Dams and Development in China

The Moral Economy of Water and Power

Bryan Tilt

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231538268
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

China is home to half of the world's large dams and adds dozens more each year. The benefits are considerable: dams deliver hydropower, provide reliable irrigation water, protect people and farmland against flooding, and produce hydroelectricity in a nation with a seeimingly insatiable appetite for energy. As hydropower responds to a larger share of energy demand, dams may also help to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, welcome news in a country where air and water pollution have become dire and greenhouse gas emissions are the highest in the world.

Yet the advantages of dams come at a high cost for river ecosystems and for the social and economic well-being of local people, who face displacement and farmland loss. This book examines the array of water-management decisions faced by Chinese leaders and their consequences for local communities. Focusing on the southwestern province of Yunnan—a major hub for hydropower development in China—which encompasses one of the world's most biodiverse temperate ecosystems and one of China's most ethnically and culturally rich regions, Bryan Tilt takes the reader from the halls of decision-making power in Beijing to Yunnan's rural villages. In the process, he examines the contrasting values of government agencies, hydropower corporations, NGOs, and local communities and explores how these values are linked to longstanding cultural norms about what is right, proper, and just. He also considers the various strategies these groups use to influence water-resource policy, including advocacy, petitioning, and public protest. Drawing on a decade of research, he offers his insights on whether the world's most populous nation will adopt greater transparency, increased scientific collaboration, and broader public participation as it continues to grow economically.

1

THE MORAL ECONOMY OF WATER AND POWER

AS ONE flies over northwest Yunnan Province in an airplane, skirting along the eastern edge of the Himalaya, there are points at which, depending on cloud cover, one can see all three of China’s great Parallel Rivers (Sanjiang Bingliu) in a single glance: the Nu (known in Southeast Asia as the Salween), which cuts a path directly south into Myanmar (Burma); the Lancang (upper Mekong), which meanders through western Yunnan before passing through five other riparian nations in Southeast Asia; and the Jinsha, the headwaters of the Yangtze, the longest river in China. The view from the air is of a rugged landscape of glaciated mountain peaks and valleys crisscrossed by rivers. But it is only from the ground that one gains a sense of the region’s tremendous biological and cultural heritage, the threats currently facing this heritage, and the multisided struggle to determine these rivers’ future.

The Three Parallel Rivers region, a small corner of southwestern China, is home to 6,000 plant species and 80 species of rare or endangered animals, including treasured species such as the Yunnan snub-faced monkey (Rhinopithecus bieti), an extraordinary and infrequently encountered mammal that has become one charismatic symbol of the struggle to conserve what remains of this repository of biological diversity. It is also home to twenty-two of China’s officially recognized minority nationalities (minzu). The people who live here, supporting themselves mostly by subsistence and small-scale market farming, are among the poorest in the nation. The region has become a focal point in the conflict between those who wish to develop China’s rivers for their hydropower potential, including government agencies and hydropower corporations, and those who place a premium on preserving species richness and protecting the rights of vulnerable people.

The World Heritage Monitoring Center, which is part of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), has called the Three Parallel Rivers region an “epicenter of Chinese endemic species” (UNESCO 2003:4). This extensive area of varied microbiomes supported by a series of deep gorges and glaciated peaks, called the Hengduan Mountain Range, began rising skyward with the collision of the Indian tectonic plate and the Eurasian plate more than 50 million years ago. The mountains, like those of the main Himalayan range farther west, are still growing. Within a comparatively small land area, there are glaciers and scree, alpine meadow, alpine conifer, deciduous forest, cloud forest, mixed forest, savannah, and riparian habitats (Xu and Wilkes 2004). Moist air masses pushing in from the Indian Ocean, particularly during the summer monsoon season, deposit rain in the westernmost valleys before slowly petering out as they move inland, creating markedly different ecological conditions from one valley to the next. An overland trek of 50 kilometers from west to east will take a person from a lush biome with ferns and orchids to dry slopes covered in scrub and cacti.

The struggle to balance economic development and environmental protection increasingly involves both domestic and international players. In 2003, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated fifteen protected areas in eight clusters, totaling nearly 1.7 million hectares, as World Heritage Sites (UNEP 2009). The designation includes approximately one million hectares of “core” protected areas and nearly 700,000 hectares of “buffer” areas in which limited human activity is allowed. The Nature Conservancy, working in close association with the Yunnan provincial government, is also active in land conservation and has advocated for turning Xianggelila County (Zhongdian changed its name to the mythical “Shangri-La” in 2003 in pursuit of tourism revenue) into a national park. Pudacuo National Park, a majestic landscape of mountains and alpine lakes located a few short kilometers away from the cobblestone lanes of Shangri-La Old Town, was established in 2007 to preserve the region as a “biodiversity hot spot,” one of the richest reservoirs of flora and fauna on earth; it is the first in China to meet the standards of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Around the world, most sensitive areas targeted for conservation represent a balancing act between the use of natural resources for human development and the imperative for environmental protection. In China, which over the past several decades has undergone economic and infrastructural development on an unprecedented scale and at a breakneck pace, the balancing act is particularly precarious. China’s rivers hold massive undeveloped capacity for hydropower generation, an attractive proposition in a country where energy demands for manufacturing and household consumption are escalating rapidly and where three-quarters of current electricity supply is met by coal-fired power plants. The southwest region, with its rugged topography and high-volume, glacier-fed rivers, is home to the major share of China’s vast hydropower potential. Development plans involving central-government ministries, provincial-government authorities, and limited-liability hydropower-development corporations are moving forward rapidly; China’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan for Economic Development, released in 2011, specifically recommends pushing forward with the development of dams in the region, which is home to three of the country’s thirteen so-called hydropower bases (shuidian jidi), areas targeted for the construction of large, electricity-producing dams.

Yunnan Province contains the upper reaches of five major river systems—the Pearl, the Jinsha, the Lancang, the Nu, and the Irrawaddy—which collectively have more than 600 tributaries and contain 221 billion cubic meters of water (Ma Jun 2004:178). This book focuses on two watersheds in Yunnan Province: the Lancang River and the Nu River. On the Lancang, where more than a dozen dams are planned, four are completely operational, and several are under construction. On the Nu, a thirteen-dam hydropower-development plan is under way, with a total hydropower potential of 21,000 megawatts, which is slightly more than the mammoth Three Gorges Dam. Should all thirteen dams in the cascade be built, the best estimates suggest that more than 50,000 people will be displaced. The effects of these dams on the environment and on the people who live in the region are immense but as yet poorly understood by scientists, policy makers, and the general public.

As a tool for economic development, dam construction is certainly not new on the scene. In fact, the world is home to more than 50,000 large dams, which the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) defines as those greater than 15 meters in height or having a storage capacity greater than 3 million cubic meters (Scudder 2005:2–3). But China’s role in this trend is startling: home to half of the world’s large dams, it has far outpaced all other countries in the construction of dams in the past several decades and adds dozens of dams to its portfolio each year. The benefits provided by such projects are considerable: dams deliver hydropower, provide reliable irrigation water, enhance the navigability of waterways, and protect people and farmland against flooding. As hydropower meets a larger share of energy demand, it may also help to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels; government agencies and private entities alike are pursuing alternative-energy-development plans involving not just hydropower but also wind, solar, wave, and biogas. The development of a so-called low-carbon economy (ditan jingji) is welcome news in a country where hundreds of thousands of people die each year from ailments linked to air pollution from fossil-fuel combustion (Economy 2004) and where pollution-related economic losses cut into the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Given that China surpassed the United States in 2007 to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, such policy decisions also have global implications in the push to mobilize technology and political will to address climate change.

But dams also have consequences for ecosystems that are likely irreversible, and many such consequences have long gone unaccounted for. The World Commission on Dams (WCD), an organization under the guidance of the World Bank and the World Conservation Union, published a landmark study in 2000 that concluded that although dams had contributed significantly to human development over the years, their deleterious effects on social and environmental systems had eluded meaningful scrutiny: “Dams have made an important and significant contribution to human development, and benefits derived from them have been considerable.… In too many cases an unacceptable and often unnecessary price has been paid to secure those benefits, especially in social and environmental terms, by people displaced, by communities downstream, by taxpayers, and by the natural environment” (WCD 2000:6).

When a new hydropower dam is installed on the main stem of a major river, it fragments the riparian ecosystem, changing a free-flowing river segment into an expanse of still water. In the process, it disrupts fish passage; alters the water’s temperature, chemistry, and sediment load; and changes the geomorphology of the river itself, often in ways that are difficult to predict. There is mounting evidence that the enormous weight of large reservoirs may even disrupt tectonic plates, a phenomenon called “reservoir-induced seismicity”; some experts speculate that Sichuan’s catastrophic 8.0-magnitude Wenchuan earthquake, which killed an estimated 80,000 people in 2008, was caused by pressure on the earth’s crust from the recently completed Zipingpu Dam, located within a kilometer of the quake’s epicenter (Klose 2012). Moreover, critics of the dam industry point out that the heavy sediment load of southwest China’s rivers, trapped in the still water of a reservoir, will build up so rapidly that the viable lifespan of any dam is not likely to exceed fifty years.

As an anthropologist, I have focused over the past few years mainly on understanding the human consequences of hydropower development, which are equally dire. When dams are built and reservoirs fill behind them, they displace the human beings who live there, flooding farmland, inundating homes, and changing lives forever. The effects can last for generations as people cope with the consequences for their family’s income, their way of life, and their sense of place and community.¹ China’s growing hydropower sector thus represents one of the key arenas in which the competing rationalities of economic development, energy production, biological conservation, and social welfare collide. Dai Qing, the well-known journalist and environmental activist, made a pertinent comment about the mammoth Three Gorges Project that aptly describes environmentalists’ views of hydropower more generally: “The government built a dam but destroyed a river” (quoted in Watts 2011).

My goal in this book is to use water-resource management and the current drive for hydropower development as points of entry into an examination of the difficult choices faced by Chinese leaders about how to meet the nation’s escalating energy demands without exacerbating the country’s social and environmental problems. The massive dam projects under way in Yunnan, along with scores of others on most of China’s major river systems, highlight the fact that water is simultaneously a resource that is central to people’s livelihoods, a kinetic force capable of producing renewable energy to sustain national development, and a medium through which social and political relations are negotiated.

This path of inquiry opens up many questions that have thus far gone unexamined. What are the values and goals of key constituent groups in water-resource management in China, including government agencies, hydropower corporations, conservation organizations, and local communities? What strategies do these groups use to participate in the decision-making process and steer it toward the outcomes they deem desirable? How do communities uprooted by dam construction and resettlement cope with the dramatic social, cultural, and economic changes they face? How do those in positions of official power balance the social and ecological costs of hydropower development against other imperatives such as energy security and integrated river-basin management? I use two main analytical concepts—statemaking and the moral economy—to examine these interrelated questions. In what follows, I briefly introduce these concepts and discuss how they help elucidate the current controversy surrounding hydropower development.

STATEMAKING AND DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTHWEST CHINA

Despite its location in the remote southwest, Yunnan has been influenced by Han Chinese dynastic expansion for centuries if not millennia. Indeed, peripheral places such as these, endowed with the natural resources required by a growing empire, have played key roles in the construction and maintenance of the Chinese state. This process of contact between core areas and peripheral areas—sometimes peaceful, sometimes conflictive—can be seen as part of the process of statemaking (Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Scott 1998). As James Scott observes in his seminal book Seeing Like a State, “Contemporary development schemes … require the creation of state spaces where the government can reconfigure the society and economy of those who are to be ‘developed’ ” (1998:185). A growing body of work on the policies and politics of statemaking encourages us to examine critically how states are built and constantly shaped through geopolitical, cross-cultural, and sometimes discursive negotiation (Michaud 2010; Sivaramakrishnan 1999).

In this sense, statemaking is a development path characterized by modernist ambitions; it entails an essential faith in the power of human knowledge systems—including science, technology, and policy—to beget better and better futures. In the West, modernism’s high-water mark was perhaps the middle of the twentieth century, when many of the benefits of scientific progress were realized but before the critical, reflective trend of postmodernism took hold. By contrast, Chinese states have been modernist in their tendencies since at least the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), with its trade routes into Central Asia, its uniform system of weights and measurements, its finely tuned legal institutions, and its civil service examination system that selected political leaders on the basis of academic mastery.

The role of Yunnan in the Chinese statemaking project is somewhat paradoxical. One need only glance at a historical chart of the dynasties, stretching back 3,000 years, or look at the way that the geographical extent of the dynasties waxed and waned throughout that long expanse of history to see that in the context of the modern Chinese state Yunnan can reasonably be considered part of the southwestern periphery. Yunnan became a province officially only in the late thirteenth century under the Yuan Dynasty of the Mongols. In fact, if we shift our gaze a bit, we can also see Yunnan as the northern end of the Southeast Asian highlands, a region called “Zomia,” a name that scholars use to describe the vast upland zone that includes parts of southwest China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam (Scott 2009; van Schendel 2002).² These regions, which comprise some of the most mountainous terrain on earth and support a population currently numbering nearly 200 million, have long posed a challenge to the various governments that have attempted to subjugate them. Subsistence strategies, political affiliations, and even ethnic identities have long remained fluid here; many of the region’s inhabitants have pursued swidden agricultural cultivation and a “deliberate and reactive statelessness” (Scott 2009:x). Although it would be a mistake to see the people of Zomia as entirely lawless or stateless, their current experience is one of far-reaching social, cultural, and environmental change (Michaud and Forsyth 2011). In Yunnan, consolidated Chinese control has been continuously threatened and often explicitly undercut by regional fiefdoms, interethnic conflict, and even, in the mid–nineteenth century, a Hui Muslim insurrection marked by widespread bloodshed (Atwill 2005). The Chinese fought the Vietnamese in a border war over Yunnan in 1979, a simmering cartographical and geopolitical conflict that wasn’t resolved until the early years of the twenty-first century. It is here, amid the competing processes of assimilation and autonomy, integration and resistance, where some of China’s greatest contemporary social and environmental challenges can be most clearly seen.

How does statemaking take place?³ In this book, I consider statemaking from both a material perspective...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. The Moral Economy of Water and Power
• 2. Crisis and Opportunity: Water Resources and Dams in Contemporary China
• 3. The Lancang River: Coping with Resettlement and Agricultural Change
• 4. The Nu River: Anticipating Development and Displacement
• 5. Experts, Assessments, and Models: The Science of Decision Making
• 6. People in the Way: Resettlement in Policy and Practice
• 7. A Broader Confluence: Conservation Initiatives and China’s Global Dam Industry
• Conclusion: The Moral Economy Revisited
• List of Chinese Terms
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index