Abstract
The installed capacity of the dams built in China in the first two decades of the twenty-first century is greater than the combined capacity of all the dams ever built in the United States and Brazil, the world’s second- and third-largest hydropower generators. Southwest China contains about two-thirds of the nation’s 541.6 GW total potential hydropower capacity. This introductory chapter reviews existing scholarship on hydropower expansion in Southwest China and beyond, and outlines the contours of the political economy that shapes Southwest China’s hydropower boom. By contextualising the region and its sociopolitical characteristics, the chapter sets the scene for the remaining thirteen chapters in this volume, which deal with a large range of domestic and international facets of China’s hydropower development such as hydropower generation and grid development, resettlement governance, rural livelihoods, and China’s international (hydro) relations.
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Notes
- 1.
When referring to people who were displaced in the course of reservoir creation, the contributors to this volume refer to ‘dam migrants’, ‘resettlers’, or ‘resettled people’ interchangeably.
- 2.
The Three Gorges Dam itself is located in Yichang in Hubei Province, which is generally considered to be in Central China.
- 3.
China was one of only three nations to vote against the UN convention, besides Turkey and Burundi.
- 4.
- 5.
These groups are China Huaneng Group, China Datang Corporation, China Huadian Corporation, China Guodian Corporation, and China Power Investment Corporation (now State Power Investment Corporation).
- 6.
The Pearl River comprises the sixth major watershed.
- 7.
These values represent the Chinese categorisation of hydroelectric stations. Globally, 10 MW is the more often recognised threshold to distinguish small from medium-sized hydropower stations; dams higher than 15 m are usually considered large dams (cf. Hennig and Harlan 2018).
- 8.
All land remains state property in China, and rural households own land usage rights. The value of the crops grown in a given area is thus a proxy for fixing compensation payments, with villagers paid for lost income opportunities rather than for the land itself.
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Rousseau, JF., Habich-Sobiegalla, S. (2021). Introduction: Southwest China’s Hydropower Expansion and Why It Matters There and Beyond. In: Rousseau, JF., Habich-Sobiegalla, S. (eds) The Political Economy of Hydropower in Southwest China and Beyond. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59361-2_1
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