| Water resources are a rigid demand for the economic development of ancient Chinese society,and the extension of water relations gradually became an important thread in the exploration of the relationship between factors of production and economic growth,which led to the traditional agricultural society being called “hydraulic society”.The attributes of water resources in ancient China changed from public goods to public resources,and then to a factor of production.Prior to the Tang and Song dynasties there was little long-term government intervention in the use of water resources.After the rise of the hydraulic processing industries,which was powered by water energy,the competitive nature of water resources became apparent,and institutional arrangements for the order of water use emerged.After the Ming Dynasty,influenced by the growth in population and the amount of arable land,the exploitation rate per unit of arable land and labour input had reached a bottleneck in the early Qing Dynasty,and water resources became an important factor of agricultural production.As a public resource,water resources are not exclusive and are theoretically shared by the residents of the irrigation area.In the Qing Dynasty,with its stable and relatively abundant supply of water resources,Jiexiu County became one of the few major agricultural irrigation towns in Shanxi Province,and developed many water-dependent industries such as hydraulic processing,shipping and cultural tourism,forming an orderly allocation of water resources with agricultural irrigation as the core.However,from the Song to the Qing dynasties,disputes over the allocation of water resources in the watershed of the Huqishengshui water system,the main source of irrigation in the region,continued to arise.Therefore,the allocation of water resources during the Ming and Qing dynasties was in fact both a public resource allocation and a production factor allocation.The Qing dynasty,with local governments as the main body for resolving disputes over the allocation of public resources,did not develop uniform national rules for water allocation,so the administrative efficiency and scientific quality of the local government was decisive for the efficiency of local water allocation.The seasonal nature of agricultural irrigation required that water allocation decisions be made quickly and effectively.How to achieve fairness in a short period of time that was acceptable to the vast majority of residents in the irrigation area was key to the efficiency of the policy.The Jiexiu county government made several large-scale corrections,adjustments and reforms to the resource allocation schemes for various river sections.In this context,the local officials’ perceptions of water resources,the identification of the causes of water disputes,the design of the resource allocation system and the development of dispute resolution mechanisms are all relevant to a range of issues such as the attributes of public resources,government functions and the transformation of grassroots forms of social governance in late ancient Chinese society.This paper selects a dispute in the Huqishengshui water basin in Jiexiu County,Shanxi Province,in 1689,and subdivides the policy efficiency of Jiexiu’s governor in dealing with this water dispute into decision-making efficiency(the time required to make a decision),technical efficiency(whether it is fair)and implementation efficiency(the degree of acceptance),to examine the governance capacity of local governments in the Qing dynasty and the impact of privatisation of water allocation rights on the diminishing efficiency of this policy.The findings show that no major improvements in the technical efficiency of water allocation in the county occurred during the Ming and Qing dynasties.However,influenced by common scientific and technological perceptions,the efficiency and equity of the scheme design reached under the government-led,socially engaged model did not depend solely on the state of per capita water resources and property rights arrangements;the perception and recognition of the technical efficiency of the water order itself was also an important aspect of the efficiency of resource allocation.In the case of the Zhonghe village and the Xihe village against the Shitong village for water hogging,the behavior called ’Ba Shui’ by the Shitong villagers and ’Si Zeng Shui Ke’ by the Xihe villagers are signs of a decline in public recognition of the authority and scientific nature of the old order,and are related to changes in social structure and a lack of public knowledge of science and technology.The quelling of litigation requires not only the design of policies that are consistent with the goals of the various water users,but also relies on the shaping of a common perception of the county government’s authority over the configuration of the Huqishengshui water.Scientific-informational discourse and ritual beliefs both play an important role in this process.At the same time,the low price elasticity of demand for water resources can cause a separation between ownership and allocation rights of public resources,leading to the withdrawal of the local government as the subject of allocation authority from the distribution of benefits.In the absence of uniform standards for the exercise of the government’s right to allocate public resources,the degree of marketisation of public resource allocation gradually increases,the government’s role in resource allocation gradually changes from that of a dominant player to that of a provider of property rights protection,and water resources gradually lose their non-exclusivity and are transformed into a fully marketised factor of production.This means that the properties of water resources converge with those of land and labour,and are integrated into the production factor system for allocation.The dynamic equilibrium formed by the three factors of population-water-land formed the boundary of possibilities for economic growth in ancient China.The government,in turn,needed to consider the difficulty of policy decisions and implementation when making resource allocations,and to find the optimal solution to policy planning under multiple objectives of finance and livelihood. |
