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WATER POLITICS

Via SAISPHERE 2008, David Lampton offers an interesting examination of water politics in China.  As the article notes:

“The politics of water in China provides a window on Chinese politics and society. Through this window one sees the complexity of governance in a society with 20 percent of the world’s population and how vulnerable the performance and stability of this system is to basic resource availability and natural and manmade calamity…

Nationally, China has one-fourth the world average per capita water availability. In north China, water availability is a fraction of that in the south. The water table is falling throughout northern China, and the Yellow River occasionally does not even reach the ocean because it is sucked dry by the parched areas through which it flows. In south China, flooding periodically displaces tens of millions of people with literally cubic miles of water landing on top of densely populated areas. With respect to hydropower potential and hydropower itself, three of China’s seven major river systems—the Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong—have their headwaters and much of their length in the Qinghai/Tibet Plateau and western China, but power demand is concentrated far away in central and coastal China.

The scale of China’s water problems is so enormous that current and proposed remedies are equally gargantuan, from spending $25 billion on the Yangtze River’s Three Gorges Dam that displaced about 1.3 million persons, to moving water from central China, across the Yellow River to the North China Plain, at an estimated cost of $62 billion.

What makes water a prolific source of political conflict in China? What are the drivers of China’s current water problems? And what are the implications for future Chinese policy and where are the opportunities for Sino-American cooperation in addressing challenges?

Water Problems and Political Conflict

Political scientist Harold Lasswell famously said that politics is about who gets what, when and how. Water politics is politics in a pure form, and the fault lines of political conflict are similar across countries irrespective of political system type, culture or level of economic development. This is so because water is essential for human life; often scarce; basic to agriculture and industry; multiuse, with one use often degrading other uses; and fluid, seamlessly crossing administrative boundaries; and because upstream users create problems for those downstream. Moreover, water projects often are of enormous scale and costly, and the opportunities for corruption and mismanagement legion.

Though water politics is a universal phenomenon, China’s delicately balanced rice cultivating system and the particular character of its rivers have made the control of water central to governance in China for thousands of years. Indeed, the same Chinese character used for governmental “rule” (zhi) is used for “taming” rivers, and this character has a component signifying “water.” Scholar Karl Wittfogel wrote Oriental Despotism in 1957, arguing that rice culture needs tremendous quantities of water reliably delivered in precise amounts, which in turn requires the control of major watersheds, massive water retention undertakings and the creation of delicate, high-maintenance channels for water delivery. All this has necessitated major engineering projects that have required a huge, centralized bureaucracy to extract money and manpower for their construction and subsequent management. Consequently, China has had the longest continuous centralized bureaucratic tradition in the world; the weight of this bureaucratic tradition has affected the society’s capacity for broad-based innovation and more pluralistic governance.

The very shape of the Chinese bureaucracy today reflects the great diversity of interests to which water gives rise. The Communications Ministry (with responsibility for inland water transport) often conflicts with the Ministry of Railroads for transportation investment. Flood control interests conflict with the electric power interests. The forestry and fisheries people conflict with the dam builders, as do inland shipping interests. The guardians of cultural relics and the tourist industry are threatened by those who want to build reservoirs. The farmers fight with industry over the price and use of reservoir water. And provinces and localities fight among themselves over the division of tax revenues and who must take how many persons displaced by projects. In short, it is exceedingly hard to make water policy in China.

Turning to the fundamental fault lines of political conflict, regional disparities in the location of water and hydropower potential give rise to disputes over the kinds and scale of projects that should be constructed, who should be displaced by the resulting structures and with what compensation, how resources should be moved and at what price they should be sold. Corruption exists at every stage of these processes, particularly with respect to resettlement funds for refugees, the construction of projects, and the supply of water and power itself. Further, when rivers with their origins in China—for example, the Mekong, Ussuri and Irtysh—flow across national borders, almost inevitably Beijing finds itself in dispute with neighbors over its management and use of the upstream.

If we look at water quality, the challenges are great, with many issues becoming political as well. Outside the Qinghai/Tibet Plateau, there is no unpolluted natural lake in China. According to Jennifer Turner, coordinator of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, over three-fourths of surface water in Chinese cities is unsafe, with 90 percent of urban ground water contaminated. About 40 percent of river flows nationally are unusable for either agriculture or industry. In some (perhaps many) areas, pollution challenges are having tangible effects on human health—high lead levels are found in the bloodstreams of Shanghai children and national cancer rates are rising alarmingly. Predictably, citizens on occasion resort to assertive or violent actions to protect their communities and families. This impulse often takes the form of increasing numbers of people creating civic organizations. This, in turn, can be an entering wedge for political system reform, something about which the Chinese Communist Party is vigilant.

Drivers of China’s Water Problems

China’s basic hydrological and related challenges importantly derive from accidents of location, natural phenomena, or population location and other decisions now lost in the fog of history. For example, flooding along the Yangtze and Yellow rivers reflects deforestation that occurred in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. Because a high fraction of the country’s remaining forest coverage is in the southwest and northeast, China’s two largest rivers traverse partially denuded areas, which increases their silt loads—one contributor to flooding. In short, the people of China today are saddled with a heavy burden of natural phenomena and catastrophic past decisions. But these are not the only drivers of China’s contemporary water problems.

First, China’s middle class may number in the range of 300 million persons. Whatever its size, it is growing rapidly. This social stratum takes its consumption cues from middle classes elsewhere, not least America’s. This produces rapidly increasing consumption of water-intensive products, from meat and high-quality agricultural commodities to petrochemicals to household and industrial water. Probe International reports that between 1975 and 2005 residential water use rose 10 times. Moreover, the industrial and agricultural processes used to create these products generate wastes, with the nearest body of water often viewed as the “cheapest” disposal site. China’s 14,000 concentrated animal feeding facilities, for example, produce enormous quantities of nitrogen, which finds its way into China’s water.

Politically, the middle class in China has, at least temporarily, become a pillar of Communist Party rule because both it and the party have an interest in stability. Regime legitimacy and middle class support rely on economic growth. High growth—about 10 percent annually—has continued for three decades. Sustained growth of this scale, reflecting rapid industrialization, urbanization and escalating consumption patterns, puts great pressure on all resources, not least water, both in terms of availability and quality. Concisely, economic growth sustains the Chinese Communist Party in the short run, while in its current form and at its current pace that growth may ecologically destabilize the entire system in the medium to long run.

Another driver of China’s water problems is that it has become “the workshop for the world.” This relocation of global manufacturing, and China’s resulting global trade surplus, reflects the fact that the rest of the world has “offloaded” some less economically attractive production to China. In 2005, China exported nearly 35 percent of its total gross domestic product, about half of which came from foreign-invested facilities. This, in turn, means China is taxing its own natural resources like water to a greater extent than would be the case if trade were balanced, assuming the water content of imports and exports is about the same. In some sense, water-scarce China is exporting water.

If we broaden our concept of globalization beyond economics and trade, we can consider climate change to be a reflection of globalization or ecological interdependence. Climate change will have enormous consequences for China, not least because China’s three greatest rivers have their headwaters in the Qinghai/Tibet Plateau, where glaciers are a major water source—these are melting at the rate of 7 percent per year. Also, as sea levels rise with global warming, coastal areas, where a large fraction of China’s population and GDP reside, will face exceedingly disruptive and costly inundation.

Third, on the policy front there are two broad sets of contributors to China’s water problems: policies in the water area directly and the character of the bureaucratic structures charged with developing and implementing them.

With respect to the first category, water is greatly underpriced in China, with agricultural water most underpriced of all—and therefore most wastefully used. The irrigation efficiency rate in China is only about half the rate in more developed countries. Of course, raising water prices is politically agonizing, even though it would spur efficiencies. Water prices have risen somewhat in recent years, but they are nowhere near the scarcity value or production cost. And the second problem derives from the first—there has been wildly insufficient investment in water delivery systems that currently lose (through leakage and evaporation) high percentages of water before reaching the user. A 2002 survey of 408 Chinese cities found an average leakage rate of 21.5 percent. Investment also has been inadequate in waste water treatment facilities. Even when such facilities are built, they are put into operation only 50 percent of the time because of “high” costs.

Organizationally, developing coherent, nationally applied and timely water policies is difficult because of the multiple actors, the numerous administrative levels of the system—center, province, municipality, special district, township and village—and the difficulty in enforcing policy once made. Further, some of the key implementing agencies, such as the State Environmental Protection Administration (despite being made a ministry-level organization in 2008), remain relatively weak in terms of available staff and politically puny when it comes to slugging it out with party officials who are promoted on the basis of maintaining social stability and achieving high growth.

Implications for Chinese Policy and U.S.-China Cooperation

For China, continued failure to ade-quate-ly address its severe water prob-lems will slow economic growth, spread water-borne health problems, necessitate population relocations and spontaneous migrations of large scale, produce uncontrollable floods and natural and man-made catastrophes, and contribute to social and political instability.

While China in recent years has taken many steps in the right direction, much more needs to be done. Moreover, international cooperation could assist in moving things in a positive direction and prove beneficial to both China and international actors, including the United States. Raising the price of water, investing more in the hydrological infrastructure, increasing forestry investment, using water-conserving technologies in industry, agriculture and households, and boosting regulatory capacity in all water-related areas are essential.

These measures suggest where American, indeed global, cooperation with China would be most productive. First, joint efforts in the development of industrial, agricultural and household technologies that will conserve and purify water are essential and will prove profitable. Second, U.S. public regulatory and civic agencies should work with Chinese counterparts to share experiences and increase institutional capacity. Third, U.S. multinational corporations can play a role in bringing best practices (as many already are) to their facilities in China and disseminating those practices to suppliers and others nationwide. For example, General Electric Corporation is working to restore water quality in Jiangsu Province’s Lake Tai. Finally, China and the United States, heretofore laggards in the global warming area, must get serious—individually and together.”