Resource Management and Geography - Research Publications
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ItemGovernmentality and the conduct of water: China's South-North Water Transfer Project(WILEY, 2016-10)Governmentality is a way of thinking about dispersed practices of governing, including attempts to render space governable. China's South–North Water Transfer (SNWT) project, the world's largest interbasin water transfer project, is a programme of government that attempts to render the distribution of water across space more governable and administrable. This article analyses English and Chinese academic, media and government documents through a governmentality lens. It aims to examine the SNWT project's machinery, mentality and spatiality, including its narrative, its constitution of objects and subjects in space, its multiple techniques of government, and its physical and administrative assemblages. In decentring the problem of the state in relation to the SNWT project we can learn much about both the politics of water and the nature of Chinese governmentalities. This article shows how the SNWT naturalises water scarcity, normalises the pre‐eminence of North China, sustains engineering over regulatory solutions and reconfigures hydrosocial relations, while also outlining the limits to and endemic conflicts within this vast programme of government.
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ItemConstructing Water Shortages on a Huge River: The Case of Shanghai(WILEY, 2015-11)Abstract Shanghai is located on the world's third largest river (by volume). Yet it faces the risk of shortages of drinking water. Many decisions and environmental characteristics have contributed to this threat. First, Shanghai has become dependent on water brought into the municipality by rivers. Second, it has become increasingly reliant on water from the Changjiang (Yangzi River), principally in order to control the levels of pollution in the water that enters its treatment plants. Third, for reasons associated with inter‐provincial administrative arrangements, the city's water intakes are located within the municipality, within the estuary zone and subject to tidal intrusions of salt water. Fourth, at high tide and when the Changjiang's discharge is low, salt intrudes far into the estuary, beyond the current water intakes. If sea levels rise, these intrusions will become more pronounced. Fifth, large‐scale central government infrastructure projects (such as dams and the South‐North Transfer) are altering the hydrological characteristics of the river. Such projects raise the probability of salt water intrusions into the water intake zone. The Shanghai and central governments have thus made a series of decisions that, taken together, have led the municipality to rely on a source of drinking water that is increasingly unreliable and subject to the risk of shortages due to salt water intrusions. Why these decisions have been made – independently – is an important problem for those who would understand the provision of water for cities and the practical efficacy of Chinese governance systems.
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ItemImpact of the Three Gorges Dam, the South-North Water Transfer Project and water abstractions on the duration and intensity of salt intrusions in the Yangtze River estuary(COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH, 2015)Abstract. This paper assesses the impacts of the Three Gorges Dam, the South–North Water Transfer Project and other water abstractions on the probability of long-duration salt intrusions into the Yangtze River estuary. Studies of intrusions of saltwater into estuaries are typically constrained by both the short duration of discharge records and the paucity of observations of discharge and salinity. Thus, studies of intrusions of saltwater into estuaries typically seek to identify the conditions under which these intrusions occur, using detailed observations for periods of 20–60 days. The paper therefore first demonstrates a method by which to identify the conditions under which intense intrusions of long-duration occur and then applies that method to analyse the effect of the three projects. The paper constructs a model of the relationship between salinity and discharge and then employs Monte Carlo simulation methods to reconstruct the probability of observing intrusions of differing intensities and durations in relation to discharge. The model predicts that the duration of intrusions with chlorinity ≥ 250 mg L−1 (or ≥ 400 or 500 mg L−1) increases as the number of consecutive days with discharge ≤ 12 000 m3 s−1 (or ≤ 8000 m3 s−1 increases. The model predicts that in 1950–2014, the number of consecutive days with chlorinity ≥ 250 mg L−1 averaged 21.34 yr−1; if the three projects operate according to their normal rules, that average would rise to 41.20 yr−1. For a randomly selected year of discharge history from the period 1950–2014, under normal operating rules for these projects the probability of an intrusion rises from 0.25 (for 30-day intrusions) or 0.05 (for 60-day intrusions) to 0.57 or 0.28, respectively.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe impact of water transfers from the lower Yangtze River on water security in Shanghai(ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2013-12)Shanghai is a megacity that increasingly relies on water drawn from the Yangtze River estuary. During periods of low flow, water in the estuary can become too saline for use in city water supplies. River flow is measured at the Datong gauging station 680 km upstream from the river mouth. Several existing and planned river water extractions are located below Datong, including the Eastern Route of the South-North Water Diversion Project (ERP). The effect of these extractions on discharge into the estuary and the associated salinity levels may be significant, even though the extractions are not reflected in the discharge at Datong. We estimate the effects of these downstream extractions on water discharge into the estuary (rather than at Datong), particularly the critical discharge level below which salinity compromises water security in Shanghai. Our results show that the ERP will cause the discharge into the estuary to fall below critical levels between December and February in dry years and January to February in normal years. Future water transfer projects along the lower Yangtze River will further compound the problem. Maintaining Shanghai's water security is therefore a significant challenge for China's water resource management institutions.
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ItemThe Yellow River in transition(ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2008-08)
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ItemMigration, modernisation and ethnie estrangement: Uyghur migration to urumqi, Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, PRC(Brill, 2009-01-01)Abstract In the People's Republic of China, minority nationality peoples have the same formal rights as Han Chinese. However, in Xinjiang, the modernisation project is taking precedence over ethnic harmony as recruitment practices are increasingly disadvantaging the Uyghurs, despite earlier affirmative action policies. Ethnographic and survey research among Urumqi's floating population indicates that Uyghurs are excluded from certain sectors, earn lower incomes and reside in poorer accommodation than Han Chinese, from whom they remain spatially and socially segregated. As the state increasingly relies on the invisible hand of the market, so the commodification of labour relations and property is amplifying social rifts between nationalities. Uneven regional development prompts Han people to migrate into Xinjiang and Uyghurs to migrate to the cities within Xinjiang, bringing these two ethnic groups into competition within a labour market. This has resulted in an ethnic division of labour that exacerbates inter- and intra-ethnic tensions.
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ItemThe Places of Primitive Accumulation in Rural China(TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2008-10)abstract “Rural” is a category of enduring significance in China. The trajectories of social change in China's rural areas reflect local dynamics and new forms of economy that encroach from local or distant cities and international sources. One indicator of change is the separation of people from their means of production: the development of the preconditions for capitalist production. Using information from villages scattered across China, this article identifies the sources of this separation and poses a theoretical question: can these changes be comprehended in a nondeterministic manner? The article demonstrates that the principal means of separating rural people from their means of production have been market based and largely local (reflecting forces within China), supplemented, however, by forcible dispossession. It also shows that the processes that drive primitive accumulation do not simply reflect an economic logic; they include environmental modernization, ethnic politics, nation building, and personal motives. The extraeconomic bases of economic change imply that primitive accumulation is not a process on a path to a known end point or to a predictable geography.
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ItemPricing China's irrigation water(ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2008-10)