The politics of water in rural China: a review of English-language scholarship

Politics is about access to resources and exercise of power. It is about institutions, some of which facilitate access to resources, others of which limit that access. It is also about discourse, language that naturalizes and legitimizes certain activities (e.g., ‘basin-wide management’) while challenging and delegitimizing others (e.g., ‘over-abstraction1 of water’). The politics of water resources in rural China encompasses structures and practices related to a number of uses for freshwater resources, including irrigation, household use (drinking, cooking and hygiene), power generation (hydroelectric and thermal), industry, and in-stream flows necessary to support biodiversity and ecological systems. Yet while rich scholarly literatures exist on agriculture, industry, daily life and, to a lesser extent, rural energy production, much of the scholarship in these areas tends to engage tangentially at best with the fundamental questions on water resources, including questions regarding

I am grateful to my undergraduate research assistant, Ms. Kexun Sun, and to The Henry Luce Foundation for its support of the Asian Environmental Studies Initiative at my institution, Hobart and William Smith Colleges. All errors are, of course, mine alone.