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Paper Short Abstract

The author intends to use his four-year environmental journalist perspectives and eight years world water source summit organizer experience as a comparative ontological/cognitive materials to make sense of water crisis commons conundrum: crisis by the people, for the people and of the people.

Paper Abstract

When the author explores the water issues from 2005 onward first as Xinhua News Agency environmental beat writer and convenor/organizer sponsored by many international organizations such as. Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, he witnessed a gradually worsening water ambience both in China and beyond, due to damming, water transfer, mining, water footprint flaws of burgeoning new economy and ensued lifestyle change; he will first connect the ecological water issues to the prototypical narratives of regime transition and social upheavals through ethnographical evidences and essential socio-cultural scripts (Water Margins Novel and its resonance as art of being ungoverned – floods mutually being used in Chinese history to refer rebels and malgovernance). Based on this water like society delineation, the author attempts to use a water conservation initiative starting from 2014 to 2023 to describe the necessity and difficulty of motivating/ mobilizing in ecological conservation campaigns and preliminarily answer why intersubjective belonging matters in innovating commons as cultural crisis/inter-species conflicts taking tolls here and beyond. Beginning with an empty basket of water drawing, this paper discusses another “multimodal/soteriological object” also related with bamboo basket: Sound Observing (Guanyin, Bodhisattva鱼篮观音) Avalokitesvara deity who always carries a bamboo basket with fish in it, in this “porous bamboo basket scenario”, another trans-species regime appeared -- the fish resides simultaneously in the air, out of water and temporarily in artificially woven “bamboo infrastructure build for salvation/co-existence.”