Ideological and volume politics behind cloud water resource governance - Weather modification in China

- Cloud water takes places via weather modification (WM) technology.
- WM in China is under ecological modernization and authoritarian environmentalism.
- WM operation in China is for agriculture, water, ecology, and mega events.
- Cloud water governance presents a new human-weather ideology of 'taming the weather'.
- Cloud water governance is a showcase of volume politics.

Weather modification operations are the intentional alteration of weather and cloud water conditions using technologies such as cloud seeding. Post-socialist authoritarian China is the world's leading user of state power for rainfall enhancement through weather modification, with diverse purposes including agriculture production, water security, ecological preservation, and mega events. We argue that weather modification in China needs to be understood as a facet of ecological modernization, in which the authoritarian state believes that precipitation can be controlled through the use of advanced technologies, thus transforming clouds into a kind of cloud water resource. Two political dimensions are highlighted to understand precipitation control and utilization of cloud water: the first is a new ideological politics of the changing human-weather relationship from 'adaptation to the weather' to 'taming the weather”; the second is volume politics that presents unique characteristics of airborne water as opposed to terrestrial and groundwater.