Thammasat University students interested in China, economics, business, political science, history, sociology, geography, water politics, agrarian change, climate change, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 1 December Zoom webinar on Critical Hydropolitics in China.
The event, on Friday, 1 December 2023 at 10am Bangkok time, is presented by the Department of Geography, Hong Kong University (HKU).
Water politics, sometimes called hydropolitics, is politics affected by the availability of water and water resources, a necessity for all life forms and human development.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of water politics in China.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=91193
The event webpage explains:
There is a growing body of research advancing more critical approaches to hydropolitics, much of it written by geographers. Focusing attention away from state politics and state actors, cross-border conflict, and questionable notions of “water wars”, this literature is advancing our understanding of the contested nature of hydro development projects within and beyond China’s borders and their uneven effects on the ground. In this presentation I will give an overview of this field, drawing out key themes such as infrastructure, competing logics, critical approaches to the state, and critical approaches to power. Beginning from China’s domestic water infrastructure projects and extending to Chinese actors’ dam building on transboundary rivers, my aim is to highlight the productive sites, lenses, and processes that could further deepen our understanding of the complex interrelations of water and power in the region.
The speaker will be Dr. Sarah Rogers, a geographer who lectures at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia.
According to her university webpage, Dr. Rogers is
a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Studies at the Asia Institute. She is a geographer who studies social, political, and environmental change in China.
Her research interests include hydropolitics, poverty alleviation, resettlement, agrarian change and climate adaptation. She is a Chief Investigator on two Australian Research Council Discovery Projects: one on the technopolitics of China’s South-North Water Transfer project (2017-2022) and one on the restructuring of China’s agricultural sector (2018-2022).
In 2021, Dr, Rogers reported:
Since 2014, the drinking water supply of Beijing and Tianjin has come almost exclusively from the Danjiangkou Reservoir 1000 km away. Thanks to the massive South-North Water Transfer scheme, wealthy city residents turn on their taps and consume clean water from an economically marginalised part of central China. The scheme, the most recent of China’s mega water projects, brings water from the Yangtze River and its tributaries to drier parts of northern China, mostly for urban and industrial use. For the past three years, as part of an Australian Research Council grant “The Technopolitics of China’s South-North Water Transfer Project,” I have been studying the impacts of the South-North Water Transfer Project on the Danjiangkou region. With colleagues from the University of Melbourne, Nanjing’s Hehai University and Wuhan’s Changjiang Water Resources Protection Institute, I visited the Danjiangkou Reservoir itself (the source of the scheme’s Middle Route), surrounding counties in Henan Province, and upstream counties in Shaanxi Province to interview farmers and officials and to better understand how this massive inter-basin transfer scheme is reshaping local economies, livelihoods, and environments.
The counties that surround the reservoir, including Xichuan County in Henan Province, have experienced sustained impacts since the early 2000s: first in the need to resettle people and industries in advance of inundation as the Danjiangkou Dam height was raised, and then in pursuit of strict water quality targets. The Danjiangkou region has suffered entrenched problems of water pollution, from industrial runoff (nearby Shiyan City has since Mao’s Third Front been a major car manufacturing base), urban domestic runoff, and agricultural runoff. To achieve drinking water of a high enough standard, there are now strict controls in place for the use of pesticides and fertilisers, farming bans in the Reservoir’s “fluctuation zone”, as well as projects to improve wastewater treatment in towns and to restructure local economies away from polluting industries like cement, paper, and chemical manufacturing to tourism and organic agricultural production.
In a recently published article, my co-author and I begin to document some of these processes and the narratives of sacrifice and opportunity that go with them. With billions of RMB in lost GDP, the responsibility of supplying far-away cities with high quality water has clearly had a huge economic impact on what are quite poor counties in central China. Their successful transformation to “green” development paths is yet to be seen.
In 2019 we began to examine how this prioritisation of water quality is impacting people’s livelihoods in Xichuan County. We travelled to several villages that had lost considerable farmland to inundation and where many residents had been resettled to towns in and beyond the county. Our interviews suggest that local smallholders are being squeezed by two powerful forces. The first is government farming bans on what used to be people’s contracted farmland (this highly fertile land is exposed for about half of the year when the Reservoir’s levels are low), instructions to pursue organic farming instead of using synthetic pesticides and fertilisers, forceful encouragement to plant cash crops instead of corn and wheat, and a ban on livestock close to the Reservoir. In an area where families’ landholdings were already very small and have been further constrained by inundation, these directives are coalescing to undermine viable smallholder livelihoods and further push people to rely on off-farm wage employment. The second force is the preferential treatment given to agribusinesses by local government. Convinced that small farmers are polluting and “backward”, local authorities have mediated large-scale land transfers to outside enterprises to establish specialised, “organic” farms. In future these farms will not just produce fruit, but are also designed to attract city dwellers to pick, stay in rural guesthouses, and enjoy the local scenery. Where small farmers fit in this new rural future is unclear.
Measured in environmental terms, the interventions at the Danjiangkou Reservoir have been an outstanding success. Water quality in the Reservoir and its tributaries now consistently ranks as Grade I or Grade II, ensuring that the residents of Beijing and Tianjin are consuming water of the highest quality. Factories have mostly been closed, rubbish is regularly swept from the Reservoir’s surface, intensive water quality monitoring is conducted, pollution spills are jumped on, and extensive reforestation is taking place to both beautify the local area and to filter the water flowing into the Reservoir. But much like earlier environmental projects of the Chinese state, the South-North Water Transfer Project is having long-lasting and deeply unequal environmental and socio-economic impacts.
A clear example is that while Beijing and Tianjin residents consume high-quality Danjiangkou water, at the time of our last visit in 2019, towns and villages surrounding the Reservoir in Henan were still reliant on polluted groundwater.
Geographers based in Melbourne have for nearly two decades been engaged in documenting and understanding the onground impacts of China’s environmental governance, including the Three Gorges Project, the Yellow River crisis, environmental resettlement, Shanghai’s water insecurity, household water consumption, and the Chinese dam industry’s activities in Africa.
Our current research into the South-North Water Transfer Project builds on this earlier work and shows the value of sustained, collaborative social science research with Chinese colleagues.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)