Keeping the Water Moving: The Red Flag Canal at Linzhou

The Red Flag Canal is not a landscape that was landscaped; it is a waterway that had to be made. Linzhou, a county-level city in western Anyang, describes itself as the birthplace of Red Flag Canal spirit and its people as the builders of an artificial river. The city government dates the digging to the 1960s and divides the county's later history into four stages that residents call four movements of entrepreneurship: fight the Taihang, go out of the Taihang, prosper from the Taihang, beautify the Taihang. The mountain setting is precise. The government notes that the Taihang Mountains kept the most beautiful section of their eight hundred kilometres for Linzhou, and that Linlü Mountain is praised as the finest of the northern peaks. The canal was driven through that country on a schedule set by the need to irrigate.

The most revealing document about the canal is administrative. A protection and utilisation plan issued by the Linzhou municipal government in March 2026 divides the system into custody. The canal service centre is responsible for the main canal and the first, second and third branch canals, the second running from Fen Shuiling to Yangbaishan village and the third from Fen Shuiling to the west mouth of Shuguang Cave, together with 239 kilometres of channel and its structures. The canal group is responsible for the Youth Cave section of the main canal, between stake numbers 24+030 and 28+260, and several other short reaches. The water bureau, the development and reform commission, the finance bureau, the public security bureau and the road authority each carry a named duty, from filing irrigation projects to policing illegal excavation and restoring culverts damaged by highway works.

The plan also draws a line on the ground. For the main canal, the three branch canals and what it calls the ten great works, the protection range and construction control zone extend outwards 208 metres from both banks. Within that strip, unauthorised building, digging and soil removal must be stopped and reported; planting, stacking hay, depositing rubbish and throwing straw into the channels are all listed as things to be cleared. The tourism and cultural broadcasting bureau is charged with protecting the canal as a cultural relic under the national heritage law and the Anyang city regulation on Red Flag Canal protection at Linzhou. Finance is assigned a sum: the city budget sets aside 10 million yuan a year to subsidise districts and townships, which are expected to repair smaller branches and ponds.