The phenomenon of rural industry grabbing water resources deserves reflection

I. Introduction

After China carried out the tax-sharing reform in the 1990s, with the “upward centralization of fiscal power” and “downward devolution of administrative authority” in central-local relations, “investment attraction” became an important means for local governments to seek economic growth (Zhou Feizhou, 2006). Attracted by a series of preferential policies offered by local governments, many private capitals began to settle in rural areas and carry out industrial production relying on local resources. In mainstream narratives, rural industry is usually regarded as the driving force of rural development and a symbol of progress, presenting an ideal picture of “win-win” outcomes, such as “being able to transfer a large amount of rural surplus labor on the spot, raise farmers' income levels, and solve the problem of insufficient domestic demand in the macroeconomy” (Li Yanzhao, 2008). However, in the field of rural industry, around the interface of the use of the same resource, especially water resources, the exclusion and marginalization of local villagers by external capital has not received due attention in China. In response to the phenomenon in which powerful groups plunder the water rights of marginalized and vulnerable groups in order to realize their own capital accumulation, Mehta et al. (Mehta, etc., 2012) call it water grabbing.

Research on water grabbing initially originated from international scholars' attention to the phenomenon of land grabbing, focusing on discussions of agricultural foreign direct investment appearing in countries such as those in Africa for large-scale cultivation of biofuels and food crops. With the research of Woodhouse and Ganho (2011) as a turning point, water grabbing, as an important issue hidden behind land grabbing, began to receive much attention. That study argued that land without water security is meaningless to investors aiming at crop cultivation, and that land is only the precondition for water acquisition. The fluidity and cyclical nature of water make water grabbing relatively concealed. Duvail et al. (Duvail, etc., 2012) argued that, unlike the direct impact brought by land grabbing, namely the transfer of land rights, the impact of water grabbing is often indirect, not only lagging in time but also diffusive in its actual spatial scope of influence. As scholars focused more on the phenomenon of water grabbing and expanded their research horizons, Mehta et al. (Mehta, etc., 2012) pointed out that in many contexts water itself is the object of grabbing, and its use is not limited to crop cultivation but may also be used for mining processing and hydropower production (Sosa and Zwarteween, 2012; Wagle, etc., 2012; Matthews, 2012; Islar, 2012). Overall, foreign research on water grabbing mainly adopts a Marxist theoretical perspective, aiming to reveal the legitimizing narratives, institutional foundations, mechanisms of power operation, and water differentiation in the process of water grabbing. Domestic related research mainly starts from the perspective of environmental sociology and analyzes and discusses environmental problems manifested as the impact of water grabbing. For example, Chen Ajiang (2000), taking Dongcun in the Taihu Lake Basin as a case, analyzed the causes of local industrial water pollution from a sociological perspective and believed that “the imbalance in the power of interest subjects, the administrativeization of rural grassroots organizations and the demise of villagers' self-organization, and the loss of traditional ethical norms in rural communities” were the main factors; Wang Xiaoyi (2010), from a cultural perspective, believed that the transfer of knowledge and power between rural areas and external forces was an important cause of rural environmental problems in the context of development.

Although the above studies differ in perspective and emphasis, there is a consensus that the water differentiation and water pollution problems brought about by water grabbing are not purely environmental or technical problems. Water grabbing is essentially a political issue concerning the distribution of water resources, relating to the livelihoods and survival interests of the grabbed party. Foreign discussions on water grabbing also provide a new perspective for understanding the development of rural industrialization. For the phenomenon of water grabbing, draped in the cloak of “development” and hidden in agricultural and industrial production, the question that should be reflected on is: “who” is using “whose” water and in what way, and whose development is being satisfied? What are the gains and losses of local villagers in water distribution, and do they have room for choice? Taking the rural industry in Song Village, Hebei —— an iron ore dressing plant —— under the background of investment attraction as an example, this paper attempts to interpret from a political economy perspective the changes and logic of the water distribution structure behind the water grabbing phenomenon caused by the iron ore dressing plant in the village, and on this basis reflects on investment-attraction-style development.

II. Introduction to Village Background

Song Village is located in the western mountainous area of Qinglin County, Hebei, in the upper reaches of the Cang River, with annual precipitation of about 400 milliliters. The village has a total of 220 households and 690 people, with a total area of 26,000 mu, and only 479 mu of cultivated land. Crops include wheat, corn, peanuts, and so on, mainly for household consumption. The local soil is mostly sandy, with a thin soil layer and poor water retention, and two-thirds of the cultivated land is dry land. Cultivated land guaranteed by irrigation water sources is also called “irrigated land” locally, mainly located by the river. It was land reclaimed by manual labor in the 1970s during the “Learn from Dazhai in Agriculture” movement, and supporting water conservancy facilities —— two main canals and three irrigation wells —— provided infrastructural guarantees for irrigation. When there is water in the river, villagers usually give priority to gravity irrigation by diverting river water; when there is no water, they use pumping equipment to take irrigation well water. Because pumping equipment needs diesel or electricity to operate, by comparison river water is water that costs no money, and local people also call it “tap water.” Due to the small area of cultivated land, irrigated agriculture plays an important role in ensuring local grain self-sufficiency. According to the village elders, before “Learn from Dazhai in Agriculture,” villagers planted only one season of corn, and the harvest situation at that time, in the villagers' words, was that “there was not enough grain to eat, half the year poor, half the year better off.” But after the cultivated land area expanded, people began to add spring wheat, and “life became a little easier.” Planting wheat requires a large amount of water, with at least ten irrigations before harvest. Because the river in spring is in the dry season, river water is relatively scarce, villagers face great tension in water demand, and there have also been disputes over water for irrigation.

Song Village was originally a traditional subsistence agricultural community, but after the tax-sharing reform and especially after the tax and fee reform, the local government where Song Village is located held meetings for village cadres many times to promote “investment attraction,” encouraging villages to provide investors with convenient conditions for land use. The meeting spirit of “one cannot sit on a golden rice bowl and beg for food” and “if you do not develop it yourself, you should give others the opportunity to develop it” became the leading principles for local efforts to seek economic development. After 2003, as the price of iron powder rose all the way, the profit margin of iron ore dressing plants expanded rapidly. Driven by local preferential policies, relying on the locational advantage of being close to mines, relatively convenient transportation, and “abundant” water sources, more than ten iron ore dressing plants successively entered Song Village, mainly for the screening and processing of iron powder. In the iron ore dressing process, iron ore first needs to be crushed, then iron powder is extracted with a magnetic separator, while at the same time a large amount of water is continuously used to wash away the remaining crushed stone powder (that is, tailings). Therefore, water is an indispensable production factor in the processing of screening iron powder. The emergence of iron ore dressing plants brought great changes to Song Village's society, economy, and environment. “The whole community quickly became lively and active, with all kinds of transport vehicles shuttling endlessly along the rural roads” (Zhang Bingqian, 2005). Many villagers who had gone out to work began to return home for employment after hearing the news, such as working in iron ore dressing plants, pulling ore for transport, and opening small shops and vegetable stores. The iron ore dressing plants also attracted many outsiders and led to the opening of auto repair and machinery repair shops locally. However, while stimulating the local economy, the iron ore dressing plants also brought water use problems. One year after the appearance of the iron ore dressing plants, because river water was heavily taken up, the amount of water available to villagers decreased, and the local agricultural planting structure also changed. The two-season farming arrangement in one year was changed to one season of drought-resistant corn because of “water shortage.” According to villagers, the village's previous irrigated land all became dry land. Apart from vegetable plots, cultivated land mainly relied on rainfall irrigation, which is also what villagers mean by “relying on heaven for food.” Although river water has seasonal flow variations, the water distribution between the iron ore dressing plants and the villagers has already been structuralized.

III. Whose Water: Formation and Strengthening of the Water Distribution Structure

According to the provisions of the Water Law of the People's Republic of China, agricultural water use should have priority over industrial water use. But in Song Village, although villagers have priority “abstract water rights,” in the actual water use structure, villagers' “concrete water rights” are marginalized (Meinzen-Dick and Pradhan, 2005). Zhang Junfeng (2005, 2009) argued that water allocation rules are the result of negotiation and competition among relevant interest groups. When the structure of interest subjects changes, the old water allocation rules will be required to be rewritten and re-established. Changes in the water distribution structure also mean the transfer of actual control over water. This part attempts to analyze from three levels: the prelude to the iron ore dressing plants' enclosing of water, their strategies, and the villagers' responses, aiming to explore the logic and mechanisms behind the distribution of water for production in the village, why villagers changed their planting structure, and how to understand villagers' coping behavior.

(1) The Prelude to Enclosing Water

Land, as the precondition for obtaining water resources, is closely connected with water itself. It is precisely as water resource problems became increasingly prominent that, under the construction and strengthening of a series of international conferences and policy discourses, the management of water and land was categorized separately, and the relationship between water and land began to be weakened and separated. However, under this dualistic cognitive framework, what is easily obscured is the water grabbing process in the phenomenon of land grabbing for the purpose of water (Woodhouse and Ganho, 2011). In the process of water grabbing, land is only the prelude to enclosing water. In Song Village, the concealment of the iron ore dressing plants' grabbing of the village's water resources is precisely embodied in land requisition and compensation.

From the decision-making process of land requisition and compensation standards, villagers were excluded from the negotiation process and lacked the discourse power to express their own interests. According to villagers, the land requisition contract of the iron ore dressing plants in the village was signed by the iron ore dressing plants and the village collective rather than individual villagers, and the contract content was also decided through consultation between the iron ore dressing plants and village cadres. Ordinary villagers had no decision-making power. As outsiders to the village, investors in the iron ore dressing plants found it difficult to “speak on equal terms” with the villagers themselves, so in order to obtain the right to use village land they actively courted village cadres. In villagers' descriptions, this courting was embodied in “benefit fees” given to cadres by the iron ore dressing plants and “gifts” during festivals and holidays. As a return gift for the iron ore dressing plants' “gifts” and as a response to the higher-level investment attraction policy, village cadres, as “middlemen,” played an active role in the process of the iron ore dressing plants occupying land and used their authority in the village to establish legitimacy for the iron ore dressing plants' land occupation. The cultivated land occupied by the iron ore dressing plants was mainly used for factory building construction, requiring the ground to be leveled and transformed into cement ground to bear the weight of processing equipment. But because the local soil layer is thin and much of the land was converted from riverbank land into cultivated land, once cement was laid, the cultivated land was very difficult to restore and might even become impossible to continue farming. However, in the process of land requisition, village cadres continuously magnified the economic benefits that the iron ore dressing plants could bring and used non-agricultural employment narratives to establish legitimacy for the iron ore dressing plants, such as “better than farming; no need to go out to work, you can earn money right at your doorstep.” Because village cadres controlled resources inside and outside the village, many villagers, under the persuasion of village cadres, fell into the awkward position of being “requisitioned without being able to say they were willing, yet not exactly opposing it.” Overall, these employment and income narratives of village cadres all started from the perspective of short-term economic returns and essentially served the iron ore dressing plants rather than considering villagers' interests. Although the contract contained clauses on restoring the landform as formal compensation for the destroyed cultivated land, ultimately it would still be fulfilled in cash. But from the perspective of damaged interests, while transferring land use rights, villagers also lost the long-term livelihood security function carried by the land.

Another concealed function behind this livelihood security function is the right to use water. What the iron ore dressing plants obtained through land requisition was not only the right to use land but also villagers' concrete water rights, yet water compensation was not reflected in land compensation. As for the compensation fees provided by the iron ore dressing plants, the compensation standard was mainly calculated based on the grain output of the occupied land. From interviews with villagers, it was learned that “there is no compensation for water; if a piece of land was requisitioned and a well was dug, the land was compensated.” But in fact, what the iron ore dressing plants occupied was not only villagers' land but also a large amount of water. The fixity and boundedness of land determine that the area of land occupied by the iron ore dressing plants is specific, and the number of villagers receiving land compensation is also specific. But water is flowing, and the potential impact brought by the iron ore dressing plants' enclosing of water has a watershed-wide character. This also means that those directly affected by the iron ore dressing plants' water use are all villagers in the village, while water compensation is completely absent. According to villagers, after land was requisitioned, water could be used “freely.” Therefore, when villagers transferred land, hidden behind the transferred land use rights were also concrete water rights, and the iron ore dressing plants' acquisition of land use rights also provided the preliminary preparation for enclosing production water.

(2) Strategies and Logic of Enclosing Water

The iron ore dressing plants in Song Village belonged to private investment, and profit was their primary purpose. As long as there was enough iron ore raw material, the iron ore dressing plants usually operated 24 hours a day, and the continuity of processing made their water consumption continuously increase. According to villagers, “once the factory starts operating, there is no water in the river.” To facilitate water intake, many iron ore dressing plants preferred to choose sites by the river to build factories. According to the types of cultivated land occupied by the iron ore dressing plants in the village, 70 percent was irrigated land. To ensure the required water volume, all iron ore dressing plants built water storage pools by the river deeper than the village irrigation wells in order to enclose river water. The water storage pools of the iron ore dressing plants were usually between three meters and five meters deep, while the deepest irrigation well in the village was three meters. In addition, the iron ore dressing plants also used their economic advantage to adopt higher-power pumping equipment to draw water directly from the river when there was a lot of river water. The pumping equipment of the iron ore dressing plants usually used three-inch water pumps, which could pump about seventy to eighty cubic meters of water per hour, while the water pumps used by villagers were two-inch pumps, which could pump only 18 cubic meters of water per hour. In the dry season of the river, the owners of the iron ore dressing plants would also use loaders to dig sand in the river channel to build interception dams, impound upstream water, and then lead it into water storage pools with pipes or pumping equipment. When river water was scarce, in order to prevent people from “stealing water,” the factories would also assign people during the day to guard the water. From the perspective of water demand, unlike the seasonal water demand of agricultural systems, factory water use follows the logic of capital; water is merely a raw material used for production processing and realizing accumulation. According to local environmental protection regulations, iron ore dressing plants should treat wastewater and recycle it. In addition to the pipe for discharging tailings, each factory also needed to install a return water pipe to pump the water seeping down from the tailings back into the well. But from interviews with villagers, it was learned that the iron ore dressing plants recycled wastewater only when there was very little river water. When there was a lot of river water, wastewater was directly discharged into the river, so that once the factories operated, “the river water was all muddy.” This way of constantly discharging waste and taking water also meant that the iron ore dressing plants' demand for river water continuously increased and squeezed villagers' space for obtaining water.

In villagers' cognition, river water belongs to a public open-access resource, but the iron ore dressing plants' enclosing of water by building water conservancy facilities not only privatized a public resource but also excluded original users. The iron ore dressing plants' enclosure of water was essentially a form of predatory accumulation (Sosa and Zwarteveen, 2012). The relationship between river water and local livelihoods, as well as local people's water needs, were ignored in the vision of capital. The squeezed space for obtaining water also contributed to water shortage at the cognitive level among villagers. As Mehta (Mehta, 2011) revealed about the social construction behind water shortage, the water shortage spoken of by villagers actually refers to the gap between the water villagers themselves need and the water they can obtain, rather than an absolute natural water shortage. Given differences in water acquisition capacity, the iron ore dressing plants, based on capital advantage, used water conservancy facilities and pumping equipment to enclose river water, reducing the free river water available to villagers, who could only use well water or rainwater or even wastewater discharged by the factories as alternative water sources for irrigation. Using river water did not require paying cash costs, but extracting well water required paying electricity fees. Under the pressure of the commodification of water acquisition channels, villagers' room for choice in water use was further squeezed, and using polluted “tap water” for irrigation was also a choice villagers made because they had “no way out.” A woman working in an iron ore dressing plant tried to “defend” the water impact brought by the factory: “when the factory is operating there is still water to use; when the factory is not operating there is even less water to use.” But from the perspective of villagers' room for choice, this is more an expression of helplessness in water use under the dual pressure of cash income pressure and water demand.

⟦NL> (3) Villagers' Responses and the Strengthening of the Water Distribution Structure

In the view of Benedict Kerkvliet (Kerkvliet, 2009), resource distribution is a political process, full of competition among relevant interest subjects around specific resources, and the social relations among subjects determine the final mode of resource distribution. Some scholars have also pointed out that water resource competition is not static but a dynamic process (Funder and Bustamante, 2012). The water resource distribution structure of Song Village is also the result of interest bargaining between villagers and the iron ore dressing plants. Although villagers were continuously marginalized in water distribution, they were not completely passive recipients. In their coping strategies they also adopted everyday political behaviors ranging from “stealing water” to “adjustment.” These forms of “submission” more often embodied “the resilience of self-preservation,” yet at the same time they also strengthened the water distribution structure dominated by capital (Kerkvliet, 2009; Scott, 2011).

Before the appearance of the iron ore dressing plants, Song Village's agricultural planting arrangement was two seasons of crops a year: wheat and corn. Wheat cultivation requires a relatively large amount of water, and March to May is the dry season of the river as well as the growing period of wheat. River water was already in a tense state in meeting villagers' irrigation needs, and the phenomenon of water disputes among villagers is an example. But with the iron ore dressing plants joining as a new water-using subject, the tension in demand for river water was further enlarged. Some villagers recalled the situation at the time: “There was not enough river water. The factory found loaders to use sand to divert the water in the river and change its course. Upstream they blocked the river horizontally and intercepted it all, and there was no water left. Down below there was basically no tap water at all, not a bit of water could come down. When the fields were dry and we wanted to water them, none could come down at all.” To prevent villagers from seizing water, the factory even assigned people specifically to guard it during the day. In villagers' cognition, the factory was a force they could not “afford to offend,” while they themselves were “ordinary common people,” with “no power and no influence, and their words did not count…… if you went to make trouble, cursing verbally also had no effect…… and filing a lawsuit would also cost money.” In this hidden battle over water, village cadres played more of a two-faced role: on the one hand, as the village's power elite, safeguarding villagers' interests was the basis of the legitimacy of their power, and they could not sit by and ignore villagers' irrigation needs; on the other hand, the interest alliance between village cadres and the iron ore dressing plants made them opposed to villagers' interests. To maintain a balance between the two sides' interests, village cadres would negotiate with the iron ore dressing plants only when the drought was relatively serious, giving priority to villagers' irrigation water use. To avoid the risks brought by direct confrontation with the iron ore dressing plants and being “held a grudge against” by village cadres, some villagers adopted the strategy of “stealing water,” choosing to go to the river dam at night to dig holes and divert water for irrigation. In the face of powerful capital, most villagers chose silence because they “had no power,” but silence was also a safe strategy for avoiding risk and protecting themselves. However, with the increase in the number of iron ore dressing plants, the space available for such safety strategies became smaller and smaller. In just one year, ten iron ore dressing plants appeared in succession in the village, the river water was enclosed less and less, and the space for villagers to use the weapons of the weak was also squeezed. Unable to carry out external resistance, farmers could only adjust themselves, rearrange their planting structure, give up wheat cultivation and switch to drought-resistant corn to reduce irrigation water demand, and at the same time had to rely on income from outside the land to maintain their survival needs.