Back on the water margin: the ethical fixes of sustainable water provisions in rural China Andrea E. Pia London School of Economics and Political Science The classical Chinese novel The water margin tells the story of a group of petty officials who take a collective stance against the widespread corruption and unfairness of imperial Chinese society. At the root of this story lies the deeply ethical conundrum of redressing injustice when unchecked power prevails. This article draws from this insight to explore some of the ethical dilemmas Chinese state bureaucrats in Yunnan face today when provisioning drinking water to rural communities. Yunnanese officials are burdened with these dilemmas by the state’s conspicuous retreat from rural public services in favour of market-based supply. Through their ethical interventions, Chinese bureaucrats are able to temporarily defer the collapsing of rural water provisions which is caused by the contradictions introduced by the marketization of water. However, such interventions may be followed by further damage to the environment. The water officials I encountered during my stay in Yancong Township – a water-stressed Yunnanese agricultural community in Huize County, southwest China 1 – were nothing like what negative stereotypes of bureaucracy would have them: unscrupulous power brokers or, worse, faceless servants of supposedly rational but ultimately inscrutable institutions. Charged with supervising the distribution of drinking and irrigation water to local communities, the staff of the local Water Service Office (shuiwusuo, WSO) appeared rather as a motley crew of characters whose plurality of human conditions and aspirations its own members ascribed to chance or fate (yuanfen). There were people like Mr Yong – at 29 the youngest ‘head’ ranking cadre in any of Huize’s state departments – who, thanks to his own talent and ambitions, had successfully wriggled out of poverty and escaped the life of strenuous toil his parents had endured in a mountain village near Yancong. The WSO crew also enrolled water experts like Jiang Kai. A hydro-engineer by training, he worked constantly long hours doing AutoCAD on his laptops. He would spend his working day jumping from one infrastructural project to the next, being summoned to the Land Development Office at dawn, called to attend an urgent matter by the Public Affairs Department at dusk. Matching the strict standards of science with the blurred lines of politics was his daily bread. Fee-collectors and plumbers, like Mengfu or Shaozhi, made up the rest of the crew. For a large portion of my fieldwork, I worked Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23, 120-136 C  Royal Anthropological Institute 2017