Use Of Water Resources, Power, Morality And Order

This article probe the way that state power and local moralities interacted and therefore shaped water resources exploitation mode in a rural region in the south of Shanxi Province where sits a pumping station during the progress of modern Chinese state construction in the last century. In the article, the power means the state's capability of being over local society; the moralities refers to standard of behavior which is shared by a community whose members could communicate with each other in person and quated to judge between right and wrong; the mode is the state of water resources exploitation shaped by the interaction of state power and local society. According to different political institution, the last one hundred years could be devided into three stages: Pro-collectivization(-1949), collectivization(1950s-1970s), post-collectivization (1980s-2007). The state began to strengthen socio-economic control on local society before 1949 and it controlled the local society to the greatest degree during the second stage. During the last stage, the state lessen the direct intervention in local affairs. The social units which are concerned to the water resources exploitation in the local society include:individual, household, clan, village, commune-brigade, village-team, pumping station, county government, provincial government and central government. As the state interacted with the local society in various way and in varying degree, the social units above played different roles, the water resources mode varied accordingly:the mode of difference sequence, the mode of Tiao-Kuai, the mode of atom.In the first chapter, Chapter of introduction,the research questions are stated through literature review on the role of state and local society in water resources exploitation. Given the selected research problems, the method of community study and literature study will be adopted in the research. There are three chapters in the body section. In the second chapter, after describing natural condition, socioeconomic status, the relationship between state and local society since the former began to strengthen control on the latter, the author argues that the the water resources exploitation mode of difference sequence is characterized by combination of "subsistence ethic" (take the municipal well for example) and "principle of difference sequence" (take the begging for rain for example). In the third chapter, the author discusses the way that the state transformed the local society and natural environment is problematizing daily life and declareing war on the nature. The state entered the local society along the naturally formed consanguine and regional settlement border with establishing commune-brigade, and therefore the informal identity of villager was reorganized in his formal identity. The pumping station got into scrape of water scarcity ever since its completion. The mode with which the pumping station operated was Tiao-Kuai mode combining "hierachical Tiao, unitive Kuai" and "exception of relationship". In the forth chapter, the author argues that the "atom" mode prevailed as the state reduced direct intevenation in local society in which the individual horizontal relationship was weak and he got extra water resources out of horizontal relationship net. By analyzing the present rural irrigation and drinking water projects, the author argues that decrease of irrigation water consumers is due to the decline of agriculture and the entrepreneur brokerage role that the rural cadres in charge of water resources affairs played. With the government monopoly on the supply of irrigating water resources, the retreat of state power from local society brought the latter a broken moral system. In the contested state drinking water project contracting, the local elites made use of the horizontal relationship as instrument and became into double-sides entrepreneur brokerage. The local society got the tangible state project works at the cost of losing more intangible community cohensiveness. The integration of irrigation and drinking engineering has lead to the "synthesis of economic growth" on the treadmill of water lifting production.In the last chapter, by summarizing the ideas of body section, the author argues that the transition of water resources exploitation mode is the result of remoulding local moralities (characterized by Communalism, conservatism and naturalism) by Modernism ideology (characterized by nationalism, industrialism and Scientism). While the local water resources got involved into the national resources system, the state power penetrate deeply into the local society through the medium of local moralities, and the latter was oppressed and distorted. When the state began to decrease the direct control on local water resources exploitation, the local moral system has been fragmented and its reestablishment bristled with difficulties.The rural water conservancy projects with the representative samples such as pumping station and the rural drinking project are symbols of realization of state power in local society. The rural irrigating water resources and drinking water resources are connected due to the water lifting technology. The productive and domestic water supply trends toward capital intensive and energy intensive with the transition from human power to electrical power. The water lifting works has been trapped into the treadmill of production, destroyed the local environment and therefore set blocks for economic growth in the future.