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    Rural imaginaries in China's Three Gorges region
    Zhen, N ; Rogers, S ; Wilmsen, B (Elsevier BV, 2023-10-01)
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    Beyond state politics in Asia's transboundary rivers: Revisiting two decades of critical hydropolitics
    Rogers, S ; Fung, Z ; Lamb, V ; Gamble, R ; Wilmsen, B ; Wu, F ; Han, X (WILEY, 2023-04)
    Abstract For the past two decades, work across a range of fields, but particularly geography, has engaged ‘critical hydropolitics’ as a way to highlight not only the politics inherent in decisions about water, but also the foundational assumptions of more conventional hydropolitical analyses that tend to focus on conflicts and cooperation over water resources, with a heavy emphasis on ‘the state’ as the key actor and scale of analysis. In this article we review critical hydropolitical literature that focuses on transboundary rivers that descend from the eastern Tibetan Plateau, namely the Lancang‐Mekong, Yarlung Tsangpo‐Brahmaputra and Nu‐Salween river basins. We highlight five key and interrelated themes that have emerged in the literature to date ‐ the state, scale, infrastructure, knowledge and logics, and climate change ‐ and discuss how these provide useful tools for more fine‐grained analyses of power, control and contestation.
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    The fence 'didn't work': the mundane engagements and material practices of state-led development in China's Danjiangkou Reservoir
    Lamb, V ; Rogers, S ; Wang, M (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2024-02-07)
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    Networking Shangnan's tea: socio-economic relations, commodities and agrarian change in rural China
    Han, X ; Rogers, S (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-06-07)
    China's central government has long signalled its desire for scaled-up agriculture. This study scrutinises the place-specific dynamics of this government-led restructuring by examining the networks of socioeconomic relations that produce tea as a commodity in Shangnan County, Shaanxi. We identify a core production-circulation network comprised of relations between agribusinesses, cooperatives and smallholders. This network is historically contingent, deeply embedded in the logics of scaling-up and poverty reduction, and is composed not just of people and institutions, but of flows of policies, capital, and value. While larger operators have accumulated great capital and political resources, outcomes for small farmers remain ambiguous.
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    Farmers’ practices and the political ecology of agrochemicals in rural China
    Rogers, S ; Wang, ZJH ; He, J (Elsevier BV, 2023-05-01)
    Chinese agriculture is in the midst of profound change, driven in part by the state's goals to scale up and modernise the sector and to promote more sustainable practices by reducing chemical fertiliser and pesticide use. Much of the existing literature on agrochemical use reduces these complex and highly politicised processes to a set of variables and models in which farmers are defined by characteristics such as age, education, and land size. This results in a poor understanding of why farmers do what they do. By examining case studies in Hubei and Yunnan, in this article we aim to better understand Chinese farmers’ agrochemical practices, and to begin to situate these in a broader political ecology of agrochemicals in China. Drawing on research conducted in 2017–2019, we examine the socio-ecological relations of production and exchange in these two places and how farmers make decisions about, and access, fertilisers and pesticides. We find no single trajectory, but a complexity of practice shaped by local conditions and policies. External drivers are constraining chemical pesticide use and promoting commercial organic fertiliser products, but actual on-farm practices complicate some of these goals. To drive forward our understanding of agrochemicals in China, we argue that a political–ecological approach is needed that is attuned to farmers’ decision-making about their particular crops, the local political economy that shapes access to resources such as alternative pest management tools and sets particular agendas, and the networks of agrochemical production and sales that bring different products to farms.
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    Apples and oranges: Political crops with and against the state in rural China
    Rogers, S ; Han, X ; Wilmsen, B (UNIV ARIZONA LIBRARIES, 2022)
    In this article we bring together conceptual threads from political ecology, commodity geographies and agrarian studies to enable an inquiry into the political nature of crops. This inquiry is underpinned by the idea that crops are not just a means or a target of political projects, but can have effects through their webs of relations, and that their different capacities might mean that they may differently engage in political projects. This article examines how specialized cash crops in rural China are enrolled in state projects. We explore the cases of orange orchards and apple orchards in different locations in Hebei by detailing flows of capital and expertise, and smallholder-crop relations. Our analysis demonstrates that a political ecology of cash crops can provide insight into the politics of successive state projects that have been rolled out in China's agricultural communities. We argue that through evolving relations with smallholders, the attributes of the crops themselves, and particular market dynamics, robust smallholder-crop complexes have emerged that are currently proving resistant to the latest state project to achieve at-scale, industrialized agriculture. If we take political crops and their relations seriously in the story of contemporary agrarian change in China, we find that apple and oranges, previously with the state, can also come to act against it.
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    Scaling up agriculture? The dynamics of land transfer in inland China
    Rogers, S ; Wilmsen, B ; Han, X ; Wang, ZJ-H ; Duan, Y ; He, J ; Li, J ; Lin, W ; Wong, C (PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2021-10-01)
    Major changes are taking place in the Chinese countryside. Long a smallholder dominant economy with small and fragmented farms, a suite of policies, regulations, and financial instruments are being mobilised to drive larger-scale, more commercialised, and more industrialised farming in China. Larger operators such as “dragon-head” agribusinesses are transforming production and supply chains, while the operational rights and titles over farmland are being formalised so that smallholders can more easily transfer their land to large-scale producers. This article aims to deepen our understanding of the extent and nature of land transfer in China by exploring its dynamics in inland provinces. It draws on a 2019 survey of more than 900 cash-cropping farms in four provinces (Hebei, Shaanxi, Hubei and Yunnan), semi-structured interviews, and secondary data. Our mixed methods approach supports in-depth analysis of the extent and dynamics of land transfer in apple, tea, orange and coffee-growing areas. We find that in contrast to national statistics, land transfer from smallholders to other operators is generally quite limited, a finding which highlights the ongoing viability of specialised smallholder farming and other site-specific barriers to scaling up. In the site where land transfer is most extensive, it is being driven by a state-agribusiness-cooperative alliance rather than through a newly emerged rural land market. We also find that the nature of leasing out farmland is markedly different to leasing in farmland. Where it occurs, the leasing out of land tends to be organised and formalised, and is tied to state developmentalist goals, particularly poverty alleviation. The leasing in of land is more widespread and occurs on an informal basis. Our analysis highlights key conditions that determine uneven land transfer and confirms that local political-economic dynamics complicate the realisation of central government directives on the ground.
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    Between Project and Region: The Challenges of Managing Water in Shandong Province After the South-North Water Transfer Project
    Chen, D ; Luo, Z ; Webber, M ; Rogers, S ; Rutherfurd, I ; Wang, M ; Finlayson, B ; Jiang, M ; Shi, C ; Zhang, W (WATER ALTERNATIVES ASSOC, 2020-02-01)
    This paper examines the challenges that a region of China is facing as it seeks to integrate a centrally planned, hierarchically determined water transfer project into its own water supply systems. Water from China's South-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP) has been available in Shandong since 2013. How has this province been managing the integration of SNWTP water into its water supply plans, and what challenges is it facing in the process? This paper demonstrates that Shandongʼs planners consistently overestimated future demand for water; this, together with the threats posed by reduced flows in the Yellow River, encouraged the Shandong government to support the building of the SNWTP. However, between the genesis of the plans for the SNWTP and its construction, the supply from the Yellow River became more reliable and the engineering systems and the efficiency of water use in Shandong Province itself has improved. As a result, by the time the SNWTP water became available, the province had little pressing need for it. Besides this reduced demand for SNWTP water, there have been difficulties in managing delivery of, and payment for, water within the province. These difficulties include unfinished local auxiliary projects that connect cities to the main canal, high water prices, conflict and lack of coordination among stakeholders, and ambiguous management policies. The result is that in 2016, on average, cities used less than 10% of their allocated quota of SNWTP water, while seven cities used none of their quota. The story of the SNWTP in Shandong is that of a centralised, hierarchically planned, fixed infrastructure with its deterministic projections coming into conflict with the fluidity of water demand and local political circumstances.
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    Producing a Chinese hydrosocial territory: A river of clean water flows north from Danjiangkou
    Rogers, S ; Wang, M (SAGE Publications, 2020-11)
    Hydrosocial territories are produced not just through concrete water infrastructure, but through flows of people, water, money, and ideas at multiple scales. As part of China’s South–North Water Transfer Project, water drawn from the distant Danjiangkou Reservoir now supplies the megacities of Beijing and Tianjin with the majority of their drinking water. To provide this new service – supplying drinking water of sufficient quality and quantity – the Reservoir and its upper reaches are in the midst of socio-economic and ecological transformations. In this article, we outline the tools being mobilised to send a river of clean water north, including administrative interventions, displacement, and discursive imaginings. We argue that what is being attempted is a wholesale reorganisation that marginalises local territorialities, reflects China’s particular governing rationalities and practices, and highlights new spatialities of water governance. Our analysis of the remaking of Danjiangkou pushes hydropolitical scholarship to more precisely define the geographies of power in hydrosocial territories.
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    Targeted Poverty Alleviation in China: A Typology of Official-Household Relations
    Davie, G ; Wang, M ; Rogers, S ; Li, J (SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2021-07)
    ‘Targeted Poverty Alleviation’ (TPA) is the Chinese government’s latest anti-poverty policy, aiming to lift the remaining 70 million Chinese citizens above the poverty line by 2020. The TPA scheme is novel in that every impoverished household is paired one-on-one with a local government official, who then bears responsibility for the eradication of their poverty. Despite being at the core of TPA, this pairing mechanism has received little academic attention. Based on an empirical case study of ten households across two villages in rural Shaanxi Province, China, this article aims to investigate this pairing mechanism at the micro level and its outcomes for poverty alleviation, in order to better understand how the notion of ‘precision’ is being realized through TPA. Two distinct traits that influence the TPA pairing system emerged: first, the ranking of the assigned local official is important in that higher-ranked officials have greater social and financial resources at their disposal, bringing about enhanced poverty alleviation outcomes for their households compared with lower-ranked officials. Secondly, the willingness and ability of impoverished households to actively participate in their poverty alleviation programme is beneficial within the TPA scheme, achieving better outcomes in the long-term compared with households who are passive receivers. TPA has the potential to work effectively and to achieve China’s poverty reduction goals; however, our analysis shows that some pairing mechanisms are more effective in achieving poverty alleviation goals than others.