The Chinese Ministry of Water Resources initiated a Water Heritage Accreditation Scheme (WHAS) in 2021, aimed at improving the conservation and utilization of tangible and intangible water heritages across the country. Drawing on the notion of the conservation-development nexus, this paper scrutinizes the political, spatial and material intricacy of WHAS to better understand the evolving geographies of Chinese hydropolitics. Based on fieldwork and open information, the paper argues that WHAS embodies not only the Chinese governmentality to balance environmental protection, water infrastructure utilization and everyday maintenance, but also the materialization of top-level decision-makers' imaginary to consolidate self-confidence in cultural terms. The practice of WHAS, however, is contested, rooted in the scalar politics of Chinese central-local rivalry, of the institutional incompatibility of heritage systems at different levels (e.g. World Heritage Irrigation Structures and UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites), and of the rescaling of cross-border water engineering structures. These all render the realization of central government’s designated goals of WHAS unclear.