Based on in-depth field research in an urban housing demolition and relocation project in J community, Jiangsu province, this article explores the strategies, mindset, and considerations employed by three levels of local authorities (the neighbourhood committee, the district and municipal governments) in resolving conflict with tough nail households. Such investigation highlights the combined discourse surrounding the 'bargained authoritarianism' concept and 'accident avoidance' principle in the context of 'maintaining social stability' (weiwen in Chinese) in China. The conclusion of this article adds to the interpretation of the perpetuating conflicting relationship between central and local in China. This article thus suggests that a shift in approach is required when local authorities establish legal procedures and regulations to manage increasing social conflict in China.

Hydrosocial territories are produced not just through concrete water infrastructure, but through flows of people, water, money, and ideas at multiple scales. As part of China’s South–North Water Transfer Project, water drawn from the distant Danjiangkou Reservoir now supplies the megacities of Beijing and Tianjin with the majority of their drinking water. To provide this new service – supplying drinking water of sufficient quality and quantity – the Reservoir and its upper reaches are in the midst of socio-economic and ecological transformations. In this article, we outline the tools being mobilised to send a river of clean water north, including administrative interventions, displacement, and discursive imaginings. We argue that what is being attempted is a wholesale reorganisation that marginalises local territorialities, reflects China’s particular governing rationalities and practices, and highlights new spatialities of water governance. Our analysis of the remaking of Danjiangkou pushes hydropolitical scholarship to more precisely define the geographies of power in hydrosocial territories.

China's South-NorthWater Transfer Project (SNWTP) is a vast and still expanding network of infrastructure and institutions that moves water from the Yangtze River and its tributaries to cities in North China. This article aims to assess the SNWTP's impacts by beginning to answer seven questions about the project: How is the management of the SNWTP evolving? What are the problems to be resolved when managing SNWTP water within jurisdictions? What are the status and management of water quality in the SNWTP? What are the consequences of resettlements caused by the SNWTP? How is increased water supply affecting regional development? Is the SNWTP achieving its stated environmental goals? What are the sustainability credentials of the SNWTP? Drawing on primary and secondary data, the article demonstrates both that the opportunities and burdens characterising the project are highly uneven and that management systems are evolving rapidly in an attempt to enforce strict water quality targets. Furthermore, while the SNWTP may be helping to resolve groundwater overexploitation in Beijing, it is highly energy intensive, raising questions about its sustainability. Our analysis highlights the need to continue to interrogate the socio-economic, environmental, and political implications of such schemes long after they are officially completed.

This paper examines the challenges that a region of China is facing as it seeks to integrate a centrally planned, hierarchically determined water transfer project into its own water supply systems. Water from China's South-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP) has been available in Shandong since 2013. How has this province been managing the integration of SNWTP water into its water supply plans, and what challenges is it facing in the process? This paper demonstrates that Shandong's planners consistently overestimated future demand for water; this, together with the threats posed by reduced flows in the Yellow River, encouraged the Shandong government to support the building of the SNWTP. However, between the genesis of the plans for the SNWTP and its construction, the supply from the Yellow River became more reliable and the engineering systems and the efficiency of water use in Shandong Province itself has improved. As a result, by the time the SNWTP water became available, the province had little pressing need for it. Besides this reduced demand for SNWTP water, there have been difficulties in managing delivery of, and payment for, water within the province. These difficulties include unfinished local auxiliary projects that connect cities to the main canal, high water prices, conflict and lack of coordination among stakeholders, and ambiguous management policies. The result is that in 2016, on average, cities used less than 10% of their allocated quota of SNWTP water, while seven cities used none of their quota. The story of the SNWTP in Shandong is that of a centralised, hierarchically planned, fixed infrastructure with its deterministic projections coming into conflict with the fluidity of water demand and local political circumstances.

The availability of and demand for water in China is an extreme case of uneven distribution in time and space. In response, the South to North Water Diversion (SNWD) project, the largest inter-basin water transfer scheme in the world, channels large amounts of fresh water from the Yangtze River in southern China to the more arid and industrialised north. In order to keep the SNWD project running smoothly, a comprehensive governance system has been implemented and innovative institutional arrangements have been created to facilitate the transfer of water itself. By taking the SNWD project’s Middle Route as one case study and drawing on primary and secondary data, this article examines the project’s emerging institutional arrangements. The article outlines the establishment of new institutions for the SNWD project with high administrative rankings at both central and local levels, the encouragement of inter-department cooperation, the adoption of a market mechanism and the integration of market functions into administrative functions. We argue that these institutional arrangements have to some extent overcome common challenges in water governance in China, including an engineering-heavy approach and what Chinese commentators have traditionally called the problem of water being managed by multiple government ministries and municipal authorities as the common metaphor of ‘nine dragons managing the water’. Our findings have significant implications for understanding the continuing evolution of water governance in China.

Protests and opposition to land acquisition from displaced peasants for fair compensation occur on a daily basis in China and have become the most prominent social problem in rural parts of the country. Employing a procedural perspective on conflict, this paper aims to uncover the complexities and tensions that are triggered in the process by drawing on a case of a land confiscation in Jining City, a medium-size city in Shandong Province, China. Our research shows that conflicts exist at various scales: both between the local governments and rural households and between the village officials and villagers. The paper argues that ambiguity in de jure and de facto land acquisition procedures has resulted in both an escalation of conflict and increasing inequality in the outcomes and benefits of the process. We discuss and conclude that the differences between de jure and de facto procedures in the process of land acquisition are a significant institutional barrier in the resolution of conflict in this important issue for rural China.

Voluntary resettlement, typically framed by the principle of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), has emerged as a preferred alternative to the heavily criticized forced resettlement approach, but there are growing concerns over whether those “voluntary” programs are genuinely voluntary. In China, the government maintains that its poverty alleviation resettlement (PAR) program is a successful example of voluntary resettlement. Under this national anti-poverty initiative, millions of people living in the poorest parts of the country have been resettled “voluntarily”. However, few studies have critically examined this claim. In this study, we collected empirical evidence through a survey of PAR resettlers. Drawing on a large and representative household survey (1723 resettlers from 30 different PAR projects) and 142 qualitative interviews, we report inconclusive and conflicting findings. On the one hand, the respondents strongly expressed that they willingly participated in resettlement. The perception of willingness was especially high among those who were younger, wealthier, and had off-farm employment. Furthermore, the consent to relocate was mostly free and driven by a desire to improve the quality of life. On the other hand, we observed that consent was not fully informed due to inadequate consultation. The villagers were not given detailed information about the resettlement or time to consider the implications. To ensure genuinely voluntary resettlement and to enhance the effectiveness of the program in poverty alleviation, the government needs to improve the consultation process, offer more targeted assistance to poor households, and provide better post-resettlement support.

Chapter 7 investigates the relationship between two other actors within the Shanghai assemblage – the water-supplying institutions of the municipal government and the residents of the city. A survey of people in Shanghai indicates that people do not trust the water that is supplied to them – large majorities do not believe that state-owned water companies tell the truth about water quality, treat residents in different places equally or are competent to supply clean water. Larger numbers of aged people than young ones think water companies are fair. People who are less educated and people with rural hukou tend to have more trust in water companies. As a consequence, almost everyone treats water in some way before drinking it – they boil it, or filter it, or buy it in bottles – in order to remove contamination. As a result, drinking water absorbs a high proportion of residents' disposable incomes.

This study contributes to research on the land-growth-environment nexus by putting emphasis on assessing the quality of land urbanization using our evaluation index system from four aspects: suitability of land urbanization, social, economic and ecological benefits of urban land use. By employing Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA), this paper concerns the spatial-temporal characteristics of land urbanization quality(LUQ) in the 285 prefecture-level cities over the past decade. In analyzing the determinants of LUQ, this paper starts from addressing the driving forces of LUQ in six urban agglomerations from the perspective of economic development, land market and local governments' behavior. The results indicate that land urbanization in China has relatively positive spatial autocorrelation with significant agglomeration effect. The path of LUQ in 285 prefecture-level cities fits in the waves of urban development and land use policy in the country. Moreover, the levels of urban land marketization and economic growth are the most common determinants while local governments behavior mostly influence the western region of China. These findings may suggest that development of urban agglomeration needs to be further promoted and more emphasis of New-type urbanization should be given to improve the urban layout and morphology.

The difference between (re-)industrialization in the past and present is that energy security and climate change now increas-ingly frame the space in which such processes take place. There-fore, there is an urgent need to rethink (re-)industrialization as part of a low-carbon future, rather than as something that perpetuates the current carbon-intensive mode of production and consumption. The aim of this chapter is to explore the con-cept of low-carbon industrialization, which has recently gained significant traction in China as part of the rethinking process. More specifically, this chapter seeks to clarify the meaning of low-carbon industrialization, supported by examples from Chi-na. The chapter also seeks to transfer lessons from China’s expe-rience with low-carbon industrialization to the context of (re-)industrialization. To anticipate the conclusion, this paper argues that both top-down and bottom-up initiatives can be important in low-carbon (re-)industrialization and that their appropriate-ness depends on the market structure and technological charac-teristics of the industry.

Poverty alleviation resettlement (PAR) is one of China’s key poverty reduction initiatives. Through this state-led resettlement programme, the government aims to improve the living standards and access to infrastructure and services of the rural poor. This paper examines PAR from the perspective of spatial restructuring through a household survey conducted in Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces. A total of 30 resettlement sites were examined. The results show that PAR has two spatial forms: long-distance resettlement, which resettles people to cities or towns, and short-distance resettlement, which resettles people within the administrative boundaries of their village or to a nearby village. Furthermore, the type of spatial restructuring is an important factor shaping the outcome of resettlement. While long-distance resettlement outperforms short-distance resettlement in terms of gains in income, the advantage is offset by higher post-resettlement expenses. Furthermore, long-distance resettlers face a greater challenge in securing non-agricultural employment. Consequently, the level of satisfaction is lower among long-distance resettlers. Significant challenges remain to be addressed for both types of resettlement, including establishing two-way communication between villagers and the government about resettlement plans and providing better financial support for the resettlers, safeguards for the livelihoods of non-movers, and post-resettlement support programmes to help resettlers adjust to their new environments.

Land acquisition in suburban China is not merely the administrative means through which land is transferred from collectively owned rural land to state-owned urban land; it is also a process of unlawful profit grabbing by rent-seeking stakeholders. This licentiousness has been the source of intense controversy in recent years, becoming a major source of social unrest in contemporary China. Although standards of compensation are legally governed by strict policies, these standards are rarely followed as prescribed. As a result, we know very little about how revenue from land acquisition is shared in practice. This is because, as a contentious political issue rife with corrupt practices, accurate data are extremely difficult to obtain. This paper aims to address this vast empirical gap by tracing the flow of profit proliferation and distribution in a land acquisition case, using a suburban village in Shandong province, China, as an example. To expedite the drawn-out acquisition process, the local government permits the corrupt behaviour of the village party secretary, who exploits his position to amass a great personal fortune. In contrast to previous research, which emphasises low compensation standards or excessive profit grabbing by local government, we find that villagers' protests are triggered by the corrupt practices of the village party secretary.

Governmentality is a way of thinking about dispersed practices of governing, including attempts to render space governable. China's South–North Water Transfer (SNWT) project, the world's largest interbasin water transfer project, is a programme of government that attempts to render the distribution of water across space more governable and administrable. This article analyses English and Chinese academic, media and government documents through a governmentality lens. It aims to examine the SNWT project's machinery, mentality and spatiality, including its narrative, its constitution of objects and subjects in space, its multiple techniques of government, and its physical and administrative assemblages. In decentring the problem of the state in relation to the SNWT project we can learn much about both the politics of water and the nature of Chinese governmentalities. This article shows how the SNWT naturalises water scarcity, normalises the pre‐eminence of North China, sustains engineering over regulatory solutions and reconfigures hydrosocial relations, while also outlining the limits to and endemic conflicts within this vast programme of government.

While previous studies have examined China’s changing industrial energy consumption at the national level, this study argues that it is more useful, from a policy standpoint, to conduct a regional-level analysis owing to the significant regional disparity in industrialisation in the country. This study focuses particularly on Northeast China, where the implementation of the Northeast Revitalisation Strategy in 2003 has contributed to rapid reindustrialisation, which has a serious implication for industrial energy consumption. We decompose the region’s energy consumption changes into activity, structure, and intensity effects. Our results show that the intensity effect is not the only negative factor impacting industrial energy consumption during 2003–2012. The structure effect also has a negative impact on industrial energy consumption between 2005 and 2012. However, the negative impact of the two factors is weakening and not strong enough to counter the positive impact of the activity effect. This result highlights the problem of uncoordinated policy-making in Northeast China. The development strategy, which still depends highly on traditional heavy industries, is in conflict with the national strategy of energy conservation. The two conflicting objectives of industrial revitalization and energy conservation must be reconciled for sustainability in the long term. The study concludes with policy recommendations on how to achieve such reconciliation.

This paper investigates the dramatic shift in Shanghai's socio-spatial landscapes in the postreform China. Supported by the recent population census, one percent sample survey, and other socioeconomic statistics, this paper posits that a socioeconomically segregated metropolis has emerged in Shanghai: It is an individual's social status and the affordability of certain areas that determines where one can live. As such, a highly segregated socio-spatial structure has emerged in Shanghai driven not only by global forces, but also by developers and the state, as well as the associated institutional change. The findings of this paper calls for the Shanghai municipal government to review its property-led redevelopment approach, and regulate its policies for suburban industrialization and central city gentrification. This aims to diminish the social damage inherent in an increasingly segregated city. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

All mining cities need to address the problems associated with resource depletion. However, there are crucial differences between mining cities in transition economies and those in market economies. Through a case study from Daqing, which is also known as the oil capital of China, this article sheds light on how mining cities in transition economies transform economically in anticipation of the eventual decline in mining prosperity. With rich empirical evidence gathered through extensive fieldwork, this article argues that mining cities in transition economies are faced not only with problems stemming from the boom-and-bust economic cycles of the dominant mining industry and the inevitable exhaustion of resources, but also with issues associated with the legacy of planned economies. Therefore, the transformation of mining cities in transition economies is often situated in a multi-level governance framework. In contrast, the transformation of mining cities in market economies is mainly a local process in the sense that the key actors are local governments and community-based organisations. This case study contributes to the theorisation of mining cities in transition economies and the practical knowledge of those engaged in similar economic transformation.

Shanghai is located on the world's third largest river (by volume). Yet it faces the risk of shortages of drinking water. Many decisions and environmental characteristics have contributed to this threat. First, Shanghai has become dependent on water brought into the municipality by rivers. Second, it has become increasingly reliant on water from the Changjiang (Yangzi River), principally in order to control the levels of pollution in the water that enters its treatment plants. Third, for reasons associated with inter-provincial administrative arrangements, the city's water intakes are located within the municipality, within the estuary zone and subject to tidal intrusions of salt water. Fourth, at high tide and when the Changjiang's discharge is low, salt intrudes far into the estuary, beyond the current water intakes. If sea levels rise, these intrusions will become more pronounced. Fifth, large-scale central government infrastructure projects (such as dams and the South-North Transfer) are altering the hydrological characteristics of the river. Such projects raise the probability of salt water intrusions into the water intake zone. The Shanghai and central governments have thus made a series of decisions that, taken together, have led the municipality to rely on a source of drinking water that is increasingly unreliable and subject to the risk of shortages due to salt water intrusions. Why these decisions have been made - independently - is an important problem for those who would understand the provision of water for cities and the practical efficacy of Chinese governance systems.

The densely-populated mega-city of Shanghai relies increasingly on freshwater from the Changjiang estuary (70% now). However, this strategy is facing potential threats due to extensive water diversion in the lower Changjiang basin and future sea-level rise. Given this, the present study evaluates the ability of Shanghai to source its water from the estuary, especially in the dry season. Flow <15,000 m3 s−1, which occurs for ca. 50% of dry seasons, represents the threshold for salinity 0.45 psu (chloride 250 mg/L) above which the estuary is unusable for freshwater. Correlating discharge and salinity, maximum salinity and related time duration, and taking the future water diversions and sea-level rise into consideration, we extrapolated salinity events into the future at intervals of 10 years until 2040. We estimate that water diversions of 56.2 × 109 m3 (1800 m3 s−1), 59.2 × 109 m3 (1900 m3 s−1) and 61.3 × 109 m3 (2000 m3 s−1) will occur in 2020, 2030 and 2040, and a rise of sea level of 0.12 m by 2040 (from 2010), equivalent 506 m3 s−1, ca. 19.4% of the total reducing discharge of 2040 into the estuary (ca. 28% projected to the worst case of February of 2040). Based on scenario building, the pattern of salinity distribution would remain >0.45 for 20–65, 75–90 and 120–128 days (in 2020, 2030, and 2040, respectively), for extreme low-flow conditions. These periods exceed the present 68-day maximum freshwater storage in Qingcaosha reservoir, which is meant to secure freshwater for Shanghai in the future. Urgently countermeasures are needed to secure the Shanghai's water in the future.

With rising income and the emergence of modern shopping centers in urban China, shopping trips by private car becomes more and more common, leading to higher carbon emissions in the transport sector. Encouraging car owners to shift transport mode from private car to public transport could achieve significant emissions reductions. This study estimate carbon emissions savings by shifting from private cars to public transport for shopping trips in urban China, using Shenyang, one of the largest cities in China, as a case study. Our results show that the average carbon emissions per shopper is 426.9 g, and the carbon emissions on weekends is 13% higher than weekdays. Moreover, shoppers travelling by private car emitted five times more carbon emission than those by public transport. We also found that car ownership gradually increased as accessibility to public transport decreased, and that more car owners chose to travel by private cars than public transport in areas with limited access. This study, thus, highlights the potential for high-quality public transport to reduce the transport sector’s carbon emissions in urban China.