Andrew Mertha's Water Warriors is a brief volume that offers an illuminating analysis of the policy-making process and hydropower politics in China. It should be of interest to scholars of Chinese politics; it is a must-read for those with a focus on environmental politics or social activism.
The opening chapters offer the theoretical framework and provide a thorough analysis of the dizzying array of interests and actors involved in hydropower politics. In each of the three subsequent chapters, Mertha presents a case of local opposition to a government-sanctioned hydropower project (two in Sichuan and one in Yunnan). In these chapters, Mertha draws primarily on articles from both the English- and Chinese-language press as well as interviews conducted in several Chinese cities, including local towns that were the site of opposition movements. These case studies are important in their own right. Collectively, they provide a fascinating look into the increasingly pluralized nature of policy-making in China and the dynamism of China's environmental politics. Perhaps most interesting is the case study on the Nu River (chapter five). Here Mertha meticulously captures the great diversity of tactics adopted by hydropower opponents that includes everything from organizing petitions to making movies documenting the harsh realities of resettlement, as well as the increasingly rancorous debate within the environmental community between hydropower opponents and supporters.
Mertha's theoretical goal in presenting these cases is to generate hypotheses that explain variation in policy outcomes. More specifically, he seeks to sketch out the conditions that favour an opposition-led, bottom-up policy change. According to Mertha's analysis, the likelihood of a hydropower project being successfully challenged (i.e. delayed or reversed) depends on two main variables. The first is the existence of “policy entrepreneurs,” which include disgruntled officials, NGOs, and the media. Policies can be successfully challenged when “values for the emergence of policy entrepreneurs are relatively high” (p. 19). This variable is defined quite broadly and includes individual characteristics of the entrepreneur, such as personal connections and professional expertise, as well as the particulars of the project itself. For instance, all other things being equal, a hydropower dam slated for an area characterized by heavy pollution and a rich cultural history is more likely to generate oppositional policy entrepreneurs because it affects the domain of both the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Culture.
The second variable explaining opposition-led policy change is issue framing. A hydropower project is more likely to be challenged successfully when the opposing policy entrepreneurs formulate issue frames that are dominant vis-à-vis the official state framework used to justify the project. For instance, in chapter four Mertha attributes the success of the anti-dam movement in Dujiangyan to the fact that opponents framed the issue as one of protecting cultural heritage. This frame resonated with the general public and attracted broad public support. Perhaps more important, it was palatable to government authorities as it did not directly confront the state or the CCP. The biggest challenge here is separating cause from effect. How does one recognize a “dominant” oppositional issue frame other than by observing its effect (i.e. the reversal of the policy)? Repeated public opinion surveys are one possible tool, but clearly infeasible given the nature of China's political system and the sensitivity of hydropower projects. One can also potentially determine the salience of an issue frame based on analysis of the Chinese media, which Mertha mentions briefly (p. 108). However, Mertha does not specify in detail how he determined a priori whether a particular framework was dominant and so the reader is left to speculate.
One additional, and related, quibble is the absence of background information on Mertha's data. The research is interview-reliant, but one gets little sense about the nature of the interviews or the subjects themselves. Mertha makes clear the importance of protecting the sources’ anonymity (p. 3, fn. 4), but it still would have been helpful to have rudimentary information, for instance, about the number of interviews conducted and the qualifications of the interviewees. In chapter three – a case study that describes the controversy surrounding the Pubugou projects – Mertha repeatedly attributes information to a “Pubugou interviewee” who was apparently interviewed on five different dates. This interviewee offers considerable insight into the project's background as well as the controversy over resettlement. However, it is difficult to determine whether these are repeated interviews with the same individual or one-off interviews conducted with five different subjects. Moreover, one does not know if the interviewee is, for example, a local government official, an aggrieved peasant or an NGO worker.
In the end, Mertha convincingly argues that authoritarian China is witnessing increased political pluralism. This is not to say there has been a retreat of the state – when the government decides to exert its authority, as was the case in the Pubugou dam conflict, the political space available to policy entrepreneurs disappears and no amount of clever issue framing will make a difference. However, when given breathing room, grassroots activists and their allies in the media and NGO community have clearly been able to influence and even reverse hydropower policies. For specialists of environmental politics, the argument that China exhibits a degree of political pluralism may sound familiar. Han Shi and Lei Zhang, for instance, have argued that China is best conceptualized as “multi-actor environmental governance model” and assert that “one can no longer understand China's industrial pollution control regime when civil society and markets are ignored or made solely dependent upon the state” (“China's Environmental Governance of Rapid Industrialization,” Environmental Politics, 15(2), p. 279). Nonetheless, Mertha provides interesting, substantial, and ultimately compelling evidence that the Chinese policy-making process now involves a complex set of actors and interests, most of whom just a decade ago were barely part of the story. Water Warriors is an important addition to the field of China politics.
