The Techno-Politics of Big Infrastructure and the Chinese Water Machine
Britt Crow-Miller School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA; bcm@asu.edu
Michael Webber School of Geography, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; mjwebber@unimelb.edu.au
Sarah Rogers Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies, The University of Melbourne, Sidney Myer Asia Centre, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; rogerssm@unimelb.edu.au
ABSTRACT:
Despite widespread recognition of the problems caused by relying on engineering approaches to water management issues, since 2000 China has raised its commitment to a concrete-heavy approach to water management. While, historically, China’s embrace of modernist water management could be understood as part of a broader set of ideas about controlling nature, in the post-reform era this philosophical view has merged with a technocratic vision of national development. In the past two decades, a Chinese Water Machine has coalesced: the institutional embodiment of China’s commitment to large infrastructure. The technocratic vision of the political and economic elite at the helm of this Machine has been manifest in the form of some of the world’s largest water infrastructure projects, including the Three Gorges Dam and the South-North Water Transfer Project, and in the exporting of China’s vision of concrete-heavy development beyond its own borders. This paper argues that China’s approach to water management is best described as a techno-political regime that extends well beyond infrastructure, and is fundamentally shaped by both past choices and current political-economic conditions. Emerging from this regime, the Chinese Water Machine is one of the forces driving the (re)turn to big water infrastructure globally.
KEYWORDS: Water development, infrastructure, techno-politics, South-North Transfer, China
INTRODUCTION
Writing at a time when much of the world seemed to have moved on from big engineering solutions to water management issues, Gavan McCormack took aim at the enchantment of China’s leaders with the modern paradigm of water management. Officials and scholars concerned with sustainable water management in China, he argued, have failed to seriously engage with, “the global discourse on hydro engineering, including the realisation that much of what has been done in the twentieth century has been a catastrophic failure – from the Rhine and the Mississippi, to the Nile, the Murray-Darling, and the Oxus” (McCormack, 2001: 23). He attributed the deep-seated belief in engineering solutions and the blindness to these historical shortcomings to multiple factors, including traditional notions rooted in Wittfogel (1963) of the link between river control and political-economic power, as well as the very concept of modernisation. In China, these factors converge in a now post-Socialist bureaucratic state to produce a context in which shifting away from engineering-heavy forms of water management may be far more challenging than it is elsewhere (McCormack, 2001: 26).
to read the full article please click on
^
The Techno-Politics of Big Infrastructure and the Chinese Water Machine
Britt Crow-Miller School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA; bcm@asu.edu
Michael Webber School of Geography, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; mjwebber@unimelb.edu.au
Sarah Rogers Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies, The University of Melbourne, Sidney Myer Asia Centre, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; rogerssm@unimelb.edu.au
ABSTRACT:
Despite widespread recognition of the problems caused by relying on engineering approaches to water management issues, since 2000 China has raised its commitment to a concrete-heavy approach to water management. While, historically, China’s embrace of modernist water management could be understood as part of a broader set of ideas about controlling nature, in the post-reform era this philosophical view has merged with a technocratic vision of national development. In the past two decades, a Chinese Water Machine has coalesced: the institutional embodiment of China’s commitment to large infrastructure. The technocratic vision of the political and economic elite at the helm of this Machine has been manifest in the form of some of the world’s largest water infrastructure projects, including the Three Gorges Dam and the South-North Water Transfer Project, and in the exporting of China’s vision of concrete-heavy development beyond its own borders. This paper argues that China’s approach to water management is best described as a techno-political regime that extends well beyond infrastructure, and is fundamentally shaped by both past choices and current political-economic conditions. Emerging from this regime, the Chinese Water Machine is one of the forces driving the (re)turn to big water infrastructure globally.
KEYWORDS: Water development, infrastructure, techno-politics, South-North Transfer, China
INTRODUCTION
Writing at a time when much of the world seemed to have moved on from big engineering solutions to water management issues, Gavan McCormack took aim at the enchantment of China’s leaders with the modern paradigm of water management. Officials and scholars concerned with sustainable water management in China, he argued, have failed to seriously engage with, “the global discourse on hydro engineering, including the realisation that much of what has been done in the twentieth century has been a catastrophic failure – from the Rhine and the Mississippi, to the Nile, the Murray-Darling, and the Oxus” (McCormack, 2001: 23). He attributed the deep-seated belief in engineering solutions and the blindness to these historical shortcomings to multiple factors, including traditional notions rooted in Wittfogel (1963) of the link between river control and political-economic power, as well as the very concept of modernisation. In China, these factors converge in a now post-Socialist bureaucratic state to produce a context in which shifting away from engineering-heavy forms of water management may be far more challenging than it is elsewhere (McCormack, 2001: 26).
to read the full article please click on
^
