Andrea E . Pia

Matthew Gandy's Commentary in Area(2023) criticised the decision of the na-tional funder UKRI to mandate that all books resulting from the research that it funds must be published open access (OA) from 2024. This raises many issues of importance to geographers. We argue that scholars in the discipline need to fight for affordable and ethically produced OA books, not ‘legacy’ modes of publishing. In particular, books produced by scholar- led OA presses will not harm the repu-tation of departments or individual scholars, and they also have the potential to reduce significant financial barriers to accessing books across the globe. A more powerful critique must be to challenge the continued ‘enclosure’ of books, and the denial of OA by academic publishers and university presses.

CHINESE WATER WORLDS: HYDROPOWER, GREEN AUTHORITARIANISM, AND THE ENERGY TRANSITION IN SEA
Andrea E. Pia, LSE Anthropology

It is important to recognize that electricity is increasingly entangled with the social not only as the endpoint of continuous infrastructural expansion but, in the form of renewables, as an emergency break that promises a qualitative rapture with the global climate-altering energetic culture that oversupplies energy through continuous fossil fuel consumption. Because of this, electricity can now be seen as having acquired a new kind of social and ethical valence: what kind of electricity and for what purpose?

The ASA is increasing its engagement both with existing members and with a new generation of anthropologists. As part of this aim, between January and May 2023, ASA gathered data on previous interactions with the association and gave members and prospective members the opportunity to share their views about the present and future of anthropology in the UK. The data gathered in the report aimed to investigate three main areas. First, the number of social anthropology PhDs and postdocs enrolled or working in UK institutions. Second, the post-PhD career destinations of anthropologists graduating from UK institutions. Third, the perspectives anthropologists have of the ASA as an organisation.

The overarching project sought to focus on the status of individuals at the earliest stages of their career in social anthropology and aimed at helping the ASA committee plan future events and enriching careers in anthropology at all levels.

Water is a matter of great concern for the PRC, especially for its agricultural sector, besieged by shortage, soil degradation, and raising production costs. Because of this, Water Users' Associations (WUA) are garnering domestic attention as a cost-effective solution for growth-compatible sustainability. These associations are inspired by Elinor Ostrom's design principles for the management of common resources. Through long-term ethnography among various stakeholders of the Yunnanese water sector, this article challenges the notion that the implementation of Ostrom-inspired WUAs in the Chinese countryside is fulfilling the associations' accompanying promises of sustainable growth. Instead, this study finds that Chinese WUAs proliferate thanks to pre-existing promises of collective prosperity. Northeastern Yunnan is rich in social arrangements for sustainable water management that predate the introduction of WUAs and make their ordinary operations possible. WUAs proponents conveniently blame the failure they see in Ostrom-inspired organisations on said arrangements while retaining faith in Ostrom's design principles. An ethnography of Ostrom-inspired associations can salvage Ostrom's intellectual project from the prescriptive readings of development planners and her critics. Yet, it also shows that alternative sustainable arrangements in human projects for the environment may become less plausible once captured by the prescriptive episteme of development planners.

Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences, is the result of an LSE Research Infrastructure and Investment–funded workshop entitled Academic Freedom, Academic Integrity and Open Access in the Social Sciences, organised by Andrea E. Pia and held at the London School of Economics on September 9, 2019.

Labour of Love. An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences, is the result of an LSE Research Infrastructure and Investment–funded workshop entitled Academic Freedom, Academic Integrity and Open Access in the Social Sciences, organised by Andrea E. Pia and held at the London School of Economics on September 9, 2019.

While China leads the global race to high-tech surveillance, a homegrown low-tech institution of dissent management is currently experiencing a surprising revival: dispute mediation. Drawing on Confucian and socialist practices of justice, Yunnanese dispute mediators are today considerably innovating the jurisprudential techniques that frame the composition of conflict and the meaning of state laws in dispute settings. Jurisprudential massage is the emic term given to one such technique. Here I show how this technique stands for the deployment of therapeutic analogies and legal fictions with the aim of reorienting the political sensibilities of disputants toward a neo-paternalistic form of citizenship. Contributing to the anthropology of law and resistance, this article shows how civil dissent cannot only be physically quenched through state coercion and silenced by pervasive surveillance or tactical buyouts but can also be ushered off the political stage by a selective redrawing of the epistemic foundation of legality.

In Italy as much as in the People’s Republic, an exclusive attention to elite-led attempts to control unintended environmental consequences has suppressed alternative discourses in natural resource management. This may have catastrophic consequences for the prospects of imaging our way out of the global environmental crisis. However, at the grassroots there is no lack of alternatives. For instance, along the long history of China, as well as in its contemporary rural countryside, there are places where water was, and still is, managed as a commons.

The debate over China’s environmental issues has given scant consideration to already existing popular alternatives to the topdown, growth-compatible governance of the country’s natural resources. Forty years of Party-sanctified insistence on pursuing relentless economic development has seemingly suppressed alternative discourses in natural resource management. However, if we take closer look, we will find that at the grassroots there is no lack of alternatives. For instance, in contemporary rural China there are places where water is being managed as a commons.

The classical Chinese novel The water margin tells the story of a group of petty officials who take a collective stance against the widespread corruption and unfairness of imperial Chinese society. At the root of this story lies the deeply ethical conundrum of redressing injustice when unchecked power prevails. This article draws from this insight to explore some of the ethical dilemmas Chinese state bureaucrats in Yunnan face today when provisioning drinking water to rural communities. Yunnanese officials are burdened with these dilemmas by the state's conspicuous retreat from rural public services in favour of market-based supply. Through their ethical interventions, Chinese bureaucrats are able to temporarily defer the collapsing of rural water provisions which is caused by the contradictions introduced by the marketization of water. However, such interventions may be followed by further damage to the environment.

L’ultimo tentativo di trasformazione della Cina e il suo rapporto con l’Occidente visti attraverso la lente di un antropologo tedesco. In questa lunga conversazione Andrea Pia intervista Hans Steinmüller, antropologo della Cina e autore di “Irony, Cynicism and the Chinese State” (Routledge Contemporary China Series).

Recent debates about the moral climate in China have focused on its citizens’ purported loss of traditional values and interest in the public good. Chinese society, particularly in the countryside, is described in terms of a moral vacuum: the absence of shared values through which citizens’ public behavior might contribute to the nation's greater good. The Chinese state is reforming its judicial system with the aim of making it more accessible to its citizenry, so that law and legal rights create bonds between individuals and the collectivity. This approach envisions legal mediation as a vehicle to bring law to the countryside. This article, however, shows that in rural Yunnan, the law and legal rights are seen as instruments of disenfranchisement. This article demonstrates that Yunnanese rural society is better described as a moral “plenum” than as a “vacuum.” It also shows that Chinese law, via temporary use rights to local resources, is ousting alternative regimes of resource management. These alternative regimes are predicated on local villagers’ participation in and responsibility for the public good.

This paper attempts to unpack the concept of property rights in land in Qing China (1644-1912). Starting from the traditional anthropological approach which sees property rights as a 'bundle' of social relations, this paper addresses the question of how property in land was realized in Qing China. By using extensively historical material against recent anthropological analysis in the  study of law, this paper seeks to break up the social concept of property into two moments: (i) the generation of 'right' from context dependant modes of agricultural production and (ii) the negotiation of those 'rights' and obligations by local elites and institutional officials in light of their conflicting or convergent interests. This particular approach exposes the concept of property rights to a set of environmental, historical and political variables. At the same time, it suggests that our present interpretation of the arrangement of land property in Qing China is profoundly influenced by the theoretical debates in which the concept of property has been employed. Insofar as the 'economical' and 'institutional' approaches found in the literature employ historically 'thick' concept such as 'right', 'law' and 'value' without accounting for cultural and sociological variations, they fail to provide the basis for a context-sensitive explanation of the production of 'property relations'. To this end, this paper presents a patchwork narrative of the generation, negotiation, codification and interpretation of land rights during the Qing with the aim of understanding the critical moments in the production of property; of highlighting the interplay of different social actors in its realization; and, finally, of problematizing the academic debate on its content.

The secular, secularism and secularisation are words that have been differently used for lots of different purposes and in various stages of the Euro-American history. This paper will be concerned with exploring the dialectic opposition between religion and secularism as it has been developed in anthropology. The broad question this paper addresses is: can religion have a place in the public spheres of the modern world states? It is argued that the concept of religion in anthropology may profit greatly from tacking on board Hannah Arendt's discussion of the public realm. This is because stressing the public dimension of religion could help understanding to what our notion of secularism really refers and help addressing whether the commonly held view that depicts world religions as mainly composed of individual beliefs can be overcome. It concludes by calling for a futher engagement of anthropologists in the debate over the relationship between the secular state and the public dimension of religious life.

Since the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD, 1965), social exclusion is deemed to target specific groups. This paper deals specifically with one of this group: ethnic minorities. It argues that the deploying of the concept of “minority” into the human rights discourse has failed to recognise the pivotal role played by the market and the State in drifting away minorities identities. To do this, relevant cases coming from Australia and China are brought forward. Further, by using Antonio Gramsci's and Karl Marx's insights on what a State is and on how, as a concept, it has emerged historically, it questions the claim that minorities' rights are there to empower social excluded groups. On the contrary, the concept seems rather prone to neglect the requests to equal treatment and social justice coming from many minority group associations.

The length and occurrence of droughts in China have increased considerably in the last few years. It has been now recognised that this trend is the cause of severe damages to the prospects of the economic growth of China, as well as a potential threat to its social stability. As a way to tackle the problem, the Communist Party of China decided to amend the 2002 Water Law and to speed up implementation of water conservation technologies. Despite the attention paid in recent times to the the Chinese water problem, not so much has been currently written on how drought is experienced at the grassroot level. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lingshui village, Mentougou district, Beijing this chapter addresses the problem of how the local practices related to water use and the sociocultural contexts of a Chinese rural village shape people's perceptions of drought. It argues that paying more attention to the context of risk perception allows gauging the extent to which the analytical lenses commonly used to understand water-shortage in public debate may actually effectively hinder an explanation of its social dimension.

La crisi idrica è uno dei nodi chiave da risolvere nella costruzione di uno sviluppo sostenibile in Cina. Sotto la spinta di un’economia in perenne crescita, la Cina sta oggi pagando una considerevole riduzione nella disponibilità delle sue risorse idriche. A questo fa fronte l’utilizzo di meccanismi di gestione, fisici ed istituzionali, dichiaratamente inefficienti nel fronteggiare il problema, con conseguenze spesso drammatiche sulla popolazione. Sotto l'egida della Banca Mondiale, e insieme a molti altre realtà con simili problemi di disponibilità idrica, la Cina ha recentemente sperimentato l'introduzione di associazioni contadine per la gestione dell'acqua potabile e di irrigazione. A muovere questo progetto, la convinzione che devolvere i diritti di gestione localmente avrebbe migliorato la sostenibilità del sistema. Basandosi su uno studio etnografico condotto presso una comunità rurale dello Yunnan nord-orientale, questo intervento documenta le implicazioni politiche e sociali derivanti dal tentativo di rendere possibile un consumo delle risorse idriche allo stesso tempo sostenibile ed efficiente nella Cina rurale, analizzandone le soluzioni amministrative impiegate dal governo per ricalibrare il rapporto uomo-acqua sul territorio.

I n On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023), Margaret Hillenbrand probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. She argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in a state of 'zombie citizenship'-a condition of dehumanising exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel their lives are precarious, sensing that they live on the edge of a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into an abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism.

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought the whole world to
its knees. Yet, this coronavirus is only the latest in a number
of zoonosis events originating in different parts of the globe,
and especially within Asia, over the last 20 years. For this
reason virologists commonly refer to places like China, Hong
Kong, or Singapore as reservoirs of potential viral threats. The
combination of advanced logistic infrastructures, industrial
farming, and the progressive disappearance of wild ecologies in
these places arguably facilitates animal-to-human transmission
of zoonotic diseases. In Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and
Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts (Duke University Press
2020), Frédéric Keck challenges the idea of zoonosis as an
Asian problem, and shows us how attending to both the wild
and domesticated behaviour and physiology of birds reveal the
multiple and often contradictory ways in which virologists and
citizen scientists make sense of epidemics and inform their
policy advice.

In 2020, Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping pledged to ‘transition to a green and low-carbon mode of development’, as well as to ‘peak the country’s CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060’. Xi’s pledge offered a tangible example of what has come to be known as the ecological civilisation (生态文明)—the idea of engineered harmony between humans and nature that was recently incorporated into the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. But what kind of engineering is required for sustainable transitions at this scale and pace? Through which political concepts and technical practices could such a harmonious rebalancing of China’s resource-devouring development be envisioned and achieved?

This issue of the Made in China Journal addresses these questions by borrowing political theorist John Dryzek’s rereading of the Greek myth of Prometheus. Inspired by the story of a demigod who stole the technology of fire for the sole purpose of human advancement, Prometheanism describes an eco-modernist orientation that perceives the Earth as a resource whose utility is determined primarily by human needs and interests and whose environmental problems are overcome through continuous political and technological innovation. In contrast with other environmental perspectives, Prometheanism prioritises human interests and needs over those of ecosystems or the individual needs of other lifeforms. Through this framework, we asked our contributors to offer their takes on the following questions: To what extent can Xi’s dream of an ecological civilisation be understood in terms of techno-optimism and the anthropocentrism that characterise Prometheanism? What price is China paying in its effort to transition towards a heavily engineered ‘sustainable’ market utopia?

The Chinese water commons are currently under pressure. Along with many other water stressed countries, China is facing a diminishing availability of irrigation and drinking water.
As a way to tackle the problem, China introduced in 2002 a new framework for water management. This shift in governance produced the adoption of a set of principles – largely
inspired by Elinor Ostrom's work on common pool resource management – emphasizing the need for increased participation of users in water management. One consequence of this is the introduction in the countryside of the so called Water Users' Associations (WUA), farmers run associations supervising water management at the village level. This with the belief that devolving rights locally would avert the overconsumption of water and produce fair and sustainable practices of water management in the rural countryside.
Based on 16 months of anthropological fieldwork among members of different WUAs operating in Yancong Township – a drought-prone area located in Yunnan Province – this
ethnographic study suggests that the way in which collective action is imagined in rural China affects the extent to which “WUAs in the book” could be replicated in “action”. In
particular this paper discusses how alternative and culturally specific benchmarks for evaluating organizational success as well as a local culture informing style and content of
farmers participation conspire to reshape these organizations from within. Surprisingly however, the adaptation of WUA to local notions of power and efficacy does not end up undermining the fair and endurable management of water in Yancong. Rather, its is thanks to local practices of water sharing and stewardship that pre-dates the implementation of WUAs,
if water is managed fairly and endurably. This paper concludes by suggesting that the operationalization of “Ostrom-inspired” organizational solutions to the Chinese water problem might end up overlooking, when not undercutting, the important contribution that ordinary Chinese villagers have long been giving to sustainability in their country.

The modernisation of east Asian countries has often passed through the reform of their legal systems. China, however, has witnessed more than one of such reforms. Assuming to have inherited a substantively irrational legal tradition – as Max Weber famously put it –  pre-revolutionary Chinese elites imported western-style jurisprudence, refuting the legislation which until then had been at the cornerstone of the empire. After the communist took power, things changed, as western law started to be considered a tool for class domination. Two strands of legal tradition were refuted by the communists: the bourgeois law of the West, and the customary rights of China's “feudal” past.  Things changed again with the “opening reform” of the 80s and the Party's conversion to economic liberalism. The Chinese government is now trying to establish a modern legal system, convinced that the many problems faced by China today can be solved only through a modern mechanism of governance.  According to Chinese authorities however, the country's backward tradition is once again getting in the way, preventing China from fully modernize. Questioning this hegemonic narrative this paper present the findings of an ethnographic studies of disputes' mediation (tiaojie jiufen gongzuo) carried out between September 2011 and  January 2013 in the Yunnanese countryside. My ethnography reveals two things. First, that locally, no single legal tradition has acquired monopoly on ruling. State legislations, communist practices and traditional moral principles get often entwined in the attempt to do “justice” and redress grievances. Furthermore, the custom-bashing narrative employed by the Chinese State does not stand up to empirical scrutiny. In rural China, villagers do not just invoke “backward” and “feudal” principles, but adopt also “progressive” and “efficient” rules to the solution of local problems.

Yancong's water supply network is a intricate infrastructural arrangement of channels and pipes covering 7,5 km² of rural land in North-East Yunnan, People's Republic of China. The network delivers irrigation water to 1826 Ha of farmland, and drinking water to Yancong's almost 22 thousands inhabitants. Managing the operations, maintenance and expansion of the supply network is the daily occupation of the state officials working in Yancong's Water Bureau, a township level government office where I conducted 16 months of fieldwork. The Bureau is populated by party cadres and hydraulic engineers who take great pride in their work. In fact, running water infrastructures in contemporary rural China is a quest fraught with contradictions. While China is experiencing an increasing pressure over its water resource – as its booming economy and mushrooming megalopolis are making up for an unprecedented water demand – rural centres like Yancong are left with underfunded or ill-planned infrastructures, amid threats of water dispossession from state dictated development projects. In such a context, the quest of bringing water to society requires cooperation among state agents and farmers, political skills and an intimate knowledge of local expectations and requests. This paper documents the daily preoccupations of the water workers of Yancong's Water Bureau, investigating the ethical and political dimensions involved in the project of securing water access for the local community. The ethnography reveals how the encounter with water can activates personal and intimate ethical reflections, bringing people together on common, yet far to be uncontested, projects for human survival.

In Yancong, a drought-prone agricultural rural Township of North-East Yunnan, access to water is a crucial concern of local villagers. Irrigation and drinking water comes to the community from a reservoir located fifty km north, and the local Water Bureau – a government office under the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources where I conducted 16 months of fieldwork – is in charge of delivering it to the 27 villages under its jurisdiction, securing that all villages get their share. Developing the water supply network so that the Chinese citizens' right to domestic water can be fulfilled is one of the main objectives sought after by the Water Bureau. This however with ambivalent results. Despite the many efforts of keeping the drinking water flowing, Yancong's distribution network has been affected since its completion by severe disruptions. Furthermore, with the construction of a hydro-power station in the late '80s, the old water infrastructures collectively excavated by the local villagers have been definitely encroached upon by the state, being converted to uses which were not supported by or even discussed with the local community. The dispossession of collectively owned infrastructures prompted local villagers to find alternative ways of securing drinking water, creating a network of  illegal wells from which anyone can collect clean water without charge. This paper investigates the moral significance and social implications of this water management counter-practice, investigating the local notion of solidarity it enacts and how this directly challenges the state governance of water and the entwined notion of legal right protecting its access.

Il cambiamento climatico, l'aumento della popolazione mondiale e fenomeni di economia di scala a livello globale stanno mettendo le risorse idriche mondiali sotto forte pressione. Come molti altri paesi definiti water-stressed, la Repubblica Popolare Cinese sta pagando negli ultimi anni una crescente riduzione nella disponibilità delle proprie risorse idriche. Ciò con conseguenze nefaste sulla popolazione: 300 milioni sono i cittadini cinesi ad non avere tutt'ora accesso a fonti di acqua potabile; mentre il numero di sollevazioni di massa per il controllo delle fonti disponibili ha raggiunto, secondo le autorità cinesi, 120.000 in 10 anni.

Sotto l'egida della Banca Mondiale, il Fondo Monetario Internazionale e il Dipartimento per lo Sviluppo Internazionale del Regno Unito (DFID) la Repubblica Popolare ha recentemente sperimentato l'introduzione di associazioni locali gestite direttamente dai contadini, chiamate Water Users' Associations (WUA, cin. nongmin yongshuizhe xiehui), nella convinzione che devolvere i diritti di gestione localmente avrebbe migliorato la performance del sistema e fermato una volta per tutte le recriminazioni provenienti dal basso. Questo modello di governance “dal basso” è stato ufficialmente introdotto in Cina con il progetto di gestione del fiume Yangtze/Changjiang, sponsorizzato dalla Banca Mondiale agli inizi degli anni ‘90, e più di recente (2004-2011) testato in diversi progetti di cooperazione internazionale finanziati dal DFID, volti al miglioramento dell'accesso all'acqua nelle aree rurali delle Province di Gansu, Henan, e Mongolia Interna.

Questi progetti hanno conosciuto nel tempo una diffusione inaspettata al di là dei limiti posti dai progetti stessi, venendo replicati in centinaia di comunità rurali confinanti le località pilota selezionate. I contadini coinvolti nei progetti sono stati gli artefici di tale diffusione. Benefici sostanziali provenivano dalla riforma della gestione dell'acqua nelle comunità rurali, e le comunità confinanti incominciarono presto a far tesoro di tale esperienza provvedendo autonomamente a fondare nuove associazioni contadine preposte alla gestione dell'acqua. 

Testimone di tale successo, il governo cinese ha sposato entusiasticamente le riforme proposte dal consorzio di agenzie internazionali, promuovendo la riforma del settore idrico a livello nazionale. Ciò è avvenuto in parte perché gli indicatori posti a misurazione dell'uso della risorsa in agricoltura segnavano numeri preoccupanti. Un'altra ragione dietro la volontà di riformare la gestione dell'acqua in questo paese è di carattere politico: la consapevolezza che il cambiamento climatico, sommato alla crescita della domanda idrica da parte della società, stia incamminando la Cina verso un futuro in cui la limitatezza della risorsa sarà sempre più causa di problemi di ordine pubblico e il nodo da sciogliere nel bilanciamento degli interessi dei vari gruppi sociali. Un'ultima motivazione a dar slancio alla riforma del settore sta nel ritiro dello Stato cinese e nel processo di “responsabilizzazione” finanziaria esperito dai diversi livelli della macchina amministrativa cinese. Devolvere diritti e doveri direttamente ad associazioni contadine, significa sì promuovere il coinvolgimento dei cittadini nella gestione della risorsa, conferendo loro più poteri (empowerment), ma anche ridurre il coinvolgimento dello Stato nella soluzione di problemi di allocazione e distribuzione intrinsecamente conflittuali, permettendo alle autorità di preservare legittimità e ridurre il proprio carico fiscale. La riforma del settore idrico cinese vede dunque la commistione di molteplici interessi: internazionali, nazionali, locali. Nel processo di traduzione e accorpamento di aspettative e aspirazioni tanto diverse tuttavia, la creazione delle WUA sul territorio cinese ha preso una sua propria strada, indipendente in forma e finalità da quelle inizialmente immaginate.

The length and occurrence of droughts in China have increased considerably in the last few years. The ensuing water crisis, which now affects the whole country, will loom large over the future prospects of the Chinese economy. Moreover, the lack of water experienced by many people in China has not failed to cause social unrest. In the last decade the confrontation between the farmers and the local administration around water allocations has risen, leading often to overt violence.

As a way to tackle this multifaceted crisis, China amended its Water Law in 2002, thereby introducing a new framework for water management. This shift in governance has produced the adoption of a set of principles emphasizing the need for increased participation of users in water management, and the implementation of water conservation technologies. New inequalities are thus created: while urban dwellers are increasingly being protected from the effects of the shortage, rural communities are facing the contradiction of an imposed economic development agenda under mounting environmental constraints and diminishing state intervention.

This paper, drawing from two different ethnographic studies conducted in rural China between 2007 and 2013, explores how drought and the politics of water management are played out in the Chinese rural countryside. In particular it discusses how mistrust between farmers and the many institutions supervising water management in the communities impact the water reform and its effectiveness. In this process feelings of dependency, care and betrayal are generated, pushing often local farmers and the state to violent confrontations.

The length and occurrence of droughts in China have increased considerably in the last few years. It has been now recognised that this trend is the cause of severe damages to the economic growth prospects of China, as well as a potential threat to its social stability. As a way to tackle the problem, China amended its Water Law in 2002, thereby introducing a new framework for water management. This shift in governance has produced the adoption of a set of principles emphasizing the need for increased participation of users in water management and establishing market mechanisms for water trade. For this reason China started developing Water Users' Associations (WUA) – farmers-run associations that supervises water management at the village level - with the belief that devolving rights locally would avert future water-shortages. However, many are the data suggesting WUAs are failing. This ethnographic study conducted among members of different WUAs operating in Yiche city, Huize county - a drought-prone area located in Yunnan Province - , suggests that the imperatives of the local politics effect the extent to which WUA are implemented in the countryside. In particular this paper discusses how fears over farmers associating outside the purview of the Communist Party alter the impact of the water reform. The long standing preoccupation over social stability in rural China has led to prioritise drought-relief measures and universal access to water over water efficiency and sustainability; but this only at the expanses of villagers' participation to the decision making process.

Water shortage is severely affecting China's economy and its population. This research will address this phenomenon from the perspective of a rural village located in Gansu. Byfocusing on the daily activity of the village's Water Users’ Association (WUA), it addresses the broad question of how the shortage, and the strategies developed locally to its solution, are affecting the larger community and changing local practices of communal water management. WUAs are legally constituted, farmer-run associations with elected managerial boards, which supervise water management at a village scale and distribute water rights to farmers within the village. WUAs do not only make decisions on water use but also issue water rights. Water rights are legal documents that give farmers’ the right to store, use and sell water. Notably, this particular ownership framework proposes something quite new to rural farmers in Yunnan: a market for water which is geared to replace older water management practices. Against this background, this research poses three questions.1) WUAs prompt farmers to debate publicly the management of water supply, involvingthem in the decision-making process over this common resource. It is also making villagers responsible for the local environment and it is empowering them in negotiations over village politics. Is this legal reform increasing the participation of farmers in the village’s political life? 2) Managing common resources have long remained in the scope of the local cadres. With the reform, water management rights are now devolved to farmers. Therewith, localcadres face a challenge to their vested interests in the resource. Thus, are WUAs perhaps seen as threatening these interests? 3) Lastly, it explores how law affects individual andcollective agency: are water rights bringing new ideas about fairness and morality to ruralvillagers?

"In the 19th and 20th century, the modernisation of far east countries has often passed through the adoption of the western concept of the "rule of law". Assuming to be the heir of an substantively irrational legal tradition – as Max Weber famously put it – Chinese ruling elites imported from the various European colonies within the Chinese territory western-style jurisprudence, constitutions and the legal procedures, refuting the legislation, based on the Confucian tradition, which until then had been the cornerstone of the empire. After the communist took power in 1949, things changed. Western law was considered a tool for class domination, thus to be replaced with socialist permanent revolution and collective critique. Two strands of legal tradition were refuted by the communist: the bourgeois law of the West, and the customary rights of China's "feudal" past. Things changed again with the "opening reform" and the party's conversion to economic liberalism. Following the law and development tradition, the Chinese government is now training to establish a modern legal system, protecting individual rights, corporate interests and upholding the fair trial principle.

However, Chinese authorities still thinks, as in the past, that the country's backward tradition is somewhat getting in the way, halting the modernisation reforms. How to foster a "legal consciousness" in society, and enlarge access to justice in the countryside – considered to be the hotbed of all Chinese malaise – has become the main preoccupation for the country's legal reformists.

Ethnographic studies of the functioning of disputes resolutions and grass-roots courts in the Chinese countryside reveal how such an opposition is merely ideological: in local contexts state legislations, communist practices and traditional moral principles get entwined in the attempt to do "justice" and redress grievances. And yet, state law often face opposition, as Chinese citizens do not see it as legitimate, but a diversionary tactic to coerce people and dispossess the poor in favour of powerful elites who encroaches upon the state.

How does law construct a self-serving image of a backward mentality to be replaced with its own rationality? What is the place and meaning of "customary laws" in a country where the judicial power shows not to be fully independent? In the Chinese context, is state law about "empowering" individual citizens or is it just a technique favouring the unaccountable corporate governance of the country?"