A lot of people in this thread seem to be missing the cultural context: the Chinese king Yu the Great is traditionally credited with building canals (mentioned in the first paragraph of the paper).
> In China, the tale of the legendary Great Yu’s heroic taming of floods and the subsequent founding of the Xia Dynasty continues to dominate mainstream scholarly narrative on the formation of China’s first state, albeit with great controversy. The importance of state-organized hydraulic projects and elites’ control of water to the evolution of Bronze Age and early imperial societies is also emphasized in recent archaeological studies of water.