Resource information
Politics is about access and power, and access to freshwater resources in rural China is complicated and understudied. China's massive size and diverse climate make it hard to generalize about freshwater resources in rural areas of the country. On balance, China is not water-scarce, yet geographic and temporal variations in water availability are dramatic, with China's driest areas receiving far less precipitation than the wettest areas. Rural areas are the locus of competition among freshwater users including agriculture, power companies, industry, households and ecosystems. Additionally, while peasants may hold usage rights (not title) to farmland, it is not a given that they will hold rights to water that will guarantee the productivity of that farmland in areas where precipitation is low. Finally, water quality is, unfortunately, an increasingly important factor affecting the availability of ‘fresh’ water, as is evident in the notion of quality-induced scarcity (shuizhixing queshui). This contribution reviews a small but important body of scholarship on rural water politics in China, identifying existing themes and suggesting new directions where scholarship is currently lacking.
