Reshaping State‐Led Agricultural Modernization in China: The Hydrosocial Reconfigurations of Small‐Scale Farmland Irrigation Infrastructures

ABSTRACT The rapid increase in the state‐led construction of small‐scale farmland irrigation infrastructures is a salient trend in China's agricultural modernization strategy. This marks an extension of state power into rural societies that have been de‐centralizing and de‐collectivizing since the reform and opening‐up policy in 1978. These newly built irrigation infrastructures are more than a simple technological upgrade, but embody a complex amalgamation of political, social and environmental changes that have reconfigured hydrosocial relations. This paper investigates how local agricultural water governance, rural social relations and power dynamics are reconfigured by a nationwide Well‐Facilitated Farmland Construction Project in T County, Shandong Province. It reveals that although this centrally‐directed and engineering‐based initiative has improved grain productivity and peasant livelihoods, it has also resulted in the recentralized government intervention in grassroots irrigation governance, socially and geographically uneven water access among irrigators and invisible groundwater grabbing and ecological concerns obscured by the discourses of agricultural productivity. By examining the hydrosocial reconfigurations of ordinary irrigation infrastructure in everyday practices, we call for a nuanced understanding of the processes, dynamics and multiplicity of China's state‐led agricultural modernization and rural development.