Inside‐out: Chinese academic assessments of large‐scale water infrastructure

Abstract

Little is known in the international academic community about Chinese‐language research on water management. To remedy this deficit, this paper reviews current mainland Chinese understandings of the role of large‐scale water infrastructures as tools of water resources management. We reviewed 461 papers published in mainland Chinese journals by Chinese scholars. This review suggests that the dominant approach to water management reflects the confines of government priorities—large‐scale, concrete‐heavy, infrastructure‐based means of moving water around the country so as to meet demands and stimulate economic growth. Suppression of critical voices means that infrastructure is generally rendered apolitical: the critiques are about practical issues, such as technological, managerial, or administrative problems. There are exceptions to this characterization that adopt more critical frames; however, they reflect on water management elsewhere or in the past rather than on contemporary China. While these more critical papers are interesting and important contributions to our understanding of the politics of hydraulic infrastructures, the literature as a whole says little about the politics of infrastructure in China now. In effect, much of the literature in Chinese on water management in China simply acts as an arm of a machine—a network of corporations, universities, international institutions, and arms of the government, together tasked with identifying and framing what are water management issues, formulating standardized procedures for tackling those issues, and then constructing solutions to them. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Water Governance

Worlding Chinese environmental geographies: A systematic, bilingual literature review

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“…A quarter of the surveyed literature focused on urban planning and development. Within the empirical Chinese scholarship, the lived experiences of changing urban built environments (inner-city redevelopment, housing relocation, urban renewal and displacement, and suburbanisation) have led to extensive debates on liveability and health (Gu and Chai 2012; Li and Chai 2013; Xia et al 2020), urban memory, nostalgia and place identity (Li, Yang and Huang 2015; Liu, Zhu and Yuan 2012; Wang, Aoki and Xu 2019), rural–urban migration (Yin, Qian and Zhu 2016; 2019), and social inclusion and justice (X. Liu, Luo and Xu 2014; Yao et al 2018). These studies endeavour to understand the entanglement of material transformation and the reproduction of cultures and social relations through analysing daily practices.…”

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“…This 'obvious necessity' is perhaps clearest in the case of the South-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP, 南水北调工程), the two existing routes of which carry water from the Yangtze River north to Hebei and Shandong provinces, Beijing, and Tianjin. Writers explain that ecological protection and economic and social development in the Yellow River Basin and the North China Plain depend on water resources (a review of such writing is provided in Webber et al 2021). However, the Yellow River and other principal rivers are said to be short of water, which severely constrains economic and population carrying capacity.…”