Australia-led research on China’s South-North Water Transfer Project reveals it as both an engineering and political undertaking, marked by fragmented governance and local resistance. The project highlights deep tensions between central mandates and local realities, challenging the idea of a unified Chinese state.

In their first decade of operation, the middle and eastern routes of China’s South-North Water Transfer Project (SNWT) have transferred over 70 billion m³ of water to North China. The water is drawn from the Danjiangkou Reservoir that straddles Hubei and Henan (middle route) and from the Yangtze River upstream of Shanghai (eastern route) and is supplied to cities in North China, particularly Beijing and Tianjin. The SNWT was a huge and multi-faceted infrastructure project, composed of pumping stations, reservoirs, tunnels, and canals on the eastern route and a 1000km gravity-fed canal on the middle route. But describing the SNWT as an infrastructure project hardly does it justice. It was as much a political project, in that it demanded a new set of institutions to manage the allocation of these massive inter-basin transfers, to pursue the policy interventions needed to ensure high quality water, and to resolve political conflicts at different levels. As a political project it continues to evolve, with plans to expand the capacity of the middle route, ongoing debate about a future western route, and subsequent diversion projects being built as a result of provincial power plays (such as the Han-to-Wei, Yangtze-to-lower Han, and Danjiangkou-to-Northern Hubei local transfer projects).

Our research on this project spanned seven years, from 2017 to 2023, funded by the Australian Research Council. Led by Emeritus Professor Michael Webber, a team of PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and Chinese and Australian academics (all human and physical geographers) examined key sites and processes on the middle and eastern routes. Collectively, the team did fieldwork in Jiangsu, Shandong, Shaanxi, Henan, Hebei, and Beijing, collecting hundreds of interviews, policy documents, media reports, and surveys. Our doctoral students completed detailed studies on the water security in Xiong’an, long-term changes to the Han River’s geomorphology, industrial water management in Beijing and Hebei, and agricultural pollution control at the Danjiangkou Reservoir. Our collective findings offer a number of insights into the nature of the Chinese state and the conflicts within it.

Our analysis of the development, implementation, and effects of the SNWT project confirmed much of what we already knew about the Chinese state: that the state is highly fragmented, that central-local power relations continue to evolve, and that the translation of central policy pronouncements on the ground is deeply uneven and always shaped by local interests. While the image of a massive inter-basin water transfer project may seem to confirm an all-powerful, unified Party-state, in reality, governance in China is contested, incomplete, and subject to conflicting interests. At the Danjiangkou Reservoir, for instance, the central government was aiming for rapid improvements in water quality in this polluted reservoir to ensure a river of clean water flowed north to Beijing and Tianjin. This task fell to county and township governments in Henan, Hubei, and Shaanxi, which, being already economically marginalised, suffered further GDP losses as a result of the SNWT project. Local factories were closed, farmers resettled, urban wastewater treatment plants constructed, and organic agribusinesses established with the aim of stemming flows of pollution into the reservoir. New construction was prohibited and illegal tourism developments stalled or demolished. The promise of green development, however, was not enough to ensure smooth policy implementation. County and township officials came into conflict with communities over land acquisition, lacked the resources needed to properly “police” land use surrounding the reservoir, and promoted the achievements of leading agribusinesses while turning a blind eye to many of the farming practices of smallholders. They occupied a difficult position, managing higher-level targets with the threat of outright protest within their communities. Negotiation, delay, and subterfuge are common in state-society and central-local relations in China, and the SNWT project was no exception.

Intrastate conflicts due to diverging interests were also clearly evident. In the original plans for the SNWT project, receiving provinces had to estimate their projected water demand. Shandong, for instance, projected increased water demand and enthusiastically supported the construction of the SNWT in the early 2000s. On completion, however, it was clear that demand—both total water demand and demand for SNWT water—had been consistently overestimated due to reasons outlined in this Water Alternatives article. The much forecasted water crisis in North China never eventuated. Integrating the transferred water into provincial water supply also proved challenging due to the huge capital outlays required for auxiliary projects, prompting the provincial government to apply further pressure on local officials to complete these tasks. Furthermore, transferred water is much more expensive than other local supplies, so the central government has had to cajole provincial governments into receiving (and paying for) their full water quota. In turn, Shandong’s provincial government has had to pressure local governments to pay their share of the SNWT eastern route’s fixed annual access fee, eventually resorting to deducting this fee from fiscal transfers following non-compliance.

The SNWT project has had extensive social, political, and environmental impacts, some of which we summarise here and many of which continue to evolve. Among the most interesting have been the evolving politics (or hydropolitics) of the eastern and middle routes, which show the Chinese state to be a complex and evolving set of political relations that are rife with conflict. The notion of fragmented authoritarianism has long been a touchstone for students of Chinese politics—it is as relevant today as ever.

Sarah Rogers is an Associate Professor at the Asia Institute. Her research interests include hydropolitics, poverty alleviation, resettlement, agrarian change, agrochemicals, and climate change adaptation. She was Chief Investigator on two Australian Research Council Discovery Projects: one on the technopolitics of China’s South-North Water Transfer project (2017-2022) and one on the restructuring of China’s agricultural sector (2018-2023).

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