China’s political system, economic reform, and the governance of water quality in Pearl River

August 5th, 2014

André Silveira, University of Cambridge, UK

China’s economic reform and opening up process initiated in 1978 has supported a more decentralized style of governing public affairs, including environmental protection and water resources management. Throughout the 1980s important administrative and fiscal responsibilities were devolved to regional and local governments, which gradually took over decisions regarding trade, foreign investment, land use, budgetary and extra-budgetary revenues and expenditures.1

Although China is a unitary state with an authoritarian political regime, several authors have suggested that the Chinese State behaves as a federal political system.2,3,4 The dynamics of central-local relations and the measure of local autonomy provided by autonomous financial means and regulatory capacity seems to provide support for a behavioural interpretation of the Chinese political system.

A key aspect of the power of local governments relates to land use management responsibilities. Land use rights became saleable items after the 1988 Constitutional amendment, after which land use rights “assignment” was added to the exclusive prerogatives of local authorities. This has become an increasingly significant source of revenue for local governments and officials and has encouraged greater competition amongst provinces and municipalities for financial, human and natural resources. New opportunities for enrichment and career development have represented robust incentives for local government cadres and decision-makers to use newly acquired powers to further advance economic growth along with their personal careers.

These developments have resulted in increasing competition between vertical and horizontal lines of authority within the Chinese bureaucratic system. In practice, lower levels of government hold considerable autonomy and de facto economic power to act (or avoid action) when they deem necessary to counterweight central political directives. Local governments may choose how policies and laws are implemented, depending on available financial resources and local development priorities. Local leaders, however, often consider environmental protection policies and laws to be an obstacle.

Overall, the process of economic reform entailed structural change to central-local relations and the exercise of power by local governments. This has brought challenges to collective action efforts when addressing environmental degradation, which typically requires coordinated action amongst different administrative sectors and amongst affected jurisdictions.

Significant efforts continue to be made to mitigate serious deterioration of the environment and its social consequences. China is often credited with having put in place an adequate set of laws and regulations for water management and protection. However, two critical problems remain: lack of coordination between relevant water laws and incomplete enforcement of laws and regulations.

As far as water quality management system is concerned, institutional structures are considered to be excessively fragmented. Responsibilities over water quality management are shared between several administrative sectors, with emphasis on two ministerial agencies, namely water resources and environmental protection. The two ministries operate two partially redundant water quality monitoring systems with no systematic sharing of data.

In respect to water management at a catchment scale, each local government seeks to attain its own objectives, having no obligation to consider the downstream effects of its actions. River Basin Water Resource Commissions (WRC) are seen as powerless in the face of this challenge given that they do not constitute a platform gathering representatives of all interested parties in the management and use of the river system. In fact, WRCs are regional agencies of the Ministry of Water Resources (MWR) and only one of the several interested parties.

While the Water Law recognizes the legal status of WRCs, and assigns them responsibilities in regard to the main stem of rivers flowing across provincial boundaries, it does not specify how their powers relate to those of provincial governments and their agencies. In respect of water quality management, WRCs may monitor water quality but have no recognised authority in respect to pollution prevention and control work.

Such challenges are illustrated through the case of the Pearl River Basin, where in 2009 more than 15 percent of the monitored water bodies registered extremely poor water quality and could not be used as sources of drinking water. There is great variety in the range and intensity of anthropogenic pressures, related to considerable disparities in economic development across the basin. In 2005, the differences in GDP per capita among the provinces in the basin were extreme, from an average of circa 25,000 USD in Hong Kong and Macau, which are located in the delta, to 617 USD in one of the provinces in the upper reaches.

Empirical findings illustrate problems of fragmentation amongst water institutional structures at national and catchment scale,5 and provide evidence that this fragmentation has a detrimental effect in the institutional capacity of the governance system to respond to water quality degradation, both in respect to pollution accidents and to slower processes of deterioration caused by human activity.6 Security of drinking water sources remains a crucial target of the government but institutional structures in place are unlikely to deliver on this important political objective without institutional change and strong cross-sectoral collaboration mechanisms.

References:

Chien, S.-S. (2010). “Economic Freedom and Political Control in Post-Mao China: A Perspective of Upward Accountability and Asymmetric Decentralization.” Asian Journal of Political Science 18(1): 69-89. Montinola, G., Y. Qian,, and R. Weingast, (1995). “Federalism, Chinese Style: The Political Basis for Economic Success in China.” World Politics 48(1): 50-81. Zheng, Y. (2006). “Explaining the Sources of de facto Federalism in Reform China: Intergovernmental Decentralization, Globalization, and Central – Local Relations.” Japanese Journal of Political Science 7(02): 101-126. Weingast, B. R. (2009). “Second generation fiscal federalism: the implications of fiscal incentives.” Journal of Urban Economics 65: 279-293. Song, X., W.Ravesteijn, B. Frostell and R. Wennersten (2010). “Managing water resources for sustainable development: the case of integrated river basin management in China.” Water Science and Technology 61(2). Silveira, A. (2014) China’s Political System, Economic Reform and the Governance of Water Quality: the case of the Pearl River Basin. In Connell, D., D. Garrick, G. Anderson, and J. Pittock. (eds.) Federal Rivers: managing water in multi-layered management systems. Edward Elgar: Cheltenham

This article is published as part of the GWF’s Federal Rivers Research Hub – an online research hub dedicated to looking at water governance in federal systems. An edited volume which expands on the contents of these articles and provides a more in depth analysis of federal water issues can be found here. This includes the full chapter on the Pearl River written by André Silveira. André is a PhD student in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. He holds a diploma in Political Science and International Relations, and an MA in European Integration Studies on which he focused on EU-China cooperation in environmental affairs. His PhD project is concerned with the evolution of institutions guiding water quality governance in large cross-jurisdictional river systems, with China’s Pearl River Basin and Europe´s Rhine River Basin as case studies. He has assisted the coordination of the “EU-China River Basin Governance Research Network” and was involved in the policy dialogue component of the “EU-China River Basin Management Programme” as rapporteur.

The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.