Water Politics and Political Change in China

[ 122 ] asia policy Water Politics and Political Change in China David M. Lampton Andrew C. Mertha has written an important book, significant because its implications extend well beyond what may appear to be the narrow confines of water politics in China. China’s Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change has a clear hypothesis germane to critical questions such as: What makes political opposition effective in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and how is the Chinese policy process, indeed the Chinese polity, changing? Moreover, his well-written and parsimonious book provides a roadmap to the increasingly complex Chinese bureaucracy and politically relevant groups as well as to the issues that animate these actors. Finally, the volume lightly touches on the possible implications of China’s pluralization for the outside world, including the United States. To help us get our intellectual arms around this book, I sequentially examine the following: the genealogy of Mertha’s work, the book’s central hypothesis, and the main findings. I conclude by identifying some of the implications of those findings for international relations and China’s domestic political evolution. Mertha’s Intellectual Forbearers Mertha does what many area specialists often do not, and that is he situates his research in a body of comparative theory that enlarges the meaning of his findings beyond the narrow cases under examination. Mertha both uses preexistent theory to give meaning to his findings and contributes to that theory, thereby enlarging the audiences for, and the utility of, his work. China’s Water Warriors expressly casts its argument in terms of the 1980s and 1990s literature that conceived of the Chinese polity in terms of a “fragmented authoritarian” (FA) system, a literature that Michel Oksenberg, Kenneth Lieberthal, and David M. Lampton animated. The central premises of the FA approach are that China is characterized by an institutional structure in which power was (and remains) fragmented among numerous and powerful bureaucratic and territorial actors and that policy outcomes often represent the mutual accommodation of these players—bargaining among these david m.lampton is George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. His most recent book is The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money, and Minds (2008). He can be reached at . [ 123 ] book review roundtable • china’s water warriors empowered (franchised) actors was (and remains) a central feature of the system.1 Moreover, this fragmentation and the resultant bargaining that occurs permeate not only policy formulation but the implementation process as well. Mertha also acknowledges, and adds to or recalibrates, other earlier research, including: Karl Wittfogel’s classic Oriental Despotism, John Kingdon’s work on policy entrepreneurs, Baumgartner and Jones’s issue-framing approach, and Elizabeth Economy’s and Jennifer Turner’s work on non-governmental actors in the environmental area in China. Beyond those explicitly acknowledged intellectual forbearers, his work also rests upon the endeavors of Skilling and Griffiths, who in the 1970s dealt with interest groups and interest tendencies in the Soviet Union. And almost everyone who has worked on water politics after he wrote his classic in 1949 entitled TVA and the Grass Roots, owes Philip Selznick a huge debt of intellectual gratitude for his thinking on organizational co-optation. Mertha has looked broadly for comparative work that helps illuminate and give meaning to his observations about China. A Clear Hypothesis and Interesting Case Studies By looking at three hydro and water conservancy projects in China (in addition to offering a peek at the Three Gorges Dam project), Mertha seeks to answer the question of why the projects went ahead in two cases, why one was stopped, and why one was at least postponed.2 He asks, in short: “Under what circumstances is political opposition effective in stopping high-priority state projects and what does this tell you about the evolutionary direction of the Chinese political system?” The principal determinants of whether or not a project was able to proceed were the degree to which the respective sides of the struggle had effective, compelling issue “frames” and which of the respective sides to the political struggle had effective “policy entrepreneurs.” By “frame,” Mertha means “organizing information in...