About Chinese Hydraulic Engineering Society

Chinese Hydraulic Engineering Society

The Chinese Hydraulic Engineering Society (中国水利学会, CHES) is China's national learned society for water engineering, based in Beijing. It is a prominent non-profit academic organisation dedicated to advancing water-related science and technology in China. Working under the China Association for Science and Technology and in close association with the Ministry of Water Resources, the Society unites the engineers and scientists of the world's largest builder of dams, irrigation networks and flood-control works. Its work spans academic exchange, technical standardisation, professional training and publishing, and it plays a crucial role in the development of China's water sector.

Origins in 1931 and the Nanjing era

The Society traces its lineage to the China Hydraulic Engineering Association established in May 1931. That founding came at a moment of national crisis and ambition. After the Nationalist government settled in Nanjing in 1927, it placed a top-down programme of water-system reconstruction, organised by watersheds, near the top of its plans for economic revival. A catastrophic flood in the central Yangtze Valley in 1931, which claimed up to four million lives, gave that programme urgent momentum.

The hydrologist Zhang Zili was among the proponents of the new association. In 1931 Zhang wrote to the government arguing that improving water control, focusing on agricultural production and increasing industrial output should be ultimate goals, and that unifying water-control administration was a most important first step. His proposal was well received by the hydraulic-engineering community of the Nanjing regime. The association held its first annual meeting in March 1932, which proposed an effective organisational system linking central government leadership with local water management. That early concern with unified, watershed-based administration has remained a defining theme of Chinese water governance, and of the Society itself, ever since.

Place in China's water governance

In its modern form the Society works under the China Association for Science and Technology, China's umbrella body for learned societies, and alongside the Ministry of Water Resources in Beijing. That dual anchoring reflects the character of water engineering in China: simultaneously a scientific discipline, an engineering profession and a core function of the state. Dams, levees, canals, irrigation districts and urban water systems are built and operated by large public programmes, and the Society provides the professional forum in which the people who design, build and study those systems meet, debate and set common technical expectations.

The Society is distinct from a government ministry and from a construction company. It does not itself build dams or operate canals. Instead it convenes congresses, maintains specialist committees, coordinates standards work, offers water-related training and publishes academic exchange for the profession. In that sense it is the connective tissue between research institutes, universities, design institutes, river-basin authorities and operating enterprises.

Specialist committees and disciplinary breadth

The Society's committees span the breadth of the water disciplines. They include hydrology, hydraulics, dam engineering, irrigation and drainage, and water-environment protection, among others. Each committee sustains its own community of specialists, organises symposia and maintains links to research centres where its secretariat is hosted.

Hydraulics illustrates the pattern. The Technical Committee on Hydraulics of the Chinese Hydraulic Engineering Society has its secretariat hosted at the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR) in Beijing. Together with counterpart committees and the China Chapter of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research, it co-hosts the China National Conference on Hydraulics and Hydroinformatics, initiated in 2003 as an exchange platform for researchers and professionals in cross-disciplinary hydraulics and hydroinformatics. The tenth conference in that series was convened from 14 to 16 November 2022 in Nanchang, in Jiangxi Province. Such recurring specialist meetings allow detailed questions — flow modelling, sediment behaviour, numerical simulation and monitoring — to be examined in depth, away from the broader plenary congresses.

Technical standardisation

Standardisation is one of the Society's formal functions, and one that distinguishes it from a purely academic society. The Society maintains a Department of Standardization that coordinates the drafting and review of industry standards for the water sector. A Standardization Committee of the Society was approved by the Society's Executive Council, with its base at IWHR, to serve as a platform for exchange and technical consultation on water-related standardisation.

The wider context shows why that role matters. In November 2003, under the Standardization Law of the People's Republic of China, the Ministry of Water Resources issued Regulations for Water Management Standardization governing the proposal, formulation, issuance and re-examination of hydraulic technical standards. The system of hydraulic technical standards issued in 2001 already contained 615 items, including state-level, trade-level and internationally compiled standards, together with standard substances, covering the main technical fields of water management. Dedicated institutions were established successively to support the work, including the Society's Department of Standardization and the Standards Research Center of the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research. Uniform standards are essential when thousands of projects, built by different organisations over decades, must operate safely as connected river and water-supply systems.

National congresses and academic exchange

The Society convenes national water-engineering congresses that are among the most important events in the Chinese water calendar. The 2023 China Water Academic Congress, hosted by the Society and organised by North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power, opened on 4 November 2023 in Zhengzhou. Its theme was strengthening scientific and technological innovation and supporting the construction of the National Water Grid. Zhu Chengqing, Vice Minister of Water Resources, attended the opening, and Zhou Xuewen, President of the Society, presided.

The scale of the 2023 congress conveys the breadth of the community. It comprised one plenary session and nineteen sub-sessions, four of them held in different places, with more than 240 reports and more than 960 papers. Topics ranged across water security in the hydrosphere and river basins, holistic governance and high-quality development of river basins, and the safe construction and operation of major water diversion projects. On the afternoon of the opening day the Society also released its list of top water-related scientific and technological problems for 2023 and the Blue Book of Water Park (2023), using the congress to set research agendas as well as to report results. A young professionals paper contest, academic reporting and debates have likewise featured in the Society's annual conferences, supporting the entry of early-career engineers into the national community.

International cooperation

The Society represents Chinese water engineering internationally and maintains formal partnerships with global bodies. It is a Board member of the World Water Council, a relationship visible at the joint 2020 Annual Conference of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) and the Society, held virtually from 18 to 20 October 2020. The World Water Council President addressed political leaders, scholars and young professionals at that event, underlining the level of cooperation between the Council and China in general and the Society as a valuable Board member.

Cooperation with IAHR is particularly close. At the 2023 China Water Academic Congress, IAHR President Philippe Gourbesville delivered a plenary speech on hydroinformatics and systematic water management and renewed the memorandum of understanding between IAHR and the Society, laying a foundation for cooperation in the following five years. Through such agreements the Society connects Chinese practice — shaped by very large rivers, monsoon floods and massive transfer schemes — with international research on hydro-environment engineering.

The profession behind China's great water projects

The Society publishes academic exchange for the profession that operates projects from the Three Gorges to the South-North Water Transfer, in the words of its recorded profile. Those two projects define the scale of modern Chinese hydraulic engineering. The South-North Water Transfer Project, also translated as the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, is a multi-decade mega-project designed to channel 44.8 billion cubic metres of fresh water each year from the Yangtze River in southern China to the more arid north through three canal systems: the Eastern Route through the course of the Grand Canal, the Central Route from the upper Han River to Beijing and Tianjin, and the Western Route from Yangtze tributaries toward the northwest.

The State Council approved the project in August 2002 after a fifty-year feasibility study, construction began in 2003, and the first phases of the Eastern and Central routes became operational in late 2014. It is the largest water transfer scheme in the world, intended to alleviate chronic water shortages in northern China, support economic development and curb over-extraction of groundwater, and it has already improved water security for over 150 million people. The Three Gorges project on the Yangtze is comparably emblematic for flood control and power. Engineers working on such schemes need common standards, shared research on dam safety, sediment and ecology, and forums to publish and challenge results — precisely the functions the Society exists to provide.

Publishing, training and public functions

Alongside congresses and standards, the Society's recorded activities include organising academic events, developing technical standards, offering water-related training and publishing journals. Publishing matters because water engineering knowledge is cumulative and safety-critical: design methods, failure lessons, hydrological records and environmental findings must circulate reliably among practitioners who may never meet. Training matters for the same reason, as new generations of engineers enter a sector where structures are expected to serve for many decades and where operating conditions are changing with urbanisation and climate pressures.

The Society also undertakes agenda-setting work that reaches beyond its membership. Releasing annual lists of top scientific and technological problems, and blue books on thematic topics, helps direct attention and funding toward unresolved questions in flood risk, water ecology, digital water management and infrastructure resilience.

Why the Society matters

Ninety years after its predecessor was founded amid flood disaster and a drive to unify water administration, the Chinese Hydraulic Engineering Society remains the national professional home of Chinese water engineering. Its significance lies not in any single project, but in continuity: a single forum linking hydrology to dam engineering, irrigation to environmental protection, research to standards, and Chinese practice to international partners such as IAHR and the World Water Council. For a country that continues to build and operate water infrastructure at a scale unmatched elsewhere, that continuity — of people, standards and published knowledge — is itself a piece of national infrastructure.