Introduction
The phrase yi shui wei cai in Chinese (simplified: 以水为财; traditional: 以水為財) means, in a word-for-word translation, “to regard water as (the source of) wealth.” Used to suggest the ready flow of wealth as akin to the perpetual flow of water in business and economic transactions, this phrase can also be interpreted literally. To regard water as wealth means to recognize the importance that water has in our own lives, whether in relation to economic success or to our personal well-being. In the case of Guangdong Province, China, both are true: water is essential to the blossoming technological development that forms a core of China’s national economy and is central to the livelihoods of China’s most populous province. In water regulation, the construction and subsequently gradual implementation of the River Chief System, hereinafter the RCS, has been crucial towards mitigating pollution and improving the waterways of the broader Pearl River Delta for agricultural uses, commercial uses, and personal consumption (H. Liu et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2024). The RCS is a water pollution prevention policy implemented first in 2007 by the city of Wuxi in Jiangsu Province to counteract cyanobacterial eutrophication in Tai Lake, which contaminated the drinking water with high concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus (H. Liu et al., 2019). Under this policy, the national government names party and government officials as “river chiefs”, who themselves are responsible for the organization, protection, and maintenance of their given waterway. By 2018, all thirty-one of China’s provinces and municipalities had established the RCS. The goal of the national government remained to address the fragmentation of the water administrative system and mitigate pollution. Systems such as the “One River, One Policy” plan establish specific management plans tailored to each specific waterway rather than providing a one-size-fits-all solution to pollution (Y. Li, 2020; H. Liu et al., 2019; Yang & Song, 2024).
However, issues of fragmentation and sustained correspondence between state and local actors have given way to the need for alternative means to maximize the efficiency of the RCS (Z. Chu et al., 2022; G. Li et al., 2018; J. Liu et al., 2020; Y. Liu et al., 2024). Thus, this paper will aim to analyze how methods of public participation and grassroots activism can contribute to strengthening the River Chief System in Guangdong Province from national implementation in 2018 through 2025. Firstly, this paper provides a framework for understanding the effectiveness of the RCS through the empirical data collected by other scholars (W. Li, 2021; Z. Li et al., 2021; H. Liu et al., 2019; Mu et al., 2025; B. Wang, 2021; Yang et al., 2024). Building on this understanding of the RCS, this paper examines online forums as a means of public participation. Lastly, it proposes additional intervention opportunities to maximize public participation within the RCS and within Chinese water policy as a whole.
Methodology
This paper analyzes public participation within the River Chief System in Guangdong Province through the adoption of a literature research method and field survey methods (ongoing). The literature review explores scholarly research on public participation in Chinese water policy, with a particular emphasis on grassroots organizations, and the RCS’s efficacy through the data collection of other scholars. The field survey method and case collections are ongoing and are intended to detail the lived experiences of various NGO leaders, media heads, and stakeholders within the system. These accounts will be compared to the stated successes of public participation within extant literature. Additionally, this paper also implements a sentiment analysis of various policies through conversations on the RCS in various internet spaces and online forums, including WeChat and Douyin.
Literature Review
This study is positioned at the junction of three bodies of literature. The first body is on the River Chief System and analyses of its effectiveness in both (a) curbing pollution and other environmental concerns and (b) its implementation into the larger Chinese legal framework, including how said implementation represents fragmentations in effective governance capability between local and state actors. In regard to the former, prior to nationwide implementation in 2018, the measure demonstrated positive impacts on river pollution treatment (W. Li et al., 2021), playing a significant role in reducing existing pollutants and overall improving river quality. For example, pollutant loads discharged into the river declined significantly in cities such as Foshan following the closure of over one hundred textile and dye plants between 2008 and 2010 (Ho 2025; H. Liu et al., 2019). After nationwide implementation, empirical studies of water quality throughout China provided similar improvements (W. Li et al., 2021; H. Liu et al., 2019; Wang & Chen 2019; Wu et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2024).
Despite these advancements, water pollution trended downwards in river bodies nationwide (H. Liu et al., 2019; B. Wang et al., 2021), a trend consistent within Guangdong Province itself (H. Liu et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2024). However, this new system is limited in its effectiveness by several factors, which include the ambiguous and often overlapping jurisdiction of river chiefs. The varied jurisdictional power held by river chiefs throughout China–specifically throughout Guangdong Province–lead to inconsistent application of policy. Larger waterways, such as the Pearl River, and its tributaries (including the Bei, Xi, and Dong Rivers), are monitored differently among different regions, limiting effective administration of water policy. Because of this transregionality, river chiefs often conflict over administration authority.
Additionally, the environmental expenditure capacity of a city alters the strength of the protection they can provide for their waterways, leading to an imbalance between cities with higher and lower levels of fiscal spending. Sewage discharge pressure also is a significant factor regarding the effectiveness of the RCS (W. Li et al., 2021), as the increasing environmental pressure wrought from rapid urbanization and industrialization cannot be met at an adequate level. Limits also exist with collaboration between river chiefs across provinces (W. Li et al., 2021; H. Liu et al., 2019); although, other scholars have considered the RCS to be collaborative relative to water policies in the past (Wang &Chen, 2020). Moreover, research indicates that the RCS has not been particularly effective towards addressing non–point source agricultural pollution (Z. Li et al., 2021; X. Ma et al., 2023), wherein the RCS does not alleviate water pollution caused by fertilizers and unfavorably alters the presence of ammonia nitrogen (NH3-N) and chemical oxygen demand (COD). Others have claimed that the effectiveness of the River Chief System, as claimed by the central government, should be doubted, arguing that the trade-off between economic development and environmental governance for local governments provided preference to financial concerns rather than ecological ones (J. Li et al. 2020). Specifically regarding Guangdong Province, while the effectiveness of the River Chief System is similarly positive in curbing severe pollution to a degree greater than previous water policies, difficulties implementing the system en masse as a standardized policy rather than an emergency only policy still plague the maximization of effectiveness for the RCS ( H. Liu et al., 2019; Yang et al., 2024).
There remains a general consensus that inconsistencies in implementation result in a risk of uneven allocation of resources or a risk of relapse. The examination of the River Chief System within Guangzhou, in extant discourse, remains at a preliminary stage and focuses primarily on the effectiveness of the system through empirically collected pollution samples. In contrast, this study builds on the conclusions made by previous scholars of the RCS both in Guangzhou and within the broader national context to explore how public participation and grassroots organizational efforts can fit into the equation.
In regard to the latter, implementation of the RCS is considered problematic between local and state governments. Some scholars have considered the system as a form of “authoritarian environmentalism” (Z. Chu et al., 2022; Hu et al. 2024) or simply a “basin management with Chinese characteristics” (Yang et al., 2024). Yang claims that:
“This initiative repositioned water environment governance as a primary concern within local administrative agendas…[it] has achieved the centralization and unification of the previously relatively decentralized administrative forces…the RCS demonstrates a synergy of the strengths of a party-state bureaucratic system and the concept of green development.” (Yang et al., 2024, p. 792.)
As such, the RCS promises the potential for a burgeoning effective and sustainable means of mitigating water pollution. However, its issues lie within implementation across the local and state levels. The aforementioned issues regarding the fair jurisdictional abilities of the river chiefs themselves are problematic, as well as the fact that improvement of river pollution control is vested in one person. While this structure streamlines decision-making, the underlying larger issue is the concern that personal knowledge of pollution control and personal subjective initiatives of each river chief differs from place to place. Although such flexibility allows for diversified river conditions, they have to face the sacrifice of constant efficiency in the implementation of the legislation (H. Liu et al., 2019). River chiefs themselves often are also government officials, and because the national government places heavy incentives on the improvement of water quality shown in the performance evaluations of Party heads, officials are often oriented towards aggressive implementation of restoration projects without considering the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of the projects. Fragmentation also occurs due to the lack of clarity behind intergovernmental roles and poor cooperation to implement this legislation, as well as the aforementioned issues of transregionality. The successful implementation of restoration projects in the RCS therefore depends on the resolution of fragmentation and promotion of efficient, sustainable methods of water management. One way to bridge such frictions between state and local actors is to introduce a third-party: the public.
The second body of related literature is on participatory governance in Chinese water policy. Most scholars of this field consider participatory governance to include community members, citizen groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and media members (Z. Chu et al., 2022; Johnson, 2020; Y. Liu et al., 2024). The inclusion of these third-party forces in the decision-making and legal processes of the central and local governments aims to supplement information and ensure commitment from local authorities, rather than detract from the governmental efficacy or legislative agendas. Generally speaking, public participation is gained through a third-party which provides informed consent of the law, allowing the public to influence the conditions of the environment in which they choose to live. Participatory governance also provides a basis for fair and equitable water allocation, or as Jerome Delli Priscoli (2009) argues, “participation forces us to be more than simply ‘water customers’ or ‘water clients,’ we become ‘water citizens.’” Addressing discontinuities in geographical and jurisdictional boundaries in water policy involves multilevel interactions with stakeholders (Antwi et al., 2025; J. Delli Priscoli, 2009; Razzaque, 2009; van Buuren, 2019). Such participation ensures the legitimacy of the policy: if it provides an intermediary voice between state and local actors, respects the wishes of the governed, and empirically resolves the problems it was created to fix, then public participation can be considered successful in the implementation of said policy.
Because water pollution is a global concern, and waterways around the world suffer from much of the same handicaps that prevent water policy from being as efficient as possible, systems like the Integrated Water Resources Management system (IWRM) are being instituted in an effort to increase public awareness and participation in their immediate environment. The successes of the IWRM in Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa are emblematic of the potential for future long-term implementation of the management program, and in Zimbabwe, donor-driven reform at the national level has yielded success (Dirwai et al., 2021). However, the successful implementation of the IWRM in full has been considered more rare. In Spain, for example, the implementation of the IWRM system in the Tagus river basin has not produced promising results, as the basin still suffers from significant degradation in both the quality of drinking water and quality of the river environment (Larraz et al., 2024; Nesheim et al., 2010). Although the implementation of initiatives surrounding public participation has been introduced, several issues have arisen, most notably the small number of volunteers—who are themselves highly interested in water conservation and therefore may introduce bias as much as they introduce expertise—as well as highly inaccessible areas to conduct trials (Larraz et al., 2024).
Public participation, however, can take multiple forms, and governments worldwide have implemented legislation via top-down, expert-oriented approaches and bottom-up, grassroots approaches. With China, public participation worldwide also faces significant troubles through resource limitation, blurry roles and responsibilities, strict funding criteria, and prioritization of consultation processes over local engagement (Antwi et al., 2025; van Buuren, 2019). More broadly speaking, public participation as it pertains specifically to Chinese water policy can be separated into two camps: those who believe in the success of public participation and those who do not, believing instead in the potential for success of public participation. Prior to the nationwide implementation of the River Chief System, water law needed desperate fixes that would be strictly enforced, clearly outlined, equitable to citizens, and ethical in conveyance. At that time, public participation was considered to be very weak and still elementary in implementation, which contributed to low awareness and capacities for public participation, an incomplete legal system, distorted operations, and immense barriers for NGOs to operate. Consequently, scholars proposed that China ought to take gradual action to promote public participation, build legal frameworks for public participation to thrive, and provide support for the development of NGOs (Xie et al., 2009).
After the implementation of the River Chief System, scholars have both critiqued and praised the presence of public participation within Chinese water policy. Studies in the Min River Basin in Fujian Province and the Haihe River Basin in Tianjin suggest a disparity between expressed interest towards environmental stewardship and actualized participation, indicating that structural or institutional barriers exist in realizing these goals. (Liu et al., 2024; Zeng et al., 2024). Improvements in water governance have also been found to be directly correlated with the economic resources available to certain communities: areas with less publicity, education, or proper implementation of resources are less likely to engage in, and much less even be concerned about, the water pollution initiatives in their immediate area (Liu et al., 2024). Other scholars have argued that while China’s environmental public participation framework leaves much to be desired, it is undeniable that it contributes significantly to the lessening of state and local tensions. The existence of a third-party that can directly contribute a voice to cut through bureaucratic red tape allows for a check to environmental disputes, and a valid way for the public to weigh in on the issues that directly affect them (even if the framework for doing so is still slightly inefficient) (Johnson, 2020). Still others consider the ambiguity behind the extant framework for public participation as it exists to be a far more pressing issue (Spijkers et al., 2018).
Guangdong Province specifically does have means of public participation, including WeChat complaint channels, collateral provisions targeting river management, and open forums for available water pollution data ( Y. Li et al., 2020; H. Liu et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2020). In fact, the inclusion of the public within the RCS has been implemented through “civilian” and "entrepreneur" river chiefs that work alongside the official river chiefs to provide public supervision and oversight, particularly in industrial areas (Y. Li et al., 2020). This form of public expertise has been utilized in various stages throughout Anhui, Sichuan, and Hebei provinces, but has shown little to no development in Guangdong Province. Studies have shown that river chiefs have increased public awareness of water pollution over time and have led to noticeable improvements to the empirical datasets collected (W. Li et al., 2021; Y. Liu et al., 2024; Yang et al., 2024). This has led to a positive turn in practicable action, thereby providing credence to the claim that public participation in the RCS has been successfully implemented. This dichotomy between successes and continuing challenges (but still the potential for future success) has led to an unclear picture of comprehensive public participation in the RCS system in Guangdong and Chinese water governance as a whole.
Thirdly, it is important to consider arguments proposed by scholars of grassroots organizations and their involvement in Chinese water policy. While this study considers grassroots involvement to be included within public participation in the aforementioned definition, it is nonetheless important to acknowledge the difference of public participation through the lens of residents and citizen groups, and public participation in the lens of institutions such as NGOs and the media. The functionality of environmental NGOs and media as more “official,” and therefore more able to create effective change, represents an impact that is different, though not greater than, that of residents and local communities (Wang, 2020). There exists a great deal of literature surrounding grassroots organizations within the framework of Chinese water policy, but little around the participation of grassroots movements in the River Chief System itself. Therefore, it is important to consider that the proposals for grassroots organizations may be more inclusionary within the broader Chinese environmental framework, and can be applied with the River Chief System. Issues surrounding the lack of grassroots involvement in China currently stem primarily from the view that political change often is top-down. China’s economic development is dominated by local governments, and change is often oriented around a net growth in gross domestic product (GDP), driving fierce competition that may incentivize a lack of pursuit of sustainable environmental practices (G. Li et al., 2018; H. Liu et al., 2019). At the same time, however, growing public interest in environmental initiatives and the betterment of their surrounding environment has rapidly expanded the amount of ENGOs (environmental non-governmental organizations) within China over the last several decades. Nevertheless, there remains no clear picture of whether or not ENGOs have actually expounded Chinese environmental policy (G. Li et al., 2018; Mertha, 2008). The growth of ENGOs within the country is representative of both public interest in environmental policy change and the efficacy of ENGOs in environmental policy as a whole. However, China’s GDP-oriented emphasis on economic growth means that most ENGOs are not allocated adequate resources or adequate space to advocate for environmental change on a realistic level (G. Li et al., 2018), leading to a negative correlation between the presence of ENGOs and industrial share in GDP. Cities also differ in terms of readily disclosed information about pollution sources, which in turn impacts the public’s own enthusiasm to participate in public supervision and inspire concrete change within environmental governance.
Within the realm of environmental grassroots activism and protests, citizens have remained crucially active in forcing the Party to incite change as a whole, although, as noted with previous literature, this change is often scant and not deeply impactful (Steinhardt & Wu, 2016; Mertha, 2008; G. Li et al., 2018; W. Li et al., 2021). While large-scale environmental protests have seen widespread success in situational circumstances (Mertha, 2008), they have not proven to be a consistently effective means of spreading awareness and enacting change; many similar environmental protests often fail in comparison to the ones that succeed (Steinhardt & Wu, 2016). In order for these protests to work, scholars have identified that the NIMBYism (the “Not In My Backyard” phenomenon) is often paralyzing to the success of the protest, whereby protesters will back a public good until the issue is moved elsewhere, upon which they will privatize their interests. The circumstances within China today are also a concern, as state pressure over media, independent learning, and civil society has increased with more government control being exerted upon citizens’ livelihoods. While this pronounced behavior does not strongly discern whether or not a protest will succeed, it certainly contributes to the potential for protests to occur in the first place. While the RCS itself has seen few protests concerning its structure relative to the scale of past environmental disputes, analyzing grassroots activity and institutional change provides a basis for understanding the potential of such protests should the lingering issues surrounding the RCS pose a greater concern into the future of an increasingly economically-driven China. The RCS is in need of structural change, and despite its continued success, the space for grassroots voices and public participation as conduits towards such change is evidently available.
Next Steps & Future Directions
The above studies have explored the RCS in depth and provided many strategies through which the RCS could be improved, discussed the application of grassroots public participation into environmental initiatives, and provided insight into the role of non-governmental organizations and other institutions in altering the way that environmental policy can be addressed in China as a whole. Crucially, the contribution of all three bodies of literature within one body of work is seldom discussed, as public participation through the lens of the River Chief System remains an emerging body of literature (Z. Chu, 2022; H. Liu, 2019; C.H. Wu, 2020). Guangdong, China’s largest province by population and having twenty-five million more residents than the next most populous province in Shandong, is tremendously important to the country’s economy (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021). As a hub of technological innovation, the importance of water to the region’s industry, particularly in its usage of developmental artificial intelligence, is immense, not to mention the importance of water required to sustain the 127 million residents of the area. Resultantly, the health of the Pearl River Delta and surrounding waterways is of crucial importance, and water policies such as the River Chief System have to be implemented in a manner that is sustainable, effective, and above all, equitable implementation and dissemination. Public participation, therefore, acts as a serviceable medium between the central government, which provides sole leadership in China’s authoritarian environmentalism, and the local government, which is responsible for achieving environmental governance targets within their own jurisdictions (Z. Chu, 2022; X. Ma et al., 2023; S.Y. Tang, 1998; Q.H. Xu et al., 2024). Public participation and grassroots activism provide what scholars have described as “a democratic solution to improving the quality of government decision-making and implementation in environmental governance” (Z. Chu, 2022). While it remains true that there is no universal nor immediate solution, and that any change often comes as a long-term pitch, the more efficiently and sustainably we address issues that affect real communities, the faster the River Chief System can promote individual and environmental well-being in unprecedented ways. Change within top-down bureaucratic systems such as with the RCS can begin with bottom-up approaches, and the RCS provides an ideal snapshot of the potential reform in adjacent legislations of environmental concern in China, from ocean and air pollution to energy efficiency. Future research may also analyze the adjacent concern of public participation as either a constraint or an advantage towards green technological innovations within Chinese enterprises, especially as it pertains to Guangdong Province. As a highly technologically centered area, proper environmental management around the waterways of cities like Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Huizhou remains crucial to the balance between prosperous economic growth and the conservation of the surrounding waterways.
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