Governing Water Transitions in China: Evidence, Policy Experiments and Future Directions in Water Economics and Policy

China has become an increasingly important site for rethinking water economics and policy under conditions of rapid institutional change, environmental pressure and regional inequality. This invited review examines 44 recent China-related peer-reviewed papers in Water Economics and Policy (WEP) and asks what this body of work contributes to the journal’s intellectual agenda and to future research on water and environmental governance. The review is not designed as an exhaustive systematic review of China’s water literature. Instead, it offers a corpus-informed thematic synthesis of how WEP papers have studied China’s policy experiments, regulatory instruments, implementation arrangements and governance outcomes. Six thematic clusters are identified: water pricing, taxation and economic instruments; environmental regulation and implementation capacity; agricultural water use and water-saving technology; basin and spatial governance; water–energy–carbon linkages and virtual water; and urban water ecology and welfare valuation. Across these themes, the corpus shows that China-related research in WEP is strongest when it connects economic analysis to governance capacity, institutional incentives, policy coordination, spatial heterogeneity and distributive consequences. The review argues that China should not be treated merely as a large empirical case, but as a policy laboratory for examining how state steering, market instruments and local implementation interact in complex water governance systems. It concludes by outlining a future research agenda that moves from policy-effect estimation toward mechanism-oriented, institutionally grounded and internationally relevant studies of water governance.