UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Water, Power, and Development in Twenty-First Century China: The Case of the South-North Water Transfer Project Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/78h9v4gt Author Crow-Miller, Brittany Leigh Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Water, Power, and Development in Twenty-First Century China: The Case of the South-North Water Transfer Project A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Geography by Brittany Leigh Crow-Miller 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Water, Power, and Development in Twenty-First Century China: The Case of the South-North Water Transfer Project by Brittany Leigh Crow-Miller Doctor of Philosophy in Geography University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor C. Cindy Fan, Chair Through a mixed qualitative approach, this dissertation injects politics into an otherwise apolitical discussion of the largest water management project in human history, China’s South-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP). The SNWTP, which transfers water from south-central China to the country’s political and economic heart on the North China Plain (NCP), is being pursued as a means to transforming water management into a space in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can assert its power, rather than a space in which that power may be undermined. I demonstrate how the SNWTP is fundamentally underpinned by the CCP’s need to maintain continued economic growth in this critical water-stressed region, which serves as a key factor in its ability to maintain political legitimacy. In pursuing this ultimate goal, the government is presenting the SNWTP in ! ""! apolitical terms by putting forth what I call “discourses of distraction,” or alternative stories about an environmental controversy that serve a particular political agenda. These discourses, I argue, are being employed as a strategic tool to depoliticize the SNWTP, mask its social and ecological impacts, and deflect attention away from three major anthropogenic sources of water stress on the NCP, because to address them would undermine economic growth. In addition to demonstrating how discourse can serve as a political tool, the dissertation illustrates the utility of scalar constructions in political maneuvering around the South-North Water Transfer Project. It also illustrates the ways in which the SNWTP has necessitated a range of temporal, spatial, and sectoral trade- offs, which both reflect and reinforce existing power discrepancies and set in place a pattern of inequities that is likely to persist for decades. ! """! The dissertation of Brittany Leigh Crow-Miller is approved. John Agnew Judith A. Carney Ching Kwan Lee C. Cindy Fan, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 ! "#! This dissertation is dedicated to my dad, Michael, for his steadfast support, encouragement, and confidence in my work. I was listening. Thank you for everything. ! #! TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………......vii Chapter One- Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter Two- The Politics of Water…………………………………………………………………………..…28 Chapter Three- Linking Water Stress, Power, and Legitimacy on the North China Plain…………………62 Chapter Four- Constructing Stories: Discourses of Distraction and Scalar Maneuvering………..…….100 Chapter Five- Water Use Tensions and Trade Offs…………………………………………………………..130 Chapter Six- Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………170 References.....………………………………………………………………………………...…185 ! #"! LIST OF FIGURES 1.1- Map of the North China Plain 1.2- SNWTP Middle Route Canal Under Construction 1.3- Middle Route Canal Design 1.4- Inside the SNWTP Yellow River Tunnel (pre-inundation) 1.5- Map of the South-North Water Transfer Project 1.6- Cities along the Middle Route 2.1- Canal du Midi, France 3.1- The 3-H (Huang, Hai, and Huai) Plain 3.2- National Population Change, Rural vs. Urban, 1949-2012 3.3- Growth of Beijing Population, Migrant and Total, 1978-2011 3.4- Beijing Per Capita GDP Growth, 1954-2010 4.1- The Yangzi River and its Tributaries 4.2- Cities along the Middle Route 4.3- Cities along the Middle Route 4.4- The Middle Route 4.5- The Three Routes of the SNWTP 4.6- Chart of the SNWTP 4.7- Roadside Slogan, “Carry on the undertaking of Great Yu, work without rest to advance” 4.8- Roadside Slogan, “The South-North Water Transfer Project benefits the country and benefits the people” 5.1- MR Canal Under Construction in Hebei ! #""! 5.2- Advertisement for Waterfront Real Estate in Hebei 5.3- Net Fishing on the Danjiangkou Reservoir 5.4- Artisanal Fisherman on the Danjiangkou Reservoir 5.5- Danjiangkou Reservoir Fish Hanging to Dry 5.6- Beijing Municipality and Hebei Province ! #"""! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Over the course of this project there are many people who provided me with invaluable intellectual guidance, critical input, encouragement, and support and to whom I am deeply grateful. At UCLA, I am thankful foremost to my advisor, Cindy Fan, for her confidence in me and in my work and for her openness to letting me follow my interests where they led me. Thank you to my three additional committee members: Judy Carney, John Agnew and C.K. Lee, each of whom challenged me and helped to strengthen the project in their own way. Also at UCLA, I’d like to thank Scott Stephenson, O.T. Ford, Luis Felipe Alvarez and other members of the Political Geography Working Group for their suggestions for improving my project design. In Beijing I am indebted to Liu Weidong and Niu Fangqi at IGSNRR and to my research assistant, Li Shuai of Tsinghua University, without whom I would probably still be digging for reports and arranging interviews. A very big thank you to Lan Zhiyong at Renmin University/ASU for pointing me toward invaluable research connections. I am especially grateful to two individuals (whose names will go unsaid here) at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan for investing so much time and energy into helping me be successful in the field in Hubei and Henan. As for my family, I am thankful to Thaddeus Miller for putting up with me and for his support and patience during this project, particularly during my extended field trips and other challenging moments. Thad has also been my first sounding board for ideas, an endless source of article and book suggestions, and a first pair of eyes on many a draft. Thank you to Ryan Crow and Michael Crow for their comments on early funding applications for this project and on draft iterations. Thanks also to Jonas Nahm and Bethany Cutts for their feedback and support. Research for this project was supported by the UCLA Department of Geography, UCLA Graduate Research Mentorship, UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, Association for Asian Studies (AAS) China and Inner Asia Council (CIAC) Small Grant, the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Anne U. White Fund, UCLA Asia Institute Fellowship, Society of Woman Geographers National Fellowship, and the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship. I am grateful to each of these funders for seeing in my project what I hoped was there. ! "$! BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Britt Crow-Miller holds a B.A. in History and Asian Studies from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY and an M.A. in Regional Studies—East Asia from Harvard University. Prior to her time at UCLA, Crow-Miller served as the Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Asia Quarterly and as a research associate at Harvard Business School and the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University. ! $! NOTE ON RESEARCH SUBJECTS In an effort to protect their identities, I have used a pseudonym for each of my interview subjects and omitted potentially identifying details such as their precise bureaucratic position and office. ! $"! ! CHAPTER ONE: Introduction Introduction Freshwater is a unique and powerful resource. It is the foundation of ecosystem health and the primary actor in the hydrologic cycle, one of the earth’s most important system-regulating cycles. Freshwater habitats cover just one percent of the earth’s surface, but sustain more than 40 percent of known fish species and 12 percent of known animal species (Conca 2006: 87). Freshwater is also the most fundamental prerequisite for all plant and animal life, regardless of whether or not they live directly in freshwater habitats. In addition to serving as an essential building block of the natural world, water is central to the physical, cultural, and economic well being of humanity. Water makes up about 60 percent of the adult human body and, while a human may survive well over a month without food, most will die after roughly a week without water. It is also an important factor in human cultures, playing a central role in many spiritual traditions and religions. Among many Native American groups, water is believed to be a living entity with a spirit, while also serving as a source of power and purification and as a medium for meditation (Blackstock 2001: 5). Water has replaced wine in the Eucharistic cup in ! "! ! several Christian traditions (Daly-Denton 2007), it figures centrally in purifying rituals such as baptism, and Catholics anoint themselves with holy water for protection. To draw on but one of many other examples, water is also vital to Hindus, again serving as the medium for ritual cleansing and with rivers (such as the Ganges in south Asia) constituting the most sacred of places. Economically, water is a basic input for growth, helping to generate many forms of energy, facilitate industrial production, and produce the material inputs fundamental to the physical expansion of cities and the human built environment. It is a decisive factor in shaping how and where humans interface with the natural world through our built environment, carrying in its flows the power to make or break places with its scarcity or abundance.