Nature did China few favors in its allocation of water, either spatially or seasonally. The South has abundant water but little land that is easy to cultivate, while the much drier North and Northwest have extensive plains but limited rainfall, which when it comes is concentrated strongly in the summer months, followed by long dry winters. Under these circumstances, water management in China is a holding company of wicked problems, including floods, droughts, pollution, climate impacts, hydropower development, environmental degradation, urbanization on an unprecedented scale, and, recently, international waters. It is fair to conclude that the nature and fate of the Chinese state has been linked in large degree to extensive and continuous intervention in the hydraulic cycle, both to prevent harm (shuihai水害) and to make beneficial use of water (shuili水利). Methods adopted for that intervention, discussed in separate entries in this chapter, have included dikes, irrigation, dams, interbasin transfers from water-abundant to water-scarce areas, and institutional reform. Attempts at institutional reform can themselves confront wicked problems of implementation in a polity of the size and complexity of China, with a governing system that, while changing in many ways under the People’s Republic, and especially in the recent reform period, remains one that is perhaps best characterized as one of “fragmented authoritarianism.” In the 21st century, the water needs of a globalized market economy and the growth of megacities, the exploitation of international waters (notably for hydropower), gigantic interbasin transfers, and water pollution have added to the complexity of water management, and to a fragmentation of scholarship on what falls under the expanding rubric of water management. An entrée to this expanding literature may be found in the individual sections of this bibliography.
Assessing Water Shortage through a Balance Model among Transfers, Groundwater, Desalination, Wastewater Reuse, and Water Demands (SE Spain)
