This book has been a long time in gestation. It originated from my PhD thesis submitted to Tsinghua University in 2004. The manuscript entitled “水权解释” (shuiquan jieshi) was then published in 2005 by Shanghai Sanlian Book Store and Shanghai People’s Publishing House. The literal translation of this title is “Explaining Water Rights”. My pursuit of researching into the topic “water rights” is traced back to the year 1998, when flow cut-off of Yellow River raised grave concern in China. At that time, I was about to be a graduate student at the Research Institute of Twenty-first Century Development at Tsinghua University and involved in Professor Angang Hu’s research project around “Yellow River Basin Management”. Professor Hu and I presented an argument that directive allocation could not solve problems of water resources allocation in China and “quasi-market” mechanisms are critical to Chinese water resources management. In 2000, our paper “Public Policy of Water Resources Allocation in the Transition: Quasi-Market and Democratic and Consultative Politics” was published in a Chinese academic journal, which received positive responses and led to a public discussion of issues of water rights and water market.