China's Hydro-politics in the Mekong

Conflict and Cooperation in Light of Securitization Theory

Sebastian Biba

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351372817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

China's Hydro-politics in the Mekong explores the intricate processes of conflict and cooperation over the use of water resources in the Mekong river basin between upstream China and the downstream countries of Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The book tackles two gaps in the empirical literature: first, the neglect of international hydro-politics as one specific and increasingly important issue area of China's foreign policy behavior, especially its neighborhood diplomacy; and second, the disregard of China's role in Mekong River politics.

In particular, this book scrutinizes the 'spring 2010 Mekong crisis' and the events surrounding it which led to a series of complex multi-level, security-related interactions among various state and non-state actors in the region, with China at the center. Analyzing this crisis, the book not only employs securitization theory as its theoretical framework and adds a couple of innovations to this theory, but also gives a detailed account of China's hydro-political behavior in one specific and particularly revealing case study. Moreover, the book embeds China's Mekong hydro-politics in the bigger picture of its (sub-)regional international affairs, as the former does not take place in a vacuum, but rather is a part of China's overall foreign relations with its neighbors. The book acknowledges this link and provides new insights into the role of hydro-politics and its relationship vis-à-vis other issue areas of China's foreign policy.

1 Introduction

China and water

China’s rise …

China’s foreign policy has been one of the most widely and most controversially debated topics in International Relations (IR) and Area Studies literature for many years. One of the prime reasons why the spotlight has been more and more thrown on China is the country’s phenomenal rise. Ever since Deng Xiaoping in 1978 launched his “reform and opening up policy” (gaige kaifang zhengce), China has been on a path of tremendous economic growth and modernization. As a matter of fact, decades of continuous near-double-digit annual growth rates in its gross domestic product (GDP) have turned China into the world’s second-biggest economy, only trailing the United States (US).¹ When measured in real purchasing-power terms, China even overtook the US as the world’s leading economy in late 2014 (Arends 2014). What is more, China in 2009 replaced Germany as the global “export champion” (Atkins 2009) and has accumulated the by far greatest amount of foreign exchange reserves, at one point in 2014 nearing incredible US $4 trillion (Noble 2014). China’s economic success has even produced sustained discussions about a generic “China model” of development – combining a free market and an authoritarian state – and its chances to supersede the prevailing “Western model,” based on capitalism in democratic settings (e.g., Zhao 2010). Militarily, China has also caught up enormously and meanwhile ranks second after the US in terms of worldwide military expenditure. In the period between 2006 and 2015 alone, China’s spending grew by 132 percent (SIPRI 2016: 3). China has furthermore articulated its intentions to build a blue water navy and in 2012 commissioned its first aircraft carrier. Besides, China has been able to initiate an ambitious space program, becoming the third country to launch a human being into space in 2003 and the first nation to launch a “hack-proof” quantum-communications satellite in 2016.

On the political front, China has steadily extended its influence through evolving into one of the key players in most areas of global governance. China is not only a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and a driver behind the G-20, China has likewise increasingly become a heavyweight in the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank. Moreover, China has joined, or at least affiliated itself with, the most important regional organizations in East Asia, including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, and the East Asia Summit. More recently, China has even proceeded to (co-)establish its own regional and transregional institutions, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS (consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and its New Development Bank, as well as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The newest and grandest expression of China’s increasing ambitions is certainly its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) officially launched in the fall of 2013.² Consisting of the Silk Road Economic Belt and a New Maritime Silk Road, the BRI envisions the creation of a highly integrated, cooperative, and mutually beneficial set of maritime and land-based economic corridors linking China to Asian and European markets. The initiative is said to include more than 60 countries with a total population of over 4 billion. Often framed as a purely economic enterprise, BRI also carries geo-economic and geo-political agendas (Swaine 2015). Last but not least, on the cultural level, the proliferation of Confucius Institutes around the globe since the new millennium is indicative of China’s increased resources also in the soft power area. All in all, it is in particular the speed and comprehensiveness with which China has catapulted itself in its current position as the world’s potential “challenger number one” of US predominance that must be seen as unprecedented.

At the same time, it is exactly China’s unique trajectory that has stirred very ambivalent reactions. While for the Chinese, their ongoing rise constitutes nothing else but a “national rejuvenation” “granted by nature” (Yan 2001: 33–34) – after all, in the last 2000 years, China has enjoyed the status of what would nowadays be called a “superpower” several times – for the rest of the world, feelings about China’s rise have varied widely, from outright “China threat” to enthusiastic “panda hugging.” The single key question related to China’s rise certainly is whether this process will (continue to) be peaceful, as proclaimed by China, or whether it will ultimately lead to war, possibly even great power war, thereby following the historic precedents of the rise of Prussia and Wilhelmine Germany in the run-up to World War I as well as the ascent of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during the inter-war period.

Those who have studied China’s rise and its potential consequences using IR theory have reached very different conclusions. For example, for offensive realists, China’s rise is bound to lead to war with the US, as China will try to dominate Asia and maximize the power gap between itself and its neighbors, whereas the US does not tolerate peer competitors and will go to great lengths to contain and weaken China (e.g., Mearsheimer 2006, 2014). China’s “new assertiveness” (Yahuda 2013) primarily witnessed in the East and South China Seas since around 2009 seems to be grist to many realists’ mill. However, an opposing view is held by neoliberal institutionalists. Probably most prominently, Ikenberry (2008) has argued that the post-World War II US-led international order has created unusually “accessible, legitimate, and durable” institutions that will be able to accommodate China’s rise in a way beneficial to both the US and China. The global order is also an issue increasingly in the focus of power transition theorists. Seeking to examine in how far a rising China is (dis-)satisfied with the existing international system, those theorists have, among other things, pointed to China’s accelerated building of pillars of a parallel structure (including, for instance, the China model as well as organizations such as BRICS and the AIIB) in order to demonstrate China’s growing dissatisfaction with the US-led order (e.g., Lim 2015 and Biba 2016a). Others, however, have maintained that China is by no means a revisionist power aspiring to overthrow the existing order. Rather, so it has been posited, China is a “reform-minded status quo power” that finds the US-led international system flawed and works to rectify this system from within (e.g., Li 2011 and Ren 2015). In contrast to these various arguments, yet another very different assessment comes from scholars who do not black-box the Chinese state, but in fact put a lot of emphasis on China’s domestic situation in order to explain possible foreign policy outcomes. Those scholars have oftentimes questioned the sustainability of China’s rise and with it the ability to wage a major war in the first place, referring to China’s huge arsenal of grave domestic problems such as rampant corruption, widening social disparities and severe environmental degradation, potentially even precipitating regime collapse (e.g., Chang 2001 and Gurtov 2013). Meanwhile, however, it has also been acknowledged that internal dynamics, above all China’s sometimes virulent nationalism, could likewise give rise to a much more aggressive Chinese foreign policy (e.g., Hughes 2011 and Zhao 2013).

Against this twofold backdrop that, first, the evolution of China’s rise is of critical importance for peace in Asia and the world, as well as that, second, China’s foreign policy is a key perspective through which to examine China’s rise, one thing is striking. That is, one of the foreign policy fields that bears potential to influence the future nature of China’s rise to an enormous extent has so far been largely neglected from analysis, at least in this particular context. This field is China’s international hydro-politics. Hydro-politics, or water politics, at its simplest, can be defined as “politics affected by the availability of freshwater” (Biba 2012: 603). As Elhance (1999: 3) expresses it, “[h]ydropolitics is the systematic study of conflict and co-operation between states over water resources that transcend international borders.” This book intends to provide much-needed insight into this significant and, in fact, increasingly relevant aspect of China’s foreign policy.

… and its neglected links to fresh water

The links between freshwater resources and China’s rise, or the potential impacts on this rise, are more diverse than one might think. On the one hand, there is the sometimes loosely recognized link between China’s domestic water woes (see details below) and the country’s rise (e.g., Economy 2004 and Hofstedt 2010). The logic, in somewhat simplified terms, goes that China’s grave domestic water problems could set in motion a causal chain reaction from water shortages to economic downturn to social instability and, eventually, to regime collapse. Such a chain reaction could, at any point, interfere, in one way or another, with China’s current rise trajectory. Yet, this domestic side of China’s water equation will – while not fully ignored – not be in the focus of this book.

On the other hand, there is also a link between China’s rise and the country’s shared water resources, that is, in particular, its many international rivers (see details below). For as its domestic water resources have increasingly come under enormous pressure – and this is where the domestic water situation impacts on international hydro-politics – China feels the need to more and more utilize water running down its shared rivers in an effort to guarantee sufficient supply for the various water-related needs of its huge population. Quite possibly, this will not be without serious consequences for China’s many downstream riparian neighbors. In fact, the building of Chinese upstream dams (sometimes coupled with the alleged planning of water diversion schemes), the various potential impacts on downstream countries, and reactions from the latter represent one issue-complex that has already been discussed extensively for rivers such as the Mekong (e.g., Menniken 2007; Li et al. 2011; Magee 2012; Pearse-Smith 2012; Räsänen et al. 2012; Kuenzer et al. 2013; Yeophantong 2014; and Fan et al. 2015) and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the Brahmaputra (e.g., Holslag 2011; Sinha 2012; and Zhang 2016). Apart from a few exceptions (see Liebman 2005; Biba 2012; and Ho 2014, 2017), though, the existing literature has largely missed out on comprehensively dealing with at least two significant and inter-related aspects. First, that China’s politics of its international rivers is intertwined with other areas of China’s foreign relations as well as the country’s overarching foreign policy objectives and that this bigger picture has to be kept in mind has seldom been acknowledged. Second, that China’s international hydro-politics as a de facto more and more important field of China’s foreign policy bears potential, and increasingly so, to both constrain China’s rise and derail its peacefulness has not commonly been recognized. Therefore, this book will shed light on the characteristics of China’s international hydro-politics, how this hydro-politics is linked to China’s overall foreign policy and its goals and what China’s behavior in this field can tell us, at least implicitly, with regards to China’s rise.

Per se, China’s international rivers have not, until recently, even ranked particularly high on the agenda of China’s foreign policy makers. In fact, many in China have long held the belief that every drop of water flowing through Chinese territory is a domestic matter and thus could be used absolutely freely and without taking the interests and concerns of riparian neighbors into account. Yet, this approach has in recent years already caused simmering friction between China and several of its riparian neighbors. Meanwhile, China’s foreign policy has also put a premium on its so-called “good-neighborly policy” (mulin zhengce) as a part of the country’s peaceful rise (heping jueqi), later renamed peaceful development (heping fazhan), strategy that has itself been further supplemented by lofty slogans such building a “harmonious world” (hexie shijie) and a “community of common destiny” (mingyun gongtongti). Sharing borders with 14 sovereign states, China has attached great importance to its adjoining regions already since the late 1980s. The key principle of China’s neighborhood diplomacy is “becoming friends and partners with your neighbors” (yulin weishan, yilin weiban), which is itself aimed at “building an amicable, tranquil and prosperous neighborhood” (mulin, anlin, fulin) (Zhao 2011: 54, 57). The idea behind this approach has been to have stability and peace all around China’s vast periphery so as to create conditions favorable for concentrating on the promotion of its own domestic development and, at the same time, also to foster a positive image of itself abroad. The problem for China now is that conflicts over shared water resources could completely derail this neighborhood diplomacy. In the meantime, Chinese scholars have begun to recognize the potential for water conflicts between China and its neighbors (e.g., He et al. 2014).

The rationale behind potential water conflicts between China and its neighbors is rather obvious. In most regions of the world, water availability levels have been falling tremendously over the last decades. Asia indeed stands out in several respects of an impending global water crisis. As a whole, Asia has undergone the world’s fastest growth in freshwater withdrawals from rivers, lakes, and underground aquifers during the 20th century (Chellaney 2011: 8). Recent data on Asian countries sharing water with China reveal that in the time period from 1962 to 2014 (that is, from the earliest to the most recent data available) all (except Russia, but including China itself) have suffered from steep declines in water availability per capita, ranging between 50 and up to 75 percent (FAO 2016; also see Table 1.1). Nowadays, Asia – after all, the most populous and most rapidly developing continent on the planet – is the region with the lowest fresh water per person ratio in the world (Chellaney 2011: 26; also see Table 1.2). Meanwhile, water demand in large parts of Asia has risen enormously. Reasons for the diverging trend of sinking water availability and increasing demand are manifold. They include high population growth, coupled with increasing rates of urbanization, spiraling household consumption, and changing diets. They also comprise rapid economic growth and the concomitant degradation of existing reserves of fresh water and the destruction of water tables through deforestation, overexploitation, and pollution. Weak governance and mismanagement have frequently aggravated thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: China and water
• 2. Securitization theory and China’s international hydro-politics
• 3. China and Southeast Asia
• 4. China and the Mekong
• 5. The spring 2010 Mekong crisis, part one: China faces criticism
• 6. The spring 2010 Mekong crisis, part two: China responds
• 7. Conclusion: Making sense of China’s (Mekong) hydro-politics
• Index