The Water That Breaks and Connects: Entangled Infrastructures of Hong Kong and China

This chapter focuses on the water supply infrastructure from China’s Dongjiang River to British colonial Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s Cold War context. I appropriate Karl Wittfogel’s hydraulic theory of authoritarian state development to deconstruct how the dichotomized and antagonistic East and West stereotyped by the Cold War narrative could work together. However, at the same time, the two regimes used water infrastructure as statecraft to compete and gain political legitimacy from the governed Hong Kong subjects. The notion of ecological determinism denotes a dialectical relationship in which humans remake themselves in the process of remaking nature. I argue that powers on opposing sides during the Cold War shared a similar view in maneuvering infrastructure to advance political objectives. In the remaking of nature via manipulating water, both regimes and subjects also remade themselves to accentuate their thirst for power more than for water. Under such circumstances, water was reduced to playing an instrumental role in feeding the political agenda and some fantasies as a symbolic or economic category. The political orientation of China’s water management to Hong Kong fails to address the environmental issues of water that have to be grasped as holistic matters. The political tensions starting in 2013 between China and Hong Kong have driven many people in the city to become more alert of their total dependency on China’s water. This chapter examines how water impacts political, economic and social issues in the entanglement between Hong Kong and China by examining the central-local tensions as well as envisioning how a pact under climate change may form to change society’s values to care for water.