Everyday Modernity in China

9. From Provision to Exchange: Legalizing the Market in China's Urban Water Supply

9 From Provision to Exchange Legalizing the Market in China’s Urban Water Supply alana boland The establishment of the “rule of law” has been a policy priority in China since the 1980s. In the transition from a planned to a market economy, the Chinese government has placed increasing emphasis on legal institutions in the regulation of economic and social life. This emphasis on rule of law is very much present in water resource management, where achievements are measured by the count of laws and regulations, and failures are cited as evidence of an inadequate legal framework. For urban water supplies, eª orts to “manage water in accordance with law” (yi fa zhi shui) have aªected production, distribution , and consumption. These changes in China’s urban water systems are no small matter. Water is perhaps the most crucial, threatened, and potentially scarce resource in China today, and the changing organization of its supply has profound eªects that resound in the everyday habits of city residents. Since economic reforms began, water supply in China’s cities has undergone a process of “domestication” as consumption by domestic users and commercial establishments—households, schools, and hospitals, for example—has increased rapidly and disproportionately. Nationally, the proportion of water flowing through municipal networks serving domestic needs increased from 26 percent in 1990 to 46 percent in 2002. Per capita consumption nearly doubled over the first two decades of economic reforms, increasing from approximately 120 liters per day in 1978 to 220 per day in 2000.1 The water flowing out of city taps has come from both surface and groundwater sources, with tremendous variation in the quantity and quality of available sources between regions. Constrained by local environmental conditions and facing growing demands for improved quality and increased quantity to meet domestic needs, city authorities have introduced radical changes in the organization of supply. While the saga of piped water as described by Hanchao Lu in chapter 1 was shaped in large part by technical innovations, the transformation of water supply in the reform era has been guided more by institutional innovations. Reflecting an ascendant legalism, some of the most fundamental innovations of the last decades have been ones that operated through law. In examining these innovations, I explore the ways in which legal institutions have responded to and in turn shaped water management reforms in China’s transition to a market economy. My purpose is not to provide an exegesis of the many laws related to water management in China. I am more interested in examining how, since the 1980s, the idea of a law-governed state, as a political symbol, has shaped changes in the social and economic character of water and its distribution. My analysis of law and water management draws on critical legal studies by focusing on the connections between ideology and law. As some legal scholars have stressed, specific ideological formations associated with law (e.g., public vs. private) are not unrelated to the more ubiquitous rule-of-law project.2 This project is more than just a state-centered or top-down engineered program. To understand how the rule of law operates, it is important to consider the normative image of law in society and how it can not only come to embody people’s material interests but also become an expression of social values. A specific focus on law as ideology opens up questions that help locate legal ideological formations in broader social and economic contexts. Approaching law as ideology is particularly important for understanding law’s eªects on those who are experiencing the so-called socialist transition.3 This is no less the case in China, where there has been much discussion about appropriate roles for the state, market, and rule of law in the country’s ongoing shift to a more market-based economy.4 As China’s policy makers forge ahead on some of the more intractable problems of transition, debates over the rule of law have a sense of political urgency that is arguably absent in advanced capitalist societies. These debates tend to be dominated by a condemnation of the planned economy and a celebration of the market.5 Under the banner of “legal modernization,” the rule of law has become an ideology itself that aªects everyday life as much as it does elite politics. And as most Alana Boland 304 Project MUSE (2024-04-20 02:36 GMT) arenas of economic and social life are...