Article Politics and Space Producing a Chinese hydrosocial territory: A river of clean water flows north from Danjiangkou Sarah Rogers and Mark Wang University of Melbourne, Australia Abstract Hydrosocial territories are produced not just through concrete water infrastructure, but through flows of people, water, money, and ideas at multiple scales. As part of China’s South–North Water Transfer Project, water drawn from the distant Danjiangkou Reservoir now supplies the megacities of Beijing and Tianjin with the majority of their drinking water. To provide this new service – supplying drinking water of sufficient quality and quantity – the Reservoir and its upper reaches are in the midst of socio-economic and ecological transformations. In this article, we outline the tools being mobilised to send a river of clean water north, including administrative interventions, displacement, and discursive imaginings. We argue that what is being attempted is a wholesale reorganisation that marginalises local territorialities, reflects China’s particular govern- ing rationalities and practices, and highlights new spatialities of water governance. Our analysis of the remaking of Danjiangkou pushes hydropolitical scholarship to more precisely define the geographies of power in hydrosocial territories. Keywords Hydropolitics, power, governmentality, water pollution, resettlement, China Introduction The two huge municipalities of Beijing and Tianjin now source the vast majority of their drinking water from the Danjiangkou Reservoir over 1000 kilometres away. They do so thanks to the Middle Route of China’s South–North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP), an expensive, technologically and politically challenging interbasin transfer scheme. As a com- plex system operating in places with severe water pollution problems, the SNWTP relies not Corresponding author: Sarah Rogers, Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia. Email: rogerssm@unimelb.edu.au EPC: Politics and Space 2020, Vol. 38(7–8) 1308–1327 ! The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/2399654420917697 journals.sagepub.com/home/epc