River leaders in China: Party-state hierarchy and transboundary governance

It is generally agreed that traditional territorial-fixed systems face transboundary difficulties that characterize a territorial mismatch between flowing materials and political boundaries. Hierarchization, a process of forming a hierarchy to generate transboundary power to transcend the territorial mismatch, is commonly founded in terms of transboundary river governance. For example, the existing literature discusses the hierarchization of river governance in either the establishment of a new governmental agency or creation of an ad hoc committee. However, the river leader policy introduced nationwide in China in 2016 is distinct from these two approaches. River leadership is assigned to certain prefecture-level cadres, whose career advancement depends on achieving specific goals related to the quality of rivers for which they are made accountable. River leaders' transboundary powers to coordinate their subordinate officials and resources are not a function of their government positions but rather their cadre rank hierarchy within China's Leninist-style authoritarian party-state mechanism. We call this process 'hierarchization through partification'. With an empirical focus on the river leader policy of Dian Lake in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, we present a detailed discussion of hierarchization through partification in China, including its characteristics, advantages and limitations. This study depends on secondary data like official documents and news reports, along with first-hand site visits on river landscapes and field interviews with officials and citizens. This paper's core contributions are to enrich the theoretical discussion of different types of hierarchization that deal with transboundary affairs and to improve understanding how the authoritarian states like China initiate their own forms of river governance that are not properly examined by the existing transboundary governance literature.