ABSTRACT
There have long been questions in and outside the Subregion about the dams and reservoirs straddling the upper Mekong in China’s Yunnan Province. Yet debates over China’s hydro behaviour towards shared water resources do not stop at its borders. Within China, virtually all large dams built, launched, or proposed, including those on the Lancang/Mekong River, also suffer from “popularity deficiencies”. There is increasing scepticism in Chinese public attitudes towards narrowly equating water resources to hydropower, banking exclusively on energy policies to address climate change, prompting economic growth with mega-dam projects, and/or assuming inevitable correlations between hydro development and poverty reduction. This chapter examines the major positions in China’s internal hydro politics and controversies. Navigating through China’s domestically identified and publicly debated pros and cons of its involvement with the Mekong River, the chapter concludes that the prospect of Beijing changing its course of action for hydro development is not great. Accordingly, the Chinese government and opinion leaders may still have a long way to go before they can effectively reframe the prevalent “China hydro-hegemonic/Mekong-choking/Subregion-encroachment threat” accounts into a “China opportunity” narrative.
