Breaching the Dam

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[ 141 ] book review roundtable • china’s water warriors Mertha’sbookisanexcellentexplorationofhowtheoriginallyfragmented, top-downdecisionmakingprocessinChinahasfurtherfragmented,becoming increasingly vulnerable to challenges from elite policy entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs are skilled and have found effective ways to frame their protests in order to subvert the proverbial control an authoritarian government can exercise. Yet, though the successes of these “warriors” are both numerous and memorable, policy entrepreneurs cannot fight battles alongside ordinary citizens or take on more fundamental issues. We cannot blame them. Their fights are delicate, cautious, and small because the government has become too adept at framing expanding popular participation or deepening protests as sinister plots to damage the interest of the people and the state. Breaching the Dam Peter Ford If the title of Andrew Mertha’s absorbing book suggests a narrow angle—a focus on the particular problems posed by the massive dams on which the Chinese government has pinned so many of its energy plans—the subtitle reveals the full scope of the author’s enterprise. Mertha makes a prism out of dams, and the popular resistance dams often generate, to explore one of the great conundrums facing China and the people who watch it: Is today’s authoritarianism indefinitely sustainable? Is anything resembling Western democracy likely to emerge? How much room can ordinary citizens carve for themselves from the granite prerogatives of the state? Mertha makes a convincing case for the way in which the range of actors in Chinese public life is broadening and pluralizing politics. His account of how floating coalitions of academics, journalists, activists, and local people can form—and sometimes attract officials—to frustrate plans laid by a onceunmoveable state is fascinating. Two of the three case studies he presents—all hydropower projects in southwestern China—were by no means simply stand-offs between a government seeking energy to power economic development and peasant farmers protesting eviction or demanding better compensation. Indeed, in peter ford is Beijing Bureau Chief for The Christian Science Monitor. He can be reached at . [ 142 ] asia policy the one instance where that remained the dynamic, the government got its way. Injecting more uncertainty into the future of large-scale Chinese hydropower projects, however, are the environmental activists, the cultural heritage defenders, the professors, and the journalists who have learned to use the greater freedom of expression born of the Internet and the explosion of the Chinese press to push their agendas. These are the “policy entrepreneurs” who do battle with the authorities to “frame issues” in ways favorable to their cause, to use the concepts Mertha applies. In the sporadic successes these entrepreneurs achieve, Mertha sees evidence of the way in which China’s budding civil society—expressing itself carefully—can sometimes impose itself in the face of state power. For this to happen, he argues, “what is necessary is simply the existence of a space in which groups can function without the threat of being shut down by the authorities” (p. 16), and at least minimal responsiveness to pressure on the part of those authorities. As Mertha himself points out, however, in today’s China, “there is very limited space between state and society within which they [NGOs] can undertake effective action and hope for substantive results” (p. 61). Mertha offers detailed and lively accounts of two public campaigns that have been fully or partially successful in derailing official plans: in Dujiangyan, Sichuan Province, the government simply abandoned a major dam project in the face of widespread opposition, and the giant Nu River project, conceived as a series of fourteen dams in some of Yunnan Province’s most spectacular scenery, has been on hold for several years. The author describes these campaigns—which comprised public meetings,alternativescientificresearch,quietlobbying,heavymediacoverage, and skillful skirting around “red lines”—as evidence that “the barriers to entry into the political process,” by which one might distinguish liberal from illiberal regimes, “have been demonstrably lowered in China with regard to hydropower policy” (p. 158). That is all very well, but once you are over the barriers, how far can you get? The stories Mertha tells suggest that this depends heavily on how the government, at all levels, chooses to react. It is instructive that in the case...