance activities and could thus overlook justice and equity issues as it is generally not explicitly acknowledged or theorized in most scale literature. This critique, albeit justified, is not as relevant in this thesis as it is meant as a purely analytical literature review focusing on the state scale compared to a local struggle over scale structures.

4.6 A Chinese ‘nature’

The reason for focusing on Chinese history is multiple, firstly one of the purposes of this paper is concerned with unpacking how the Chinese waterscape influences international relations of the Mekong River region, and the only way according to Swyngedouw (1999) to gain transformative knowledge about waterscapes is by reconstructing their processes of production. Secondly, because current processes of socionatural changes always take places within already constructed historical-geographical socionatural situations it is important to understand the previous conditions to understand how the ever-changing hybridity of socionature emerges. Thirdly, because Swyngedouw’s approach focuses on the process of hybridization itself, understanding how this process has unfolded and subsequently altered later transformations

25 will give a greater understanding of the path-dependencies that created the current Chinese waterscape hence understanding it better.

Qu and Li, two prominent environmental officials in the 80s and 90s argue in their piece on the environment and population that “a sound understanding of environmental conditions in countries mandates knowledge of past policies in those countries” (Qu and Li, 1994, p. 179). This reflects the notion of many historians like Marks (2017) and Shapiro (2001) who argues that the ‘shadow of the Mao era’ looms over China’s current environmental problems and policies. This attitude is because of the influence that the history has on current events, attitudes, philosophy, and thought around human’s interaction with nature, especially in China. Former president Jiang Zemin further highlighting the continuance of socionatural relations from historical times stated, "since the twilight of history, the Chinese nation has been engaged in the great feat of conquering, developing and exploiting nature" (Crow-Miller et al. 2017, p. 245).

The Chinese contemporary society have a perceived problem, lack of good quality fresh water and energy, which many believe are getting worse with climate change (Abbs, 2017). Connecting climate change with future water and energy security is influenced by knowledge created throughout history and modern science. This place specific knowledge then favours certain ways of governing such issues and who should do it. The Chinese state, thus values certain aspects of the Mekong River over other aspects because of their specific socionatural national context.

Socionature emerged out of western political ecology thinking, both as a critique of the western modernistic separation of nature and society and to work as an analytical concept to better understanding of interactions between the natural and social, that had been separated in scientific thinking. However, this presupposes a common understanding of what nature is. Albeit with local differences, in a western context with a common historical and philosophical heritage with a common understanding of nature, this is not a problem. In the modernist thinking, nature is separate from man, philosophical and religious traditions put man outside or above nature (Marks, 2017). Contrasting with this view is the growing movement that sees humans as a part of nature while others think that there is no more nature, as all the nature have been influenced by humans with the Anthropocene (Arias-Maldonado, 2016).

However, Marks (2017) reminds us that this is not necessarily the case with Chinese understandings of nature. Marks (2017), prefaces his discussion of the early Chinese and their relationship with the natural environment with saying that until the twentieth century there were no equivalent Chinese word of the English word ‘nature’ denoting a world out there separate from humans. The Chinese term (benxing) that was often used, means ‘the inherent quality of a thing’, and the later word for heaven (tian), like in the heavenly mandate that I will discuss later, is sometimes thought to mean something similar to nature as it points to a force outside of the human realm (Marks, 2017). There were combination of words that could mean something close to what we associate with ‘nature’ like ‘heaven, earth and mankind’ (tiandiren) or the more common ‘heaven and earth’ (tiandi) which points to everything in the world that is nonhuman (Dunstan, 1998; Marks, 2017). What comes closest is maybe the word ziran, which means ‘that which is self-so’ or used in modern times to mean naturalness or even nature. It is important to remember that none of these terms were fixed over the past 2500 years of organized Chinese history, they were dynamic, discussed, reflected on and contested (Marks, 2017). Through focusing on Chinese socionatural history, we will encounter different ideas about nature that gradually evolved into a Confucian inspired desire of recreating nature in the image of man that now dominates the Chinese socionatural relations.

4.7 Socionature

Given the complexity of the socionatural entanglements in the Mekong basin, I will draw on scale, the production of nature and hybridization to be able to describe the Chinese part of these socionatural relationships. The theoretical notion of socionature have become increasingly popular within the field of political ecology the last few decades (Desfor and Vesalon, 2008; Nightingale, 2014; Nightingale 2015). Socionature have contributed vastly to our understanding of relationships between society and nature, across different scales. Socionature, like much theoretical work of political ecology, is concerned with attempts at uniting what western modernity separated in modern scientific discourse – the natural and the social (Swyngedouw, 1999). Socionature has been at the heart of a scholarly and activist movement fighting against the objectification, externalization and commodification of the natural world (Desfor and Vesalon, 2008). It does so by trying to break down “the deep ontological and epistemological divide that justified the application of scientific laws and economic interests to an external nature in the production of built environments” (Desfor and Vesalon, 2008, p. 587).

Fundamental to much of this work, and indeed to this paper is the idea that socionature, similar to scale, is inherently political.

In order to break down the deep ontological and epistemological divide between nature and society, it is necessary to critique western modernist ideas as well as finding new ways in both thoughts and practice to see how the natural and the social converge into a common socionature (Castree, 2020). Swyngedouw (1999) in his landmark work on the topic of the production of the Spanish waterscape at the turn of the twentieth century lays out the cornerstones of socionature theoretical ideas and concepts. In this paper, Swyngedouw uses the Marxist notion of production of nature work by historicising Latour’s ideas of networked associations (Bakker and Bridge, 2006).

Swyngedouw’s (1999) analytical concept of the waterscape, the hybrid character of the water landscape, leans extensively on two other ground-breaking theories from two of the most influential Geographers in the last couple of decades, Latour’s hybridity and networked reconstruction and Lefebvre’s concept of historical and geographical production of space. Latour’s notion of a ‘hybrid’ is a thing-like appearance or ‘permanence’ that is part social, part natural, and embodies a variety of processes and relations (Swyngedouw, 1999). These hybrids or networks “creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture” (Latour, 1993, p. 10).

According to Latour these networks allows us to connect and create a continuity from the local to the global and from the nun-human to the human as it is the “thread of networks of practices and instruments, of documents and translations” (Latour, 1993, p. 121). This hybrid is a ‘thing were “none of the component parts is reducible to the other, yet their constitution arises from the multiple dialectical relations that swirl out from the production process itself” (Swyngedouw, 1999, p. 447). To understand a hybrid/network, one has to “mobilize a great number of objects for their description” (Latour, 1993, p. 121). This hybrid concept is thus a way to unpack the Chinese networks of power, dam building, and political institutions through focusing on the process of its creation, namely the history of the Chinese waterscape.

Lefebvre’s idea of historical and geographical production of space builds on previous, especially Smith’s, Marxist materialist concepts of social metabolism and production of nature (Swyngedouw, 1999). This materialist approach uses the idea that nature is an essential part of the social metabolism of capitalist societies, as society through labour relations transforms

28 nature in and through metabolizing the natural environment. This production of nature “insists that nature is an integral part of the metabolism of social life. Social relations operate in and through metabolizing the natural environment which, in turn, transforms both society and nature and produces altered or new socionatural forms” (Swyngedouw, 1999, p. 446). This process alters nature into socionature, reorganizing material objects into hybrids, that are part nature and part social, like the way a resource is contingent on both the physical aspect and societal use it has.

Through combining this production of nature and Lefebvre’s ideas on the production of space, Swyngedouw asserts that socionature is itself a historical-geographical process, and as such is time and place specific. Since socionature as hybrids is always changing, the ‘world’ is a continuing “process of perpetual metabolism in which social and natural processes combine in a historical-geographical production process of socionature, whose outcome (historical nature) embodies chemical, physical, social, economic, political, and cultural processes in highly contradictory but inseparable manners” (Swyngedouw, 1999, p. 447).

Thus, using Lefebvre’s ideas, Swyngedouw develops an approach that “it is not the hybrid that has ontological priority but the process of hybridization - the historical-geographical 'process of production, of becoming, of perpetual transgression” (Bakker and Bridge, 2006, p. 17). It is not the hybrid itself, the thing that matters but how it became its current state that matters. Even though Latour’s hybrid concept was instrumental in placing humans into the material world, and not outside it, the concept does not go far enough as it is ‘part social and part natural’. This then creates a divide between the different parts of a hybrid object without realizing how their interrelation and construction creates one thing, the hybrid. This process of hybridization that created the Chinese waterscape will be the focus of the subsequent historical review.

This leads to the production of socionature, which primarily happen through techno-natural arrangements, which “are not socially or politically neutral, but express and re-constitute physical, social, cultural, economic or political power relation” (Swyngedouw, 2007, p. 10). Thus, ‘networks of power’ enrols and recreates parts of nature creating the metabolism of socionature. The ‘success’ or ‘failures’ of different trajectories depends on political struggles and whether there emerges a ‘hegemonic’ dynamic that allows these transformation processes to become concrete in the landscape as we experience it (Swyngedouw, 2007). Eventually the visions of the elite networks, which constitutes the ‘networks of power’, transforms socionature into distinct geographies and landscapes throughout the world.

To sum it up “socio-nature is produced through social practices, and underpinned by political decisions. The production of socio-nature serves socio-economic and political interests, reflect the ideological preferences of dominant groups in society and acts as a condition of possibility for socio-economic change“ (Desfor et al. 2010, p. 194). In the historical Chinese case that I will discuss later, these elite networks are primarily based on Han elites in the central governmental bodies and large regional landowners able to work through and influence state action and enact their own projects.

How then can we understand Chinese governance of water with socionature? Well first, it is important to acknowledge that all resources, water included, are a cultural hybrids because what resource is considered useful is culturally dependent (Bridge, 2009). This is because of the relational aspect of the process of hybridization deems what is considered a resource based on how it relates to other social aspects like knowledge and economic opportunity for extraction (Bridge, 2009). Because of this relational aspect of socionature and resources, “the same 'chunk' of nature … will have different physical attributes and implications for societies, depending on how those societies use it” (Castree, 2020, p. 13). The physical part of socionature, the ‘thing’ or object itself, is therefore contingent on social practices and are not fixed meaning that river water for instance can serve multiple purposes like hydroelectric power generation or for fisheries or agriculture.

Because as Zimmerman stated ‘resources are not: they become’ (Bridge, 2009). The transformation of material objects into resources as we have seen earlier relies on several factors like cultural valuation, and economic and technological capacity for extraction or use. Resources through becoming quasi socionatural objects dependent on societal considerations reveals how resources can be understood as a relational process. Since the production and consequent reproduction of socionature and the process of resources becoming are both relational in nature, both the outcome and process of becoming is never neutral, highlighting the political aspect of these processes (Swyngedouw, 1999). The non-neutral and highly political aspect of these relational processes helps to unpack perceived permanencies and stability of objects highlighting the associational capacities of objects (Bakker and Bridge, 2009), akin to Marxist ideas of nature and ‘value’ (Sayre, 2015). This relational aspect is important as it allows for a conceptual overlap between using socionature theory and scale so as one can both analyse the history and contemporary political projects.

This also relates to how we as humans understand the natural part of socionature, our knowledge about socionature (Nightingale, 2015; Castree, 2020). Our understanding of any topic is inherently social and cannot exist outside of the social arena. How the Chinese state understand water governance, what devices, theories and models they use in acquiring and testing knowledge are all social aspects influencing the natural world. These shape what are considered the best ways of dealing with specific issues like the Mekong River governance, what actors that have the right skills and knowledge and how they are supposed to govern it.

I view socionature as a concept that allows me to unpack the networks of power that impacts the specific contested trajectories of society – environment relations that evolved through Chinese history and continues to happen today. My socionatural analysis will thus focus on the political process of hybridization that shaped these society – environment interactions creating the contemporary Chinese waterscape. I will do this through describing the trajectories and the resulting socionatural landscapes as hybrid waterscapes thus attempting to break with the traditional human – nature binary that is often used in analysis.

5 History

Following Swyngedouw (1999; 2007), I will use the theoretical framework of socionature and scale to structure a narrative that shows how water have been influenced, and indeed influence, the Chinese socionatural relations and scalar arrangements throughout history. I view scale not as an ontological given here, but mobilized through socio-spatial power struggles and political projects altering the physical landscape and creating new socionature. This narrative is by no means a coherent, straightforward, homogenous or uncontested project. The historical narrative here is meant to give an overview of the topics and development of the Chinese waterscape throughout history.

Because the meaning and use of various terms for nature have been debated and changed over time, there is no single, unchanging, essential “Chinese view of nature” (Marks, 2017). There are however some clear thoughts and actions that have happened throughout Chinese history. Some of these patterns have been repeating, giving strength to the path-dependent historical argument of production of a ‘Chinese socionature’. Chinese history have ample examples of how humans interacted with and altered nature throughout the over 3000 year of organized political society since the first Shang and Zhou dynasties (Marks, 2017). Researchers have put special focus on wildlife and forests (Shapiro, 2001 Sanft, 2010; Marks, 2017) and water control (Li and Dray-Novey, 1999; Li, 2007; Zhang, 2013; Marks, 2017).

The rest of this chapter will first introduce different philosophical schools of thought and a discussion on their influence on Chinese history. Second, an introduction of historical context and examples of production of socionature as examples of historical influences as ultimate causes. Finally, a discussion of what constitutes a more contemporary Chinese socionature starting with the Mao era will follow.

5.1 Philosophy

Before discussing the history, I will discuss how different researchers have conceptualised philosophical influence in Chinese human – nature relationships. Especially salient is the dichotomy of harmony with nature or dominion over it. I will quickly introduce four relevant philosophical schools of thought before a discussion on the importance of philosophy as an ultimate cause to environmental governance. This philosophical introduction will work to make

32 the historical argument later that the Chinese socionatural relations were ones far away from the age-old characterization of an eastern harmony with nature.

The three Chinese philosophical schools of thought emerged as the most influential schools out of the hundred schools of thought approximately 600 BCE to 221 BCE (Ebrey, 2003). The hundred schools of thought roughly coincide with the warring states period where these different philosophical schools helped the warring states govern their resource pools in order to maximise military power (Marks, 2017). This period ended when the legalist inspired Qin Empire united China in 221 BCE (Ebrey, 2003), but these three Chinese schools of thought would continue to compete for influence in later historical eras (Sanft, 2010)

The first school of thought that I will introduce is Daoism. Daoists believed that one should follow ‘the Dao’ or the way, to be natural in order to live a fulfilling life (Marks, 2017). Daoist contrasted the developed civilized world with the notion of unity with nature and blamed civilization for ruining the harmonic relationship with nature. This led many Daoist to flee to mountains in order to become recluses to ‘follow the way’ in order to regain that harmony (Marks, 2017). An example of how Daoism influenced society was through the specific way of managing the Yellow river through arguing humans could, and should, not control its natural course but build low dikes a far distance away to define a flood plain to avert too much damage (Marks, 2017).

The second school of thought is Confucianism. Confucians believed in rigid order and human civilization (Marks, 2017). They were advocates of creating a world of culture as opposite to nature, viewed as hostile. Confucian beliefs define humans in terms of our difference from animals, which lack human qualities like morality, manners and social order (Marks, 2017). Confucians believed that humans created societies in order to not succumb to wild beasts and that man should dispose over the world of things, taming the wild animals and nature to create nature in humans’ own image (Marks, 2017). Confucianism also propagates social order and conformity between different social layers and to the sovereign leading the nation (Shapiro, 2001). Opposite to Daoist, Confucians believed in building higher river dykes close to the river.

The third school of thought is Legalism. The legalists are interested in furthering the power and legitimacy of the state, and believed in controlling both nature and people (Marks, 2017). The Guanzi, one of the main works of legalism state “one controls the people as one controls a flood. One feeds them as one feeds domestic animals. One uses them as one uses plants and trees”

(Marks, 2017, p. 106). Using water as an example of how to control both nature and people is another example of the importance of water governance for state power similar to Zhang’s investigation of the Yellow River floods described below. Legalist ideas are perhaps most well- known for inspiring the Qin empire, who unified China in 221 BCE and built the imperial system from which later dynasties built their own (Marks, 2017). Legalism is therefore more important for the nature of scalar projects that have dominated Chinese water projects, with a focus on a strong state leadership.

The last school of philosophy is the western Modernist view, often introduced in oppositional terms to the eastern schools of thought based around harmony with nature (e.g. Shapiro, 2001). This modernist anthropocentric view is based on humans as created in god’s image and given charge to succumb and control nature in our image (Shapiro, 2001; Marks, 2017). It views humans as fundamentally distinct and separate from nature, and thus nature is viewed as something external. As the above introduction shows, this Modernist view is eerily similar to the Confucian view as humans opposite of nature. Simplifying traditional ‘Chinese’ views with those more similar to Daoism, like many do, thus creates an issue as Shapiro (2001) argue that the Confucian tradition have been by far the dominant school of thought in China.

Sanft (2010) questions the degree of evidence to support a distinction between legal texts and ritual or philosophical texts in the Qin and Han dynasties. This has major influence on the degree of importance that philosophical thought were given in governance and action to preserve nature. Sanft (2010) argues that many contemporary philosophical thinkers like the Confucian thinker Mencius (372-389 BCE) put a great deal of weight on the good stewardship of nature in ideas of proper governance. Another influential philosopher in Xunzi (ca. 340-245 BCE), argued that a good ruler should conserve the environment through different measures like forbidding woodcutting of young trees (Sanft, 2010). Here we thus have a direct link of philosophical thought incorporating environmental conservationist ideas into concepts of government that Sanft argues carries on throughout Chinese history. I would argue philosophy is not a direct active cause for the human-nature relationship at the time, but through varying degrees, is an important ultimate cause defining ideas and norms of state rule and good governance.

Shapiro (2001) uses philosophy not only in definitions of human – nature relationship, but also argues for how philosophy inspired norms and values played a part in the environmental destruction of the Mao era. Shapiro argues that Confucian values of obedience to authorities

34 and social conformity played a big part in supressing dissent and promoting ambitious and often detrimental projects. Shapiro (2001, p. 3) states that the Maoist views were an “extreme case of the modernist conception of humans” highlighting the separation of humans from nature. Shapiro thus uses philosophical thought as both ultimate causes for the revolutionary projects success in creating environmental change and uses it to describe its characteristics. What is also interesting to see from the below analysis is the connection with earlier Zhou times with the use of militarized language when discussing nature, so historical influences can also be seen as playing a large role in more contemporary environmental governance.

Shapiro (2001) argues for the influence of philosophical thought in shaping the Chinese human – nature relationships and uses it most active when arguing for the causes of the particular adversarial relationship during the Mao era. However, Shapiro also cautions against equating human – nature relationship and values with direct environmental change as they are constrained by cultural frameworks and institutional structures from which these values and attitudes arise. “Behavior and policies can be indicators of attitudes and values, and vice versa” (Shapiro, 2001, p. 11), so the conclusion of how philosophical thought influences the human- nature relationship is not a clear and easy one throughout Chinese history. I ague that philosophy have played some role in determining the construction of a Chinese socionature, but following Dunstan and Shapiro these ideas and thoughts have important constraints and did not always play a large role in on the ground governance. Of the four philosophical schools, legalism still play an important role in contemporary governance.

5.2 Early history

I will especially focus on how Chinese governance of water have been done and subsequently talked about by historians. I will start by highlighting some non-water related cases that describe the beginning of a Chinese human – nature relationship because how the first dynasties organized society and interacted with nature had tremendous importance for later dynasties, and even today (Marks, 2017).

The very first separation of prehistorical Chinese from living in nature came with the outset of agriculture. Previous hunting and gatherers on the loess plateau around the Yellow River started clearing forests. The methods they used, removing the bark and damaging the roots, was a highly methodical approach that cleared forests in predetermined shape and sizes (Marks,

2017). This led to an unusually sharp edge between farming area and forests, that came to symbolise the difference between culture and nature, and marked the separation of humans from the environment surrounding them. This separation from the surrounding environment was further exclaimed in the Shang dynasty who started building walls around cities and towns, separating the elites from both forest and countryside (Marks, 2017).

Here we can see the first example of a distinct adversarial human – nature relationship where Zhou agriculture colonies were sent out into the borderlands in order to clear forests and create farms. These colonies described their efforts in military language, were trees were seen as enemies and clearing them was seen as a victory for the civilized Chinese society over nature and to land previous belonging to ‘barbarians’ (Marks, 2017). These colonies coincided with a trend in Zhou society; the developing ideas that human should dominate and control nature, an idea that gradually came into reality with later dynasties (Marks, 2017). Here the proper order of the human – nature relationship was one were a civilized sovereign ruler helped humans dominate the landscape through transformation and exploitation. This notion of a centrally led effort in civilizing wild nature also acts to highlight a continuing characteristic of scalar arrangements in Chinese society where central leadership played an important part in constructing socionature.

In these times an idea about what constituted good governance and legitimacy emerged, the mandate of heaven (tianming). The mandate of heaven was bestowed upon rulers to rule well and help the people. If a natural disaster happened or the ruler had abused the mandate from heaven through not paying enough attention to nature, it was believed that heaven revoked the mandate and it was only natural for a new successor to usurp the throne and restore order (Ebrey, 2003; Marks, 2017).

The Zhou rulers used this idea to justify their conquest of the Shang dynasty that did not maintain order. The Zhou thus conquered the Shang, “restored order by subduing nature … then ‘drove the tigers leopards, rhinoceroses, and elephants far away and the world was greatly delighted’ (Book of Mencius, in Marks, 2017, p. 76). This “war against wild animals generally was a defining characteristic of the early Zhou-dynasty culture from which classical China later emerged” (Elvin, 2008, p. 11). These accounts starts to draw a picture of the early Chinese actions and beliefs concerning the environment. The environment was there to be exploited and transformed, either through a war against animals like the Zhou rulers espoused or a calming civilizing guidance by the sovereign like the mandate of heaven proclaimed (Marks, 2017). The

36 natural order was one in which the humans dominated the landscape as “ancient Chinese were less interested in ‘living in harmony with nature’ than they were in humanizing it” (Marks, 2017, p. 77).

Whereas Marks (2017) frames the human – nature interactions as slightly more neutral, Sanft describes the interactions in a more negative manner when talking about environmental results such as killing of animals and deforestation (Sanft, 2010). Nevertheless, Sanft talks in a more neutral manner when discussing the causes of these environmental interactions. He argues strongly against categorizing deforestation that happened despite of legal codes as the result of a cultural hostility towards forests or nature akin to something similar to what Marks (2017) is doing. Sanft (2010) rather argues that the unsuccessful conservation and consequently environmental results was a result of limited knowledge, as well as the structural aspect of an expanding human population. These limitations created in his words “unavoidable negative consequences” (Sanft, 2010, p. 716). Since the earliest onset of a unified Chinese political entity a struggle against nature have played important roles in justifying and securing political power. The military language used when describing interaction with nature and the idea of mandate of heaven will play important parts in later water projects.

5.3 The Grand Canal

I will here introduce some successful scalar water projects, both small and large, that made the early Chinese cement their belief in their own hydrological knowledge and gain confidence that they could master and control nature, because they were (Zhang 2013; Marks, 2017). I will here quickly mention some smaller projects, before I introduce two of Chinese histories longest running and most significant hydrological projects, the Grand Canal and the Yellow River dikes. The reason for focusing on these hydrology projects, has a long history in China, the mythical first ruler of China, Yu the Great is said to have built hydro-projects for flood control and thus saved the country (Shapiro, 2001). Vulnerability to floods and a long written history have helped establishing the importance of water projects and maintenance of granaries as primary responsibilities of the imperials administrators (Li and Dray-Novey, 1999; Shapiro, 2001), thus cementing the importance of centrally led scalar arrangements for the reworking of Chinese socionature through water projects.

During the Zhou dynasty and onto the earlier Qin and Han dynasties roughly 221 BCE to 220 CE (Ebrey, 2003), technological improvements made it possible to store and control water for irrigation and flood control (Marks, 2017). In Central China, damming to create reservoirs and then using sluice gates for irrigation where emerging, and around the Yellow River the state funded and built large-scale contour canals for irrigation. Another quite large Qin water project was the Dujiangyan, or Capital River Dam, a flood control measure in present Sichuan province that still functions to this day, more than 2200 years later (Marks, 2017). The Dujiangyan shows the technical expertise in the emerging hydrological projects that were enacted by the central authorities. The Dujiangyan also followed a clear legalist view that was meant to cemented state power through supporting the heavenly mandate discourse that reified the emperor’s political legitimacy.

The Grand Canal built around the turn of the 7th century by, the rather short-lived, Sui dynasty was to have tremendous importance for the course of the history of China and the Chinese relationship to their environment (Marks, 2017). The canal running from the lower Yangzi plain to the north played an important role in connecting and thus unifying the north and the south into a single political and economic unit and for the north to import agricultural products to the more unstable North-China plains all the way up to the 20th century (Li and Dray-Novey, 1999; Marks, 2017).

Building and maintaining the Grand Canal altered the environment of the North China plain dramatically. The canal intersected with several major rivers, largest of them the Huai River, which transported silt towards the ocean. This meant that the canal required exhaustive centrally planned maintenance and produced a deep knowledge about river hydrology. However, when the vast amount of investment in resources or energy required to maintain the steady operation lagged for some reason, the highly engineered hydrologic system could easily break down, causing massive floods across the North China plain (Marks, 2017). The ecological problems caused by blocking several rivers course to the sea leading to flooding, silting of agricultural area and stopping fertile soil to the ocean was seen as less important because of the canals strategic importance to the north. At its height around 440 million kilos of grain was transported on the canal a year (Li and Dray-Novey, 1999).

During the early 20th century, the lack of a strong centralised government to manage and fund the maintenance of the Grand Canal led to a disaster where the North China plain was inundated in flood after flood (Marks, 2017). After two thousand years of strategic importance the North

China plain went into a period of demographic, economic and environmental decline leading to Pomeranz (1993) calling this process ‘the making of hinterland’. The scalar arrangements that the maintenance of the Grand Canal relied on were not contested per se, but rather abandoned as the old networks of power that relied on these were supplanted by new networks.

5.4 River diking and the Yellow River

The second project that has had major influences on Chinese hydrological thinking throughout the history is the continual struggle of diking one of the most unpredictable rivers in the world, the Yellow River. Because of the geography of North China, to the west a loess plateau giving of large amounts of silt, especially after intensive agriculture on the fertile plateau, and to the east a near flat plain prone to flooding (Marks, 2017). The large amounts of silt and flat terrain has resulted in hundreds of major floods and several major changes of course throughout Chinese recorded history (Zhang, 2013). Marks (2017, p. 276-277) says that “Han Chinese have been diking rivers on the North China plain since at least the eighth century BCE. Doing so is the Han Chinese way”. Important to note here is Marks’ specification that these activities are especially Han Chinese, and that these activities started on the North China plain. Later we will see that these scalar projects and specific socionature were transported to new places creating new conflicts and environmental issues.

According to Zhang (2013), the largest shift in the Yellow River’s path in 1048 came about not because of natural causes but emerged out of the Northern Song State’s (960-1127) hydrological ideology and practices. Zhang (2013, p. 137), in his exhaustive paper on the Yellow River politics during the Song dynasty argues that the actions taking place before the historic 1048 flood should be considered as the “emergence of a new, systematic hydraulic agenda, which regarded the successful flood-control of the Yellow River as a significant part of the political unity of the early Song state”. This unity was together with other core interests of the state seen as paramount to forming a stable, centralised government, something that had been absent for nearly two hundred years prior to the Song state (Zhang, 2013).

The early Song viewed unfavourable environmental conditions, chief among them the Yellow River, as a decentralising force that obstructed the new regime’s dream of a centralised state (Zhang, 2013). Thus, their heavy interventions in the flow of the Yellow river originated in the rulers’ desire to design an ideal socionatural landscape that could build a beneficial political

39 landscape in achieving their dream of a strong, stable and centralised state. To achieve this required human considerations like cost-benefit analysis, political ambitions and practical intervention that contributed to the creation of a new physical landscape with the shift in flow of the Yellow River (Zhang, 2013). The resulting socionature that was constructed through centrally led scalar projects was not favourable to everyone, especially not the Chinese living in Hebei province, north of the Yellow Rivers dykes as they were racked with floods following the historic shift (Zhang, 2013).

The emperor Taizu and the important engineer Li Chui in charge of this scalar project argued that this would set the south forever free from Yellow River floods (Zhang, 2013). In the following eight decades, with the course of the river shifted northward, Hebei would experience several major floods while Henan, true to the words of the emperor, would experience stability and no major floods. This new course of the river, away from capital and heartland, was considered healthier, more moral and deemed cosmological harmonious since it followed old precedent and followed the mandate of heaven (Zhang, 2013). Thus, “the Song state’s heavy manipulations of the Yellow River bore not only hydraulic significance. Rather, these actions should be regarded as an important component in the process of and efforts toward state formation in the early stages of the Song’s rule” (Zhang, 2013, p. 159). The scalar project concerning water governance favouring the central areas over all others through reconstructing the Chinese socionature thus became an important component of the power of those very political elites consequently solidifying the Yellow River scalar arrangements.

5.5 Exporting socionatural habits and scalar arrangements

When the primarily Yellow River based Han Chinese state with subsequent dynasties expanded their reach into more of what we traditionally think of as China they encountered similar issues with their hydrological practices. When the river diking habits of the Han people reached the lower reaches of the Yangzi and its tributaries, new conflicts emerged. During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the Han River was extensively diked leading to a conflict of interest between upstream residents who reaped the benefits of diking and the downstream residents who experienced more and larger floods (Marks, 2017). Cooperation among downstream and upstream villages might have been possible, but intervillage quarrelling and state inaction were

40 the norm. This again led to more and more downriver diking and the accompanying belief that the water could be controlled (Marks, 2017). During the end of the Ming, the entire basin was hydrological altered into a hybrid waterscape. With the turmoil that followed the fall of the dynasty, this highly engineered system, similar to what happened to the Grand Canal, collapsed without the necessary maintenance leading to years of floods and return to the original swamp- like environment (Marks, 2017).

During the Ming and Qing (1636-1912) dynasties, the Han Chinese state’s hydrological practices extended further south, and west, and new more intensive land reclamation projects were carried out on swamps and waterways (Marks, 2017). Lillian Li’s (2007, p. 72-73) conclusion on Qing practices and subsequent decades of flooding around the turn of the twentieth century is worth quoting in its entirety:

“The eighteenth-century triumphs of hydraulic management—the stabilization of the Yongding River, the control of drainage around the Thousand-Li Dike, the diversion of silted waters to swamps, for example—only encouraged the intense use of the land on or near the swamps and dikes. Cultivators were willing to assume the risk of occasional floods because the silt-laden soil was very fertile. The state cushioned these risks offering famine relief, which included generous tax remissions. As the population settlement became much denser, the human costs and risks became higher each time there was a natural disaster. To a great extent, then, the ecological crisis of the nineteenth century was a product of the very successes of imperial engineering of the eighteenth century, not its failures. The changing riverbeds and topographical monstrosities described in the 1890s flood reports by [missionaries] were the legacy of centuries of channeling and diking.”

Marks (2017) uses very powerful language when talking about Han Chinese’s earlier interaction with nature. Words like conquest, domination, master and control are used in order to paint a picture of a relationship with the environment far away from any romanticized Daoist ‘harmony’ with nature. Marks (2017, p 236) also claims that other ethnic minorities like the Miao, who lived in central China did not alter the environment to the degree of the Han population: “their farming, fishing, and lumbering activities do not appear to have caused many problems for the watersheds flowing downriver into Dongting Lake. Han in-migrants, though, did”. This was partly because of the unique Confucian inspired Han way of interacting with the environment and partly because throughout Chinese history “economic development more often than not trumped knowledge about ecological problems” (Marks, 2017, p. 246). Thus, as

41 the Chinese brought their hydrological practices into a greater geographical area, conflicts emerged and left the Qing Empire with several large environmental problems.

5.6 Modern history

Following the actions of previous empires’ environmental action the more modern Qing Empire and republican times (1912-1949) will continue with similar socionatural relations that were characterized by using and civilizing the natural environment. There are several historical arguments to what constitutes modernism, how to define it in a Chinese manner, and when it started. The period that I will discuss here is from around 1800 during the Qing Empire, up until the time of Mao era communism starting roughly in 1949 (Marks, 2017). This is done in order to highlight the continual socionatural trajectory leading up to contemporary times. Dunstan (1998), doing extensive archival research writes extensively on Qing era human – nature relations and conceptions of nature that influenced imperial administration of the environment. By doing this, she mirrors much of Marks’ claims on the priorities of the Chinese officials.

Dunstan (1998, p. 587) argues that during the Qing empire the classical view of the environment that Confucian-trained officials were trained in and worked under were literally a “anthropocentric, gendered cosmos —Heaven (male) above, Earth (female) below, mankind (male-dominated) in the middle”. Here we see the tiandiren term denoting a cosmological understanding of nature. However, Dunstan (1998) cautions against putting too much explanatory weight on cosmological or religious explanations to imperial administrators environmental understanding as she argues that it played part of the cognitive framework but did not dominate the everyday consciousness or actions of territorial administrators.

What played a larger role however, was the understanding of nature and the state’s role in legitimizing their rule over the common people (Dunstan, 1998). Throughout history Chinese viewed the climatic conditions, sent by heaven, as a precursor for success, and it was up to man to invest work and innovation in order to realise earths full potential to bring forth sustenance and wealth to create a civilization ‘fit to awe barbarians’ (Dunstan, 1998). This belief influenced the state, who justified much of its existence by supposedly leading society in this goal. Therefore, a large amount of energy was expected of Qing officials in "enriching [his people] as a prerequisite to teaching them [morality]” (xianfu houjiao) (Dunstan, 1998, p. 587).

Nonetheless, much like Sanft’s case two thousand years earlier, Dunstan (1998) concludes that several advantages that could have made imperial officials govern with environmental awareness, not the least through philosophical thought and local economic interests, were not acted upon. This was partly because of several institutional obstacles; too much elite intellectual energy was spent on bureaucratic tasks instead of environmental research and governance (Dunstan, 1998). Second, environmental considerations were just one of several considerations an official had to consider. Lastly, the negative impacts of bad or complete lack of, environmental governance was usually seen long after officials had moved on, as each position lasted for only two years and the officials were constantly moved around (Dunstan, 1998). Since negative impacts happened long after officials had moved on to a new posting, few ever got punished for mismanagement, and the concern for most administrators were thus in governing human society and primarily maximizing the extraction of revenue for the state (Dunstan, 1998).

Muscolini (2010; 2011) writes on the environmental devastation of war in general and the Sino- Japanese war specifically. He focuses on the devastation that repeated Yellow River flooding had on Henan, and the subsequent refugees’ impact on new areas settled. Similar to the Song- dynasty the Chinese Nationalist military under orders from Chang Kai-Shek broke the Yellow river dikes in June 1938 to halt the advances of an invading Japanese army (Muscolini, 2011). This led to a devastating flood, and was successful in halting the Japanese advances in the short term. However, much like the situation during the Song dynasty almost a thousand years earlier, the worst effects were on the civilian population long-term, as heavy grain taxes by both Japanese and Chinese forces and inclement climatic conditions lead to an ENSO drought in 1942-43 that killed at least 2 million and made even more refugees (Muscolini, 2010; 2011). The breaking of the dikes is another example of a Chinese perception where nature was to serve human purposes through centrally led scalar arrangements.

To ameliorate the refugee crisis the nationalist government started an extensive land reclamation project (Muscolini, 2010). According to Muscolini (2010), this reflected the ongoing militarization of the Chinese society that happened all throughout the twentieth century. Chinese political leaders held up the military as sources for emulating in all things and different land reclamation projects were carried out with military goals, ideals, organization and discourse rife with military metaphors concerning reclaiming uncultivated land to help in the fight against the Japanese (Muscolini, 2010). The resettles refugees were sent out reclaim

‘wasteland’, which is a translation for the value-laden Chinese word ‘huang’, that means uncultivated land. Huang refers to “desolate, neglected land full of weeds and devoid of civilizing influence. The culturally constructed meanings attached to this type of environment justified and even encouraged human alteration of uncultivated "wasteland" to exploit it for agricultural production” (Muscolini, 2010, p. 454). These projects were thus meant to ‘civilize’ the nature for human use and thus demonstrate a clear Confucian and legalist link to environmental governance. These land reclamations lead to removal of natural vegetation in order to exploit the land, which in turn led to soil erosion and decreased soil quality once again showing large scalar projects reworking socionature having a negative consequences.

However, the worst of environmental damage took place in areas where the refugees left (Muscolini, 2011). The highly engineered agricultural and hydrological socionatures of Late- Imperial Henan required vast amounts of maintenance and constant input of labour similar to the Grand Canal. When the refugees left, the labour necessary to support this task was absent leading to an interruption of agriculture, making previously inhabited highly productive areas ‘desolate wastelands’ (Muscolini, 2011). Muscolini finishes his account of the refugees’ impact on the environment by reminding everyone that a purely demographic explanation fails to include the nuances of a situation where “relatively wealthy refugees did most of the damage to the natural landscape, while cultivation of marginal land damaged the health of the most impoverished” (Muscolini, 2011, p. 311). This equity question is one that will be especially relevant in the Mekong river case where upstream and downstream states are pitted against each other.

5.7 The Mao era

Following years of political unrest and environmental deterioration many places in China, people hoped the stability that the communists brought would improve the environmental situation. This was not to be. With Shapiro’s (2001) book Mao’s War Against Nature, the title of the book is self-explanatory to the content of Shapiro’s discussion. In the book, she discusses the Mao era’s human – nature relationship, which she categorises as an extreme example of human interference with nature and describes the human – nature relationship as being unusually distorted (Shapiro, 2001). Shapiro highlights how the relationship between the repressive political actions of the state and environmental consequences can be thought of as a dual dynamic of violence towards human beings and violence by humans toward nature. This 44 repressive relationship can also be seen in much political ecology literature like Swyngedouw (2007) when describing authoritarian environmental governance. The Mao era thus leads to both unique scalar projects and a socionature unlike any point in Chinese history.

Shapiro (2001) using her framework of proximate and ultimate causes tries to explain how this ‘tragedy’ could happen and how it unfolded. The first point that she discusses is the role of normal everyday citizen at the time. She argues that the revolutionary fervour and the resulting environmental consequences when all policies and production targets were uniform, and not place specific and grounded in reality on the ground, cannot be separated from “the often willing participation of millions of Chinese people, at all levels of society, whose traditional culture played a critical role in suppressing dissent and in promoting overambitious development projects” (Shapiro, 2001, p. 1-2). She highlights Confucian culture who fostered obedience to ones superiors and a long history of strong centralised rule in being two of the ultimate reasons for allowing the state to control people’s lives to the degree that happened during the Mao era.

Shapiro (2001) argues that the Maoist communism that emerged in this period was one shaped by a strong voluntarist philosophy that held that “through concentrated exertion of human will and energy, material conditions could be altered and all difficulties overcome in the struggle to achieve a socialist utopia” (Shapiro, 2001, p. 3). This voluntarist philosophy would combine with a continuation of the pre-communist militarization of the social life and interaction with nature so that humans were pitted against nature in a fierce struggle akin to fights against capitalism, revisionism, individualism and feudalism (Shapiro, 2001). One example of this were a plethora of huge hydropower projects that removed people from their homes, but because of the quality of work that anti-intellectualism brought with it, they were ultimately useless, often causing disastrous floods when dams broke.

Shapiro (2001) shows how the Maoist adversarial relation towards nature emerges through official discourse filled with references to ‘war against nature’, ‘conquest of nature’ and ‘victories’ against nature. Wheat was to be planted by ‘shock attack’, ‘shock troops’ reclaimed grasslands and other unproductive landscapes and ‘victories’ were won against flood and droughts through hydraulic projects. These Maoist attempts at ‘conquering nature’ was motivated by socialist utopianism to transform the natural world and build a socialist paradise, which was “characterized by coercion, mass mobilization, enormity of scale, and great human suffering. The articulation of Mao’s war against nature is striking for its overtly adversarial expression and disregard of objective scientific principles, while its implementation stands out

45 for focused destructiveness and mass coordination” (Shapiro, 2001, p. 8). Mao’s supporters even admired him for this adversarial stance as General Yang Shangkun boasted “no other world leader looks down with such disdain on great mountains and powerful rivers” (Shapiro, p. 68).

Shapiro (2001) cautions that these discourses did not directly lead to action or behavioural changes, as thought and action are hard to separate and other proximate and ultimate causes also played a part in what she in quite dire terms describe as destruction of the environment on a scale rarely seen in history.

Shapiro (2001) situates the Maoist socialist stance on nature by comparing it to other philosophical stances that I have introduced above in this chapter. Shapiro states that the Maoist philosophy is an extreme case of a modernist idea of humans as separated and distinct from nature. However, Mao was not a modernist because unlike the earlier Chinese republic’s attempt at rational management of nature, Mao were a fierce opponent of scientific knowledge and most production targets for wheat, rice and metal had no grounding in reality (Shapiro, 2001). Shapiro also contrast the Maoist idea of conquest of nature with ‘traditional Chinese values of harmony and sustainability’ akin to a Daoist understanding of governance. As one can see through this historical narrative that this chapter paints, I would argue strongly against the view that earlier Chinese governed the natural environment using ideas of harmony and sustainability.

However when discussing the history of militarization of socionatural relations throughout Chinese history Shapiro (2001) argues that the anthropocentric Confucian tradition where humans mastered nature by remaking nature in a fashion that would provide benefits for society were dominant. She argues that the Mao era drive to conquer nature could be understood “as an extreme form of a philosophical and behavioral tendency that has roots in traditional Confucian culture” (Shapiro, 2001, p. 8), and in so doing effectively comparing the anthropocentric similarities of western modernism and eastern Confucianism. Through the turbulent years of Mao’s reign, the Chinese socionatural relations who was influenced by thousand years of militarized discourse became even more adversarial than previously leading to environmental degradation that continued into the reform era.

5.8 The Reform era

In this penultimate part of the historical overview, I will discuss the period after Mao’s death in 1976 leading up until the present day. This will start out with the reform era in the 1980s and 90s, and introduce more current examples of the production of socionature in order to show a connection between current scalar arrangements and socionatural relations to those that preceded it during the two thousand years of Chinese history covered here.

Shapiro (2001) uses James C. Scott’s (1985) theory on disasters of social engineering to discuss the nature of agency of the population concerning state action. Because as were often assumed the case in the totalitarian communist system before the opening up during the reform era was that the state controlled every facet of everyday life, and thus also the production of socionature (Shapiro, 2001). The picture is, of course, more complex than an authoritarian system manipulating a docile, Confucian conforming populace into an utopian revolutionary insanity that characterized large portions of Mao’s rule. This view have been replaced by an idea of interactions and influence among numerous political actors and many levels within the bureaucratic political scale, “with centers of power and interests throughout the bureaucratic hierarchy” (Shapiro, 2001, p. 16). People did oppose, adapt and use different scalar projects for their own benefit, just like in most political entities. Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, together with a group of high-ranking officials initially opposed Mao’s great leap forward claiming that building water conservancy projects at such a quick pace that Mao wanted was reckless. They later turned around and argued for urgency with the very same projects when the tide had turned and they had more to gain themselves. This kind of behaviour happened on the local level as well as people resisted policies when they felt threatened like local official Zeng Jia in Sichuan who questioned the grain production quotas, and promoted other policies that benefitted themselves, as when a journalist reported on official steel making numbers while actually opposing the whole project (Shapiro, 2001).

However, there were some powerful limits to this resistance during the Mao years (Shapiro, 2001). Scott (1985) argues that such limits play an important role in creating the conditions for social and environmental disasters in some of the greatest disasters of social engineering like the Soviet collectivization, the Tanzanian ‘villagization’ and the several periods during the Mao era. Scott (1985) identified four key elements present in all of these; first, the administrative ordering of society by the state, second, faith in the modernist project, third, an authoritarian

47 regime willing to use coercion and force to further the modernist project and fourth, a civil society too weak to resist. The former two elements are present in most of contemporary societies, but the addition of the latter two provide a recipe for disaster (Scott, 1985). In China, the communist party fostered a party control apparatus that furthered a “culture that stressed collectivity, social harmony, hierarchy, and obedience to authority” (Shapiro, 2001, p. 17) and all four elements certainly were in place during the Mao years. This culture of control is most similar to a legalist way of thinking and were present in most dynasties, but were the strongest during the Qin dynasty that built several large infrastructure projects like the Dujiangyan. As I argued earlier, such large water projects were meant to support the power of the central political elites through showing dominance over nature.

Shapiro (2001) argues that the four elements that contributed to environmental and social violence during the Mao era remain to the present, although in different appearances and with different degrees. These elements continue to contribute to contemporary China’s environmental issues and governance which are linked to the state’s authoritarian system, national character, recent history and cultural traditions (Shapiro, 2001). These elements continue to tribute to many of “China’s environmental problems even as powerful new factors such as commercialization and the rush to development have emerged to hasten destruction of the natural world” (Shapiro, 2001, p. 19). During the reform-era China this commercialization took over every aspect of society as the country opened up its markets for investment, and the saying ‘look toward money in everything’ (Yiqie Xiang Qian Kan) became the golden rule for interactions with nature as commercialization and market forces supplanted revolutionary vigour (Shapiro, 2001). Shapiro sees commercialization as a continuation of Mao’s war against nature with a different motivating force, but could just as easily be seen as reversal to Qing dynasty focus on profit over the environment as I described earlier.

One direct results of the Mao years that are still affecting China to this day is the severe deforestation because of the failed steel making policies during the Great Leap Forward. Another result was that “widespread well-digging sometimes caused water tables to drop and land to become salinated and alkalinized, a consequence of the Leap that affects water availability and land quality even today” (Shapiro, 2001, p. 76). This direct consequence put special importance on water security today giving added incentives to build dams and reservoirs on the Mekong River.

Qu and Li (1994), two prominent state officials in the reform era, Qu being part of the 175 man large Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress which exercise legislative power of the state, and on the Environmental Protection and Resources Conservation Committee from 1993-2003, in their book Population and the Environment in China illustrate much of the official thinking on the environment in China during these years. Chapter 13, with the quite clear and telling name of Controlling Population to Protect the Environment reveals the neo- Malthusian ideas that led to much criticized policies like the one child policy.

Throughout this book Qu and Li (1994) connects population size with environmental degradation, arguing for the positive benefits that the One Child policy had both economically and environmentally. However, they further delve into this issue by stating, “limiting population growth will alleviate pressures on the environment. Improving population characteristics (e.g., education and living standards) will change the nature of environmental degradation” (Qu and Li, 1994, p. 193). Qu and Li (1994, p. 189) themselves recognize that “although advances in science and technology will alleviate pressures on China’s resource stocks, impacts from growth will increase at faster rates”. This is made worse by the Chinese government attributing environmental problems with economic growth and population without realizing the complexity of the issue and the difference that science and technology can have (Qu and Li, 1994).

Qu and Li gives a damning verdict on the state of environmental governance from the 70s until the early 90s by saying that guidelines are weak, policy have been slow to improve and that, similarly to population control, regulation and policy have been post facto, reacting to damage already inflicted. Indeed, the more recent lackluster result of the command and control system with regards to environmental policy has led some analysts to call the system, one of ‘command without control’ as central government does not exercise high degrees of control over implementation and monitoring processes (Kostka, 2016). One element that gets the blame is China’s traditional utilitarian attitude views that views the environment in purely material terms; a more ‘responsible’ view would impact standards and patterns of production and consumption (Qu and Li, 1993). Another is the lack of property rights for natural resources that would improve efficient use of resources. In their conclusion Qu and Li (1994, p. 201) stakes the course for the next decades by arguing that “first, China will aim to preserve living standards. Next, the country will further invest in environmental amenities”. This can also be seen on Mekong River as the Chinese sees the water in purely material terms building several

49 dams to improve living standards and then later dealing with consequences from downstream countries.

Rozelle et al. (1997) discuss and summarise China’s efforts in the 80s and 90s on a wide- ranging topic of rural resource degradation. They argue that government policy has not been effective in dealing with resource degradation, primarily because of limited fiscal resource and poorly taught personnel leading to the delegation of responsibility of environmental protection to ministries of agriculture and forestry, which have incentives to favour pro-production policies (Rozelle et al. 1997). Similarly, to the Qing officials over a hundred years before them, and dam building on the Mekong, these ministries were tasked with enriching the Chinese people first and worrying about environmental protection second thus creating scale mismatches in the governance of the environment.

Following the Mao years and with the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy in the reform era especially with the growth of township and village enterprises, water pollution became a major issue in the early 1980s that continues to this day (Rozelle et al. 1997; Han et al. 2016). Rozelle et al. (1997) explain some of the difficulties that China have faced with regards to meeting environmental protection goals by a conflict of interest in those who wants to exploit and those who want or are tasked with protecting the environment. On the Mekong case that I will present later this very conflict is at the heart of the issue with the Chinese controlled institution wanting to exploit the hydroelectric potential of the river and one of the foreign backed institutions wanting to protect the environment.

5.9 The Three Georges Dam

The last historical example that I will discuss here is the Three Gorges Project (TGP) on the Yangzi River, the project in a historical context, debates about its planning and building and its socionatural impact. The TGP is the landmark project that created the current Chinese water machine and chartered the course for subsequent projects, including those on the Mekong. Shapiro (2001) calls the dam project a ‘monument to Communist Party hubris’ and one of the largest shadows from the Mao era to hang over more contemporary Chinese environmental policy. Wang (1993) in the environmental assessment of the TGP states that the TGP will foster advantages and reduce problems leading to both an improved environment and socioeconomic

50 development. While Adams and Ryder’s (1998) damning critique of the whole process calls the TGP ‘China’s great leap backward’ and ‘the twentieth century’s largest state vanity project’.

Wang (1993), in his aptly named Comprehensive ecological and environmental impact of the Three Gorges Project thoroughly discusses the different impacts of the TGP. These include “the impact of backwaters, the effect of human activities on water discharge, reservoir slope stability, earthquakes, resettlement resulting from inundation, siltation, water quality, aquatic organisms, natural sources of virus, and local infectious diseases” (Wang, 1993, p. 72). During two meetings organized by the State Science and Technology Commission prior to the construction of the TGP, the inundation of the reservoir area and ecological carrying capacity for the resettlement was ‘generally agreed’ to be the most important ones (Wang, 1993). Even though the list of potential environmental issues are exhaustive, most of the issues are trivialized and potential benefits highlighted as “part of the harmful impact can be mitigated or eliminated by certain remedial measures” (Wang, 1993, p. 75). This can be understood as a discourse supporting the construction of the TGP project as the technical information in the impact assessment were distorted to promote the TGP project. Since the project was important for a new generation of political elites, through showing their mastery over nature and in creating networks of power that would help them reify their power, the impact assessment had to be positive in order for the project to be a success.

Regarding one of the biggest issues of the TGP, and indeed most large hydraulic projects in China and outside, the potential displacement of residents in the reservoir area, Wang (1993) argues as long as the resettlement resident can be given an equivalent or higher income than before, then the resettlement capacity issue can be resolved. To help with this situation ‘rational exploitation and utilization of different resources’ can transform the area’s ‘backward economy’ into potential economic prosperous leading to an expanded carrying capacity and an improved ecological environment (Wang, 1993). By patronizing the local economy as backward, the potential harm of the displacement is lessened as the TGP is presented in offering an economic opportunity. Wang, similar to the Chinese republic more than 70 years earlier, espouses the benefits of rational modernistic management in order to help both the environment and the economy. This follows in line with much of the Communist Party’s technocratic approach to large projects like the TGP (Adams and Ryder, 1997), and will be an important component of the later Mekong situation were dams will be framed as opportunities for the developing economies of the downstream countries to grow.

Even though Wang’s (1993) assessment is overly positive and downplays most of the negative issues connected to the construction, two important points can be gained from it. First, by reading the assessment it is quite clear that the local power generation and economic development of a ‘backward’ region played a significant part in the construction. Secondly, and more importantly, being influenced by thousands of years of socionatural production, the assessment puts especially strong focus on the flood prevention aspects of the dam. By creating the dam, the rivers water can be controlled by humans preventing loss of lives and economic damage from smaller and larger hundred-year floods in the downstream embankments. As Wang (1993, p. 108) himself put it “the TGP will reduce flood disasters in the middle and lower reaches of the Changjiang (Yangtze, own) River, save people's lives and property, and protect the ecological environment. Such positive impacts are highly significant”.

Adams and Ryder (1998) in their equally aptly named article China’s great leap backward: uneconomic and outdated, the three gorges dam will stunt China’s economic growth tells you all you need to know about their more negative outlook on the whole project. The angle that they look at the project is primarily through an economic one and according to them as a pure source of electricity the TGP ‘cannot compete with the alternatives’ like cogeneration and smaller scale projects (Adams and Ryder, 1998). However, “when the government hasn't made support for Three Gorges obligatory, it has 'recommended' that some profitable large enterprises 'assist their counterparts' by making donations to the Three Gorges project” (Adams and Ryder, 1998, p. 698). Thus, they argue that the obstacles for an energy shift to cleaner and more affordable energy sources are not technical or economical but bureaucratic and political as the command and control apparatus of the CCP favours large-scale investment in coal, hydro and nuclear instead. The TGP is the flagship of this large-scale, centralized electricity program and shows that the central planners in Beijing are alive and well running the ship (Adams and Ryder, 1998). The centrality of state led scalar projects for water governance can thus be seen to similar to that one or two thousand years earlier, reifying the political legitimacy of strong central state.

According to Adams and Ryder (1998), the planning process was packed with ‘obedient and technically illiterate supporters’ silencing opposing views. TGP opponent were silenced all throughout the process and oppositional views were “not treated as mere differences of opinion, but evidence of disloyalty and ‘counter-revolutionary’ intent” (Sullivan, 1994, in Adams and Ryder, 1998, p. 701). This gives weight to Shapiro’s (2001) claims that the shadow of Mao era politics hangs heavy over the TGP especially as this kind of silencing and referring to opponents

52 as ‘counter-revolutionary’ were some of the most defining characteristic of that time. As the opposition to the project was silenced and information made to support the project, there was little to no debate and no viable unified opposition to challenge the various issues with the project (Adams, and Ryder, 1998). This silencing of opposing views also occur in the later Mekong case where the Chinese state are actively trying to silence downstream dissent through undermining the opposing institutions and funding dam projects in others countries.

Adams and Ryder (1998) highlight the important role of two powerful dam organizations and their key role in making the TGP happen, the Ministry of Water Resources and the influential Yangtze Valley Planning Office. These two organization did everything they could in order to make the project a success. Some of the tricks that were employed by these organizations according to Sullivan (1994) were promises of administrative positions and influence, bribing oppositional views, falsifying data, skewing the economic data to favour the construction and fixing crucial technical experiments. Together with silencing the political opposition, every tool was used to make the project a success despite concerns and numerous large issues. Sullivan (1994, in Adams and Ryder, 1998, p. 702) argue that this means that the TGP is one of the “refuges of the old-style planned economy ‘with secure and everlasting financing, personnel, and political power’”.

Dai Qing, a Chinese journalist jailed without trial for her work related to the TGP, claimed that the TGP was a metaphor for the power struggle between reformers and hard-liners that happened in China during the 90s (Adams and Ryder, 1998). The hard-line politicians who supported the TGP were using the scalar project to gain power and had all the characteristics of Mao era strongmen with clear authoritarianism, support for central economic control and the one-party system and personal despotism (Adams and Ryder, 1998). With the increased authoritarianism showed under Xi Jinping, like the ‘deterioration of media-freedom’ (Teon, 2019) it is clear which side won in the power struggle in the 90s. This has important consequences for the Chinese socionature and scalar constructions related to dam building as one could suspect a similar process to be carried out with subsequent dam projects despite issues like pollution and geological instability and decreasing water levels in the lower Yangtze being publically acknowledged only five years after its completion (Wines, 2011)

The TGP showed that the center could still be boss in a world of growing decentralized economic and political power, individual consumerism and ‘bourgeois liberalism’ (Adams and Ryder, 1998). This is equally valid with a Chinese economy embedded in a growing

53 international economy, the TGP purported Chinese nationalism and ethnocentrism as it showed to the world that China wanted to be ‘number one’ in all things, including the biggest dam. The TGP has thus both been a beneficiary of China’s autocratic socionatural history and helped strengthen it (Adams and Ryder, 1998). Supporters of the dam have used discursive strategies and political nous to support the project, constantly referring all the way back to Sun Yat-sen’s, the founder of the modern Chinese state, ideas of hydropower, through Mao’s dreams and desire of the TGP, and Deng Xiaoping’s ‘support’ for it (Adams and Ryder, 1998). The TGP follows a 50-year long history of reservoirs (Adams and Ryder, 1998), and even longer history, like the Han River diking, of hydrological construction of socionature where those who suffered the consequences of this construction are not the beneficiaries and the beneficiaries do not suffer.

This chapter argues that the key objectives for water governance in China has been controlling nature to the benefit of humans through large state-led water governance projects that showed the political elites power over nature, thus projecting power and building their political legitimacy. Similarly, Moore (2019) highlights the importance that water have had in creating scalar networks of power through assuring legitimacy for the ruling political elites and influenced the scalar characteristic of central institutions. The Chinese state continuously attempts at keeping a dominant role in water governance because of the central role that water has in ensuring both political legitimacy and developmental objectives. This thesis will continue on this line of thinking and argue that both scale and socionatural relations also influence transnational environmental governance on the Mekong River.

6 The governance of the Mekong

This final chapter of the paper will discuss how the aforementioned socionatural relations and scalar politics that make up some part of what one can call the black box of the ‘Chinese context’. This chapter will primarily focus on how Chinese ways of governing a transnational resource impacts international governance of the Mekong river through the actions of the Chinese state and reactions of lower Mekong countries (LMC). I will do so by focusing on interactions within and between three important governance institutions that have throughout the last 20 years been the dominant institutions dealing with water governance in the region. This is done in order to show how using a joint socionature and scalar framework can help in understanding the complex environmental governance case of a transnational environmental common like the Mekong River.

I will first introduce the current state of Chinese actions and socionature as seen by a variety of perspectives. Second, a brief history of Chinese governance activity on the Mekong through discussing Chinese participation in the two institutions of The Greater Mekong Subregion and Mekong River Commission. Finally an introduction and critical discussion on the newest regional governance institutions, the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism (LMCM) through the socionature and scale framework.

6.1 Mekong introduction

The Mekong River have had long and turbulent history after the 1950s with geopolitical situations like the US wars in South-East Asia, the cold war and regional rapprochement (Hirsch, 2010). During the years before the 21st century, dams on the mainstream of the Mekong were far and few between, with regional environmentalism and local and international NGOs pushing dam construction to smaller projects on the tributaries. However, growing regional economies and subsequently energy demand together with diplomatic assertiveness have meant that developmental projects with larger mainstream dams helped by the funding and construction from the Chinese water machine were initiated (Hirsch, 2010; Hay 2018). Middleton and Allouche (2016, p. 100) argue that “three ‘powersheds’, conceptualised as physical, institutional and political constructs that connect dams to major power markets in China, Thailand and Vietnam, are transforming the nature– society relations of the watershed”.

The energy produced from these dams, are meant to fuel economic development in the regions powerhouses, far from any negative consequences of dams.

Crow-Miller et al. (2017, p. 233) argue that “historically, China’s embrace of modernist water management could be understood as part of a broader set of ideas about controlling nature, in the post-reform era this philosophical view has merged with a technocratic vision of national development”. They show how China’s focus on large infrastructure projects can be institutional embodied by what they call a ‘Chinese Water Machine’, which unifies the technocratic, political and economic paradigm into a loose institutional ensemble for the governance of water. This ‘high modernist’ Chinese water machine was solidified with the construction of the TGP and is now being exported all over the world, including the Mekong (Crow-Miller et al. 2017). This Chinese water machine can be understood as one large scalar project meant to support the Chinese modernisation and nation-building project, and similarly to the TGP project that gave birth to this scalar arrangement, critical perspectives on new projects are silenced (Crow-Miller et al. 2017).

I view this Chinese water machine as a continuation of a socionatural and scalar approach to water governance going all the way back to imperial times. A previous Chinese minister of environment Zhou Shengxian stated, "in China’s thousands of years of civilisation, the conflict between humanity and nature has never been as serious as it is today" (Crow-Miller et al. 2017, p. 243). This shows how the continuation of previous socionatural relations influences new developmental paradigms in a way that creates an adversarial stance towards the biophysical aspect of nature.

6.2 The Greater Mekong Subregion

This transformation from geopolitical struggle to a regional economic area bound by the Mekong River came about through a specific scaling of the region (Sneddon and Fox, 2012). This rescaling of the region into an economic cooperation area was an important first step in bringing all the Mekong states together and influenced the way the region thought of water governance for the next decades. Specific actors in the LMC have promoted the idea of the Mekong as an economic region, in spite of any inherent geographic features, to serve their own economic and political interests. The central agent in promoting and benefiting from this scalar imaginary is the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and their scale project of Greater Mekong

Subregion (GMS) (Sneddon and Fox, 2012). The GMS Economic Cooperation Program was established in 1992 with support from ADB and other donors to enhance economic relations between member states (Greatermekong.org, 2020). The GMS are principally based on economic motives focusing on cooperative economic development and connectivity favouring the construction large infrastructure projects like highways, railways and hydropower dams (Sneddon and Fox, 2012).

Through the scalar project GMS, the developmental and interaction of the Mekong region was scale jumped to a higher spatial and institutional level. However this scale jumping and framing effectively means that “grand, or ‘mega’ projects are emphasized and promoted … whereas if development objectives are framed in terms of livelihood security of households dependent on seasonal river flows and wetland inundation, then alternative priorities and options emerge” (Dore and Lebel, 2010, p. 61). This means that the onus is moved away from local ecological or livelihood issues that require specific scalar arrangements onto regional economic projects. The GMS agenda also focused on the development of the aforementioned powersheds meaning that together with a change in scale and economic projects, the Mekong waters was intended for electricity production, rather than local livelihoods like fisheries and rice cultivation (Sneddon and Fox, 2012). The scalar project of the GMS reworked the river waters imagination into an economic development potential with electricity generation the primary purpose of its water thus recreating the regions socionature.

The ADB funded GMS however never had mainstream appeal for the Chinese state (Yang, 2019). The ADB’s funding and voting mechanism with larger share of funding meaning more votes means that the US and Japan with a funding of 15.6 % gets of 12.7% voting shares while China only has 6.4% and 5.4% respectively. This was made worse with ADB’s presidency staying in Japanese hands since its establishment in 1966, which means that the GMS was conceived by the Chinese to be a scalar project controlled by the Japanese (Yang, 2019). The voting shares and subsequent power in the ADB and GMS scalar project primarily shaped by Japan thus essentially lies outside the GMS geographical area. Because of this the “Chinese central government had somehow avoided consulting with Japan directly over the key issues of GMSM and had delegated its authority to Yunnan province for implementing agreements signed within the GMSM, thus downgrading the regime’s diplomatic importance” (Shen and Xie, 2018, p. 721).

Because of the lack of leadership role within the GMS scalar project, the Chinese state did not work directly with the GMS thereby granting it more legitimacy and reifying the scalar fixity of the GMS. Instead, China scale bended their participation in the GMS by delegating interaction with the institution to Yunnan province, an entity on a lower level on the institutional scale within the Chinese state. I would thus argue that both focusing on interactions between scalar projects and the interactions and power structure within them can be fruitful as the GMS case show that looking at power structures within the ‘networks of power’ that are scalar projects grants important insights into their effectiveness at recreating specific socionatural relations. With the GMS, the socionatural relations related to the use of the Mekong by using it for hydropower were aligned with the Chinese, but power imbalances within the scalar network caused the Chinese state to contest it thus preventing it to gain the necessary scalar fixity to work as a governance organ for the Mekong. Shen and Xie (2018, p. 721) thus comment that the GMS “coordination among states on basin-scale governance, which is crucial for the planning and management of entire river basins, is weak”.

6.3 Mekong River Commission

The next governance institution that I will look at is the Mekong River Commission (MRC) that was created in 1995 by Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand in a bid to use a watershed framework to strengthen transboundary water governance on the Mekong (Middleton and Allouche, 2016; MRC, 2020). According to the funding document of the MRC, the Mekong Agreement, its goals are “to cooperate in all fields of sustainable development, utilization, management and conservation of the water and related resources of the Mekong River Basin … in a manner to optimize the multiple-use and mutual benefits of all riparians and to minimize the harmful effects that might result from natural occurrences and man-made activities” (MRC, 1995, p. 3). It does so by looking “across all sectors, including fisheries sustainability, identification of opportunities for agriculture, freedom of navigation, sustainable hydropower, flood management, preservation and conservation of important ecosystems” (MRC, 2020). Importantly, even though the MRC has numerous times attempted to include China as a full member, the Chinese state have persistently declined and like Myanmar remains only dialogue partners (Biba, 2018).

China, not being a full member of the technical oriented scientific body of the MRC took until 2002 to agree to share information on water-level on the upper reaches of the Mekong with the 58 other MRC countries (Biba, 2018). However this data was only shared during the flood season (Biba, 2018), hiding important data during dry season. Using Harris and Alatout’s (2010) framework of focusing on technical data shows how the performative actions of states works in naturalising water usage and asserting territorial claims through scalar networks. China uses the fact that data about hydropower operations and water flow is treated as state secrets (Biba, 2018; Eyler et al. 2020) to very selectively release technical information to the LMC. They first released data only during the flood season, which omits any storage of water in dam reservoirs during dry season, and then selectively released data when there were downstream complaints during droughts. These later releases together with the earlier data is meant to show how Chinese dams are not causing issues for the LMC, building a narrative of shared suffering, thus naturalising the Chinese territorial activities related to the upstream dams. This territorial assertion through technical facts were further given weight during droughts in 2010 when China released more extensive dry-season data (Hirsch, 2010) and in 2016 (Biba, 2018)

In the eyes of China the MRC have faced a similar issue to the GMS, that of external funding by western donors (Middleton and Allouche, 2016). The MRC is also run in a strictly rules based regime, which China feels “is imbalanced, particularly serving the interests of downstream countries while not recognizing the services upstream countries provide for the river – for instance, in terms of sediment accumulation” (Biba, 2018, p. 628). Thus, in the eyes of China MRC faces the same issues as the GMS does in that the internal power structure within the scalar project is not favourable towards a deep China participation, which is necessary to create a broad Mekong governance scalar project.

The MRC has also been contested by the larger scale project of the GMS on several occasions as it has been marginalised in decision-making processes as GMS backed projects and Chinese river navigation projects have effectively surpassed the governance body of the MRC (Middleton and Allouche, 2016). Since the MRC’s main objectives is for the sustainable development of the Mekong with a focus on the biophysical aspects and small scale livelihoods like fisheries, energy ministries and dam developers have viewed the MRC as a hurdle to overcome and circumvent rather than an ally in development (Middleton and Allouche, 2016).

The MRC has largely struggled with regulating water use and, in largely unsuccessful attempts at curtailing large dams on the mainstream of the Mekong, the MRC has commissioned environmental assessment and organized stakeholder forums to bring all stakeholders and actors using the river waters to create a framework and guiding principles for development

(Hirsch, 2010; Shen and Xie, 2018). These have largely not been followed and governments and other scalar projects like the GMS have increasingly surpassed the MRC (Hirsch, 2010). This can be explained by the MRC’s opposing scalar preferences when dealing with water governance as they focus on the local level while the GMS and most of the Chinese activities are interested in larger developmental projects. The biophysical and environmental focus that the MRC stands for also challenges the oppositional and utilitarian socionatural relations that the Chinese state is operating under in their dam building and water governance.

Because of Chinese contention with both the other major scalar projects dealing with water governance because of power struggles within the GMS, and inherent differences in both scalar preferences and socionatural relations in water governance with the MRC, the MRC scalar project essentially failed its objectives at governing for sustainable use for all water users as it has been unable to restrain construction of unwanted mainstream dams (Shen and Xie, 2018).

An example of this is that the Mekong River basin “fishery was the world’s largest, it is the second-most bio-diverse after the Amazon, and is the major source of animal protein for tens of millions of the basin’s poorest people” (Hirsch, 2010, p. 317). A study sponsored by the MRC concluded that dams on the mainstream river would cause increasing food insecurity for millions, irreversible ecological consequences and degradation of wild fisheries (Sneddon and Fox, 2012). Although riparian communities all throughout the greater Mekong basin would be affected from dams, including those on tributaries (Hirsch, 2010), there is an obvious element of inequity in the outcomes of dams.

The LMC would all be especially at risk, for instance the Cambodian fisheries sector that could lose up to 240-400,000 metric tons of fish per year thus affecting the livelihoods and food security of the over 1.6 million fishers that rely on the Mekong fishers and lead to economic loss for the Cambodian economy (Sneddon and Fox, 2012). Similarly, the Vietnamese Mekong delta would be adversely affected as loss of sediments and nutrients would impact fisheries and agriculture. The Mekong delta produces 50% of Vietnam’s annual rice yield, often meant for export (Sneddon and Fox, 2012). During the historic 2016 drought, caused by a strong El Nino weather pattern and made worse by Chinese dams (Eyler et al. 2020), around 50% percent of the regions arable land had been hit by salinization (Wong, 2016) costing Vietnam 669 million dollars from agricultural losses and severely impacting access to drinking water and food shortages for almost two million households (Tong, 2017;Wong, 2018).

6.4 Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism

Because of the apparent weakness of both the GMS and the RMC in governing the waters of the entire basin, and for clashing with Chinese scalar preferences and socionatural relations in regards to water governance the Chinese government decided to create an additional institution in 2014 – the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism (LMCM) (Shen and Xie, 2018). Chinese officers believes the LMCM is ‘only a logical result’ of Chinese cooperation for water governance and other activities in the greater Mekong basin (She and Xie, 2018). The LMCM has broad participation with all six riparian countries participating after its inauguration in 2016 (Biba, 2018). According to Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, the LMCM goals for cooperation covers a broad spectrum including water governance and “connectivity, production capacity cooperation, cross-border economic cooperation … as well as agriculture and poverty- reduction cooperation” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 2015). The LMCM scalar project can thus be likened to the GMS in how it views its socionatural relations as economic development is side-lined, or even prioritised, to environmental governance of the river’s water. Where it significantly differs from the GMS is the ownership of the institution, where the Chinese state use it as part of a discourse to silence LMC opposition to Chinese dams on the upper reaches.

Following Chinese scalar focus on large state led scalar projects, the LMCM was organized as a traditional state multinational organization with official state cooperation and excluding non- state actors such as environmental NGOs and other developmental organizations (Shen and Xie, 2018). “The intention of LMCM is to elevate the dialogue to the state level so that Beijing can have a legitimate place in the governance system. The state-led institutional arrangements are most convenient for China to suit its own political system” (Shen and Xie, 2018, p. 722). Following previous discussion of power within the different scalar projects, the LMCM sidesteps China’s inability to ‘dominate’ the MRC and GMS (Biba, 2018), and works at strengthening China’s position and power in the Mekong region. More on this below.

The LMCM scalar project for the greater Mekong basin must be viewed in relation to a larger geographical and more comprehensive scalar project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Shen and Xie, 2018; Zhou, 2018; Biba, 2018). The BRI is a global scalar project with a view of using infrastructure projects and developmental investment to increase connectivity to further both economic and political gains for China (Flint and Zhu, 2019). According to Shen and Xie

(2018), after Xi Jinping launched the BRI in 2014 the Chinese government’s rhetoric towards the GMS and towards LMC has become increasingly constructive and cooperative.

However, Biba (2018) views this change of discourse surrounding the Mekong River governance being a response to gradually stronger and louder international criticisms and media coverage that their unilateral dam building caused. Biba (2018) argues that the resulting challenges to the positive image of China abroad were partly responsible for this positive change in discourse towards the Mekong and eventually the creation of the LMCM. Shen and Xie (2018) similarly argue that China wants to be seen as responsible actor and is eager to use the LMCM to further positive rhetoric and gain a better image. The LMCM scalar project can thus be seen as embodying a discourse that is meant to solidify positive perceptions of Chinese actions globally and regionally.

The LMCM can also be understood as a branch of the larger scalar project of the BRI since they share many of the same objectives in economic development and connectivity. Reactions from LMC towards both the BRI in general and towards the LMCM specifically can influence further scale solidifying and exercising of power from the LMCM. Similar to BRI projects, inclusion in the LMCM for the LMC was motivated, and convinced, by financial flows from China that were meant to promote domestic development outside of the water governance creating further dependence on Chinese generally (Shen and Xie, 2018; Yang 2019).

Some of these financial incentives for joining the LMCM is a “RMB10 billion in concessional loans and US$10 billion in a credit line, including a US$5 billion preferential export buyers’ credit and a US$5 billion special loan on production capacity cooperation” (Yang, 2019, p. 115). Another 200 million USD in a South-south cooperation fund and 300 million USD in funding for small and medium sized projects in the LMC (Yang, 2019). Yang (2019) frames this in an overtly positive manner, but I wold like to make two points regarding these financial packages. First, they follow similar language and design to many of the other BRI projects, which highlights south-south cooperation and financial investment instead of foreign aid. Secondly, by including economic cooperation into a water governance project, like the LMCM have done, effectively puts focus away from water governance thereby legitimizing Chinese dam building in unequal power relations.

In fact, several analysts (e.g. Biba, 2018; Yam, 2018) argues that the LMCM serves Chinese national interest and could further regional power asymmetries. Bunyavejchewin (2016) argues

62 equally, that China developed the LMCM to position itself as a leader in the greater Mekong region and to exclude competing scalar projects with outside actors like the Japanese controlled GMS. Fernandez (2018) argues similarly to Biba (2012) in that an organization like the LMCM offers China a “tool to temper downstream complaints concerning Chinese construction of large-scale dams on the mainstream Mekong”. Biba (2012) argued in 2012 that LMC resistance to Chinese dam projects were minimal because China had linked hydropower to regional development in general. The LMCM can easily be seen as a continuation of this link, even strengthening it as the Chinese activities are connected to development in the entire area through the LMCM developmental finance thus naturalizing the Chinese socionatural relations and activities upstream. The Chinese state thus furthers its own national interests through the scalar project of the LMCM since it helps in legitimizing Chinese socionatural relations towards water governance and dam constructions thus furthering the Chinese state’s power within the region through the LMCM scalar project. This also helps to solidify Chinese networks of power like the Chinese water machine, reifying and strengthening the political power of the political elites domestically in China.

6.5 Power relations on the Mekong

Two impacts, which I have briefly mentioned earlier, of the rise of the LMCM, are important in understanding how the Chinese led scalar project influences the water governance of the Mekong River. First is the matter of actual water governance. Shen and Xie (2018, p. 720) argue, “a strong and inclusive basin-scale institution has to serve an effective mechanism that guarantees state-level collaboration among all riparian states”. They use this definition to argue that both MRC and GMS failed at this, while the LMCM has shown more promise. However, their definition omits any reference to actual governance, as both Biba (2018) and Yam (2018) both argue that the LMCM is not an effective governance institution. Yam (2018) highlights that the LMCM is only meant to support “cooperation towards better water resource management”, and not in fact facilitate joint governance of transboundary water resources, or even water policy harmonization in the region.

Biba (2018) focuses on the organizational design, as it is based on a ‘project-oriented model’ meaning that the LMCM will not have codified rules for water governance derived from the UN Watercourse Convention like the MRC (Middleton and Allouche, 2016). “While all LMC members are officially said to be equal, the loose institutional framework certainly creates 63 options for China, as the most powerful member state, to be more equal than the others” (Biba, 2018, p. 634). Since water governance is generally not treated as an ‘easy’ cooperation field in China, and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi has stated that the LMCM should ‘discuss easy issues first’, therefore Chinese experts “tend to believe that the LMC will be a mechanism largely for economic development through connectivity and production capacity enhancement and that water resources management will effectively be a secondary factor at best” (Biba, 2018, p. 636).

This belief is mirrored with the reality on the ground as there are mostly just talk about sustainable water governance, while other economic development have had concrete action (Biba, 2018). These developmental projects like energy, agriculture, and transportation are both made before action on water governance and tend to be decoupled from environmental concerns regarding the river so water governance becomes an “isolated and hollowed-out issue area of low importance” (Biba, 2018, p. 636). These actions further give weight to how the Chinese socionatural relations influences both the governance of a transboundary resource like water both within and outside the Chinese territorial borders as the river governance and development on the Mekong have effectively been tied to the Chinese developmental model with a focus on large-scale dam construction.

The second impact that the scalar project of the LMCM have had is its effect on the previous two mentioned organizations of MRC and GMS. Particularly the effect of the RMC who is purely focused on water governance, and as shown earlier has both opposing scalar ideas and socionatural relations to China. The LMCM scalar project were set up to be in direct contention with both of these other non-Chinese led scalar projects (Biba, 2018). The large sums for developmental purposes and move away from a rules based water governance focus means that the LMCM is effectively contributing to the marginalization of the MRC (Yam, 2018).

Moreover, in the struggle between an emerging scalar project funded by the region’s most powerful state in the LMCM and the principally western funded RMC, the inherited scalar power structure of the RMC is losing (Middleton and Allouche, 2016). In January 2016, MRC had “its budget cut over half to USD53 million for the period 2016-20, significantly reducing its capacity” (Middleton and Allouche, 2016, p. 113). These funding cuts were a result of reduced aid budgets and more significantly, donors’ doubts about the MRC’s performance in reaching their goals of influencing sustainable water governance on the Mekong (Middleton and Allouche, 2016).

As discussed earlier, China were unhappy about their lack of power in the MRC and GMS, so they created their own scalar project controlled mostly by themselves to rival those. Now the LMCM has been established with strong financial backing and a special importance as a part of Xi Jinping’s flagship foreign relation tool, the BRI. The power imbalances in the Mekong region have made previous projects fail in providing sustainable water governance, and the LMCM will not alter this situation as the socionature of China makes them value the economic potential of hydropower over the livelihoods of people relying on the waters of the Mekong. This creates scale mismatches between Chinese dam building impacting the poorest LMC residents reliance on river water and its nutrients, and the LMCM as an effective governance institution.

Tong (2017), writing on the differences between the Nile River governance and the Mekong River, highlights the geographical and geopolitical power imbalances at play. First, the four LMC that created the MRC have their own differences, especially concerning Chinese funded Laotian hydropower development, and have focused on their own developmental rights over a shared benefit like water governance (Tong, 2017). Secondly, in the Nile River, there is a relative power balance between different countries, and the most powerful country, Egypt, is the downriver country (Tong, 2017). Regarding the Mekong River, even if all the LMC were to agree, China would outweigh them by far. This potential cooperation is also hampered by China using the LMCM scalar project to make bilateral dealings with individual countries exacerbating power imbalances through its network of power (Wong; 2018; Shen and Xie, 2018). China being the most upstream, they do “not need hydrological data from downstream; nor is China particularly dependent on its downstream neighbours in terms of Mekong drought and flood management” (Biba, 2018, p. 637). This creates a situation where China already sat with the most power in the region, and the LMCM will help the Chinese in projecting power thus exporting its socionatural and scalar arrangements related to water governance in the Mekong basin, similar to what happened during the Ming dynasty when Han migrants brought their hydrological practices with them further south and west of the Yellow River.

During the writing of this paper new contemporary information regarding the consequences of these Chinese governance activities and mainstream dams were published. Eyler et al. (2020) uses “physical river gauge evidence from the Mekong River Commission and remote sensing processes” to argue that all the major droughts, the most recent being 2019, were exacerbated or even caused by Chinese water governance policy. They argue that during the 2019 drought,

China received above average amount of rainfall and snowmelt, but blocked or restricted water flow from their dams, instead ‘impounding’ it in China directly causing drought for the LMC (Eyler et al. 2020). Through their findings, Eyler et al. (2020) argue that China is actively lying, or completely lack the knowledge, when Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi claims that the lack of rain and not Chinese dams are cause of the droughts.

Eyler et al. (2020) argue that since Beijing consider water a sovereign commodity for the benefit of Chinese citizens, Chinese stakeholders statements of “not one drop of China’s water should be shared without China using it first or without making those downstream pay for it” all to natural. This mirrors Swyngedouw (1999; 2007) findings in Spain were a discourse of not wasting a single drop of water, before using it, to the sea were used to legitimize a modernistic hydrological expansion. With the Himalayan glaciers melting fast (Maurer et al. 2019), and Yunnan province experiencing its own drought in 2020 making 1.5 million inhabitants water insecure and impacting agriculture (Nieuwenhof, 2020) it might be a possibility that storing water in these dam reservoirs are meant to catch glacier melting for the use of domestic Chinese use. If so, it would spell more bad news for the affected LMC who are impacted by the scale mismatch in Mekong River water governance.

7 Conclusion

In this paper, I introduced and discussed the methodological choices I made to write this paper. Purposive criterion sampling and complimentary triangulation helped me do rigorous research despite relying on secondary sources, historical review and integrative review helped to build an analytical narrative where socionature and scale explained Chinese water governance on the Mekong River. Then I introduced scale through three conceptions of scale, politics of scale, poststructuralist scale and scalar politics as well as some political ecology contributions to the scale framework. Next, I introduced socionature and discussed how it can complement scale theory, as both are relational and interested in revealing hidden power relations that networks of power use to exercise power like recreating socionature.

In the next chapter, I looked at how path-dependent scalar arrangements and resulting socionature developed throughout Chinese history. The historical analysis started all the way back at the start of Chinese agricultural society to create a narrative far away from any romanticized harmony with nature. Through this historical overview, I argued how water has played an important part for creating political legitimacy and influencing, and being influenced, by state-led scalar projects. Because of this importance, throughout history the Chinese state has favored large state-led scalar projects for the governance of water. This water governance was primarily influenced by the modernist-like Confucian school of thought that espoused recreating nature in humans’ image. This led the Chinese scalar projects to focus on utilitarian use of nature through recreating it to benefit the political elite the most. Water governance was thus a way for Chinese political elites to show their strength through conquest of nature thus ontologically fixing scalar arrangements that supported their power.

In the next chapter, I discussed how these Chinese socionatural relations and scalar arrangements, the Chinese context, influence Chinese participation in governance institutions related to the Mekong. I did so by introducing three competing scalar projects in the region, the GMS, MRC and LMCM. The GMS failed in creating a basin-wide governance mechanism because of a power conflict within the scalar arrangement between Japan, the US and China. The MRC espoused sustainable development for all actors on all scales who rely on the river, but is deemed by most commentators to have largely failed in its task. The reason for this failure was opposing preference for appropriate scale of water governance and socionatural relations highlighting local livelihoods and environmental sustainability compared to the Chinese view.

Some, mainly Chinese, see the LMCM as a step in the right direction, while others view it as continuation of business as usual and extension of Chinese power in the region. Nevertheless, through the scalar project of the LMCM China is contributing to a reproduction of a Chinese socionature with the Chinese water machine constructing dams all throughout the Mekong region.

The Chinese socionatural relations and scalar preferences have created scale mismatches in the governance of the Mekong. With the GMS, the inability to control the scalar project led the Chinese state to delegate responsibility to a lower institutional level, preventing it from becoming an efficient water governance institution since the central elites who benefit the most from the Chinese hydraulic projects were not included meaning they acted outside of the GMS initiative. With the RMC, the opposing socionatural relations and scalar preferences led the Chinese state to actively ignore it, unilaterally constructing several dams on the upper reaches of the Mekong River that negatively impacts downstream countries. Even though some view the LMCM as an improvement with broad participation from all the riparian countries, power relations within the scalar project and between China and the LMC in general means that opposition to Chinese dam building activities from the LMC are ineffective. Thus, even though there exist different scalar projects with water governance in mind, all of them create a scale mismatch were the scale of governance impacts the sustainable governance of the Mekong River for all its people and animals relying on its waters.

Thus, through combining the scale and socionature frameworks I was able to build a picture of the hybridization process creating the Chinese waterscape. By using this framework, it is possible to create novel understandings of Chinese interactions with current international Mekong institutions. The framework highlights how national political processes influence a state’s participation with international institutions. This framework can thus be used by policy creators to anticipate how different states will interact with different international institutions based on analysis of current socionatural relations and scalar arrangements. The Chinese waterscape is characterized by the Chinese states attempt at civilizing the wild nature then altering it to serve their metabolic purposes while at the same time using political initiatives to ontologically fix power structures that solidifies their political power. The reliance on large scale projects to recreate socionature to solidify their power means that Chinese have to continue building dams. This dam construction expansion creates conflict with downstream neighbors on international rivers when they are affected thus creating a more contentious

68 relationship than otherwise would be necessary through different scalar arrangements and socionatural relations.

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