- 06 Nov 2007 18:10
#1372890
Three Gorges Drama: Why Chinese Dam Is Forcing Yet Another Mass Exodus
Pollution, Poverty Spur Relocation of 4 Million; Death in a Demolition
By Shai Oster
6 November 2007
The Wall Street Journal
CHONGQING, China -- Fan Zhongcheng last year joined 1.4 million people forced to flee rising Yangtze River waters caused by the government's massive new Three Gorges Dam. His elderly parents' mud-brick house collapsed as the family tried to dismantle it to comply with official orders. Mr. Fan and his wife were buried alive for hours, and his parents died.
The family's troubles aren't over. Now the Chinese government says it plans to induce as many as four million more people to move from homes near the shore and in the surrounding mountains. The Fans' new homestead, up a hill from the old one, may be among them.
The mass uprooting is just the latest controversy to plague the $25 billion Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project. Built to tame the violent annual floods of the 4,000-mile Yangtze River and to harness its power, Three Gorges is now threatening many of the rural residents it was intended to help. Since the dam first cut off the Yangtze's flow in June 2003, parts of the reservoir's shoreline have repeatedly collapsed. Waste from neighboring farms and villages is creating a water-pollution crisis. And by flooding hundreds of square miles of rich farmland, the reservoir has robbed hundreds of thousands of farmers of their livelihoods and overcrowded the remaining land.
How Beijing handles the challenge could have great consequences both for the environment and for political stability in the region. National and local officials have responded to the twin problems of ecological and economic peril in the countryside with a massive urbanization plan, promising jobs for those who relocate -- a move that also meets economic development goals.
The plan could be complicated by simmering resentment over the fate of the people already displaced by the dam, may of whom were left without jobs or government subsidies that were promised. "They had so many problems with moving one million people. How are they going to move four times that many?" asks Wu Dengming, head of the Green Volunteer League of Chongqing, a local environmental group.
The government has not called the project, which does provide electricity and has stemmed floods, a mistake. But in September, five days after approving the relocation plan, Beijing's State Council acknowledged the dam's problems for the first time after a meeting called by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Officials of the cabinet-level Three Gorges Commission warned that the dam was having an "adverse impact" and could cause an environmental "catastrophe" unless drastic measures are taken, according to state news agency Xinhua.
For nearly a century, China's leaders dreamed of building a dam to harness the 4,000-mile Yangtze River's power. Mao Zedong, who believed man could control nature, wrote a poem extolling the plans. Dissent was suppressed, and in 1992, construction was approved by the government despite an unprecedented "no" vote by one-third of China's legislature. Environmentalists at the time predicted many of today's problems.
Begun in 2003, the dam created a 400-mile reservoir stretching through the narrow valleys of the Three Gorges, named for a series of canyons once known for their fast currents. On the other end from the dam sits Chongqing, one of China's biggest cities, capital of a municipality with 30 million people in the urban area and surrounding countryside.
Problems started soon after the dam first cut off the Yangtze River's flow in June 2003. Slopes along the riverbanks started to warp, and within weeks on July 14, two dozen farmers and fisherman were killed in a massive landslide. At first, officials blamed heavy rains but Chinese and foreign researchers later showed the rising waters were to blame.
Today, the water has risen about 514 feet and is set to rise 60 more by 2009. Regional officials have declared 60% of the new shoreline too steep to farm, and are moving 141 million cubic feet of fertile earth inland. Critics warn that the riverside port of the region's huge main city here, Chongqing, will be silted shut within a decade because of the slower-moving current.
Already, belts of polluted water surround the shores of cities upstream from the dam along the reservoir, including Chongqing on its far western edge. The dam is preventing the upstream waste from being flushed out to sea, says a study last spring by the World Wildlife Fund. Sewage and other pollution collecting in the stagnant reservoir also have backed up into tributaries, causing blooms of algae. Fish harvests in the Yangtze River basin have fallen sharply because of disrupted river flows. The dam even has increased local rainfall and fog and lowered temperatures because of condensation forming over the huge reservoir, according to a study by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Beijing is providing more than $5 billion to build hundreds of sewage-treatment plants and garbage-disposal centers in the area, and officials plan to clear a riverside greenbelt more than half a mile wide to keep fertilizer runoff or other pollutants from the water. Meanwhile, more hydroelectric dams are planned for the upper reaches of the Yangtze and its tributaries. They might help reduce silting upstream, but the missteps at Three Gorges are spurring criticism of more dams in state-owned media, and Beijing has started to rethink those plans.
"The best way to protect the water quality in the Three Gorges region is to reduce the population," along with strengthening environmental protection, says Chongqing Vice Mayor Tan Qiwei, who oversees economic development in the area.
The initial round of relocations, spurred by rising water levels, was fraught with difficulties and ended up more widespread than first planned. In August 2005, Mr. Fan's family and 600 other villagers signed contracts with the government agreeing to abandon their old homes in the hamlet of Tonglin and move several hours' travel away, closer to Chongqing city. The reservoir was soon going to cover the flat valley bottom where they had farmed for decades. The government offered roughly $1,500 to each family, more than their annual income, and promised it would demolish the homes.
At the last minute, documents show, officials said farmers must do their own demolition or forfeit $250. In May 2006, Mr. Fan's elderly parents hired a few workers to help them knock down their home. Mr. Fan and his wife also helped. It was a hot clear day, after weeks without rain. Mr. Fan saw dust hanging in the air as the workers used hammers and picks to tear down the mud bricks.
Then a wall collapsed, burying the whole family under a pile of bricks and shattered timber. Neighbors rushed to help painstakingly pull off the rubble from the trapped bodies. Mr. Fan's mother's skull was crushed. His father's arms and legs were broken. Mr. Fan, 41 years old, remembers little from the hours he lay under the pile with a punctured liver. Then for 45 days, he lay in the hospital while his injured wife shuttled between his and his father's rooms to care for them.
The family, like most farmers, was uninsured and had to borrow from friends and relatives to pay the mounting bills. When they could no longer afford to care for both father and son, the family decided to send Mr. Fan's father to the new home they had built up the hill in the larger village of Yanglu. There, without access to modern medicine, his wounds became infected and within a dozen days, he too was dead.
Officials held lavish ceremonies that May to mark completion of the 1.4-mile concrete structure of the dam. At the same time, Fan Xiao, a geologist for a government-affiliated institute based in Chengdu, published an article questioning Beijing's assurances about the dam's impact on sedimentation, earthquakes, and pollution. "They shouldn't have built the dam, the price paid was too high," the geologist says in an interview.
This spring another series of landslides forced more villagers to evacuate their homes. Scientists working with the World Wildlife Fund and some Chinese universities began reporting mounting pollution and silt problems. Researchers from government-funded institutes warned officials in the past year that as many as 4.8 million of the 11 million residents on the reservoir shores cannot survive there because of the combination of pollution and limited farmland and infrastructure, though they have since cut that estimate in half. Chongqing officials said 91 incidents had caved in more than 22 miles of shoreline, though they later retracted the statistics.
The concerns finally began filtering up to the central leadership. On June 27, China's cabinet, the State Council, met to discuss the future of Chongqing and the dam. Premier Jiabao said addressing the worsening ecological and environmental problems at the Three Gorges was a primary concern, according to a later account of the meeting by the state-run Xinhua News Agency. A day later, four villagers were killed in another landslide.
With Beijing worried, Chongqing's leaders put together the new relocation plans, calling for 2 million people to be moved from near the reservoir shores and a similar number from the surrounding mountainsides. The State Council approved them on Sept. 20, though they were only announced weeks later. Meanwhile on Sept. 25, Beijing's Three Gorges Commission acknowledged the problems at the dam publicly for the first time.
Mr. Tan, the vice mayor, says the migration will be voluntary over the next 10 to 15 years and will rely on job creation in 40 industrial zones, free health care and education and housing subsidies to entice villagers from the homes. Some critics are skeptical, given the stakes and complaints of abuses in previous relocations.
The city also is offering farmers a coveted hukou, or official permission to settle permanently -- not available in the far-off coastal industrial centers of Shanghai and Guangdong, where many Chongqing-area farmers have gone for city jobs because the opportunities and pay are much greater. Nationwide, urban residents earn more than three times what farmers do, and the gap is growing. In the Chongqing city center, shopping malls filled with high-end shops such as Brooks Brothers and Versace line the city's glittering central square.
Chongqing elders say Beijing's funding will help the city absorb the planned influx of labor -- the equivalent of adding the population of Oklahoma City each year -- without creating slums. "This migration is already starting to happen as a result of economic development," Mr. Tan says. "The government should lead it." All told, private and public investment will reach about $100 billion, he says.
In Yanglu, where most of Mr. Fan's 600 neighbors have resettled instead of where the government directed them, anger runs high. Yu Qingfa, Mr. Fan's cousin, 30 years old, complains that he hasn't received the money the government promised, unlike others with political connections. The far-off community the government designated had no jobs, he says. Of trying to hold the government to its promises, he says, "The mountain is tall and the emperor is far away."
An hour's drive upstream, in a Chongqing satellite city, lawyer Zhou Litai is putting the finishing touches on a new office he believes will soon be busy with claims from a new, even bigger wave of migrants in the Three Gorges region. This summer, Mr. Zhou received about 1,000 claims related to relocations connected with another dam, convincing him there was more work coming. "The law and policies are good, but there are problems with how the local government implements them," says the lawyer, who has become well known in China for representing migrant workers from the Chongqing region in disputes with factory employers.
Mr. Fan, now managing a local pharmacy, is among those suing over his farming family's losses from the first relocation. He says he was given about $2,000 by the local government. Local officials say they donated to the family about twice as much and deny any responsibility for the accident.
Local courts refused to hear Mr. Fan's case at first, and when they did, sided with the local officials. A few weeks ago, he traveled several hours from his village to the Second People's Court of Chongqing to file an appeal. He climbed up the marble steps of the new courthouse, overlooking the swollen Yangtze, to file the papers, and returned home where he is caring for his daughters while running the small pharmacy. To help make enough money, his wife is working in a jewelry factory in Guangdong, about 1,500 miles away.
Mr. Fan says he is pressing the legal case because he wants the government to acknowledge responsibility for his parents' deaths and pay more. "They died for the Three Georges Dam," Mr. Fan says. "They died for the state. The state owes this to them."
Kersten Zhang in Beijing and Bai Lin in Shanghai contributed to this article
Pollution, Poverty Spur Relocation of 4 Million; Death in a Demolition
By Shai Oster
6 November 2007
The Wall Street Journal
CHONGQING, China -- Fan Zhongcheng last year joined 1.4 million people forced to flee rising Yangtze River waters caused by the government's massive new Three Gorges Dam. His elderly parents' mud-brick house collapsed as the family tried to dismantle it to comply with official orders. Mr. Fan and his wife were buried alive for hours, and his parents died.
The family's troubles aren't over. Now the Chinese government says it plans to induce as many as four million more people to move from homes near the shore and in the surrounding mountains. The Fans' new homestead, up a hill from the old one, may be among them.
The mass uprooting is just the latest controversy to plague the $25 billion Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project. Built to tame the violent annual floods of the 4,000-mile Yangtze River and to harness its power, Three Gorges is now threatening many of the rural residents it was intended to help. Since the dam first cut off the Yangtze's flow in June 2003, parts of the reservoir's shoreline have repeatedly collapsed. Waste from neighboring farms and villages is creating a water-pollution crisis. And by flooding hundreds of square miles of rich farmland, the reservoir has robbed hundreds of thousands of farmers of their livelihoods and overcrowded the remaining land.
How Beijing handles the challenge could have great consequences both for the environment and for political stability in the region. National and local officials have responded to the twin problems of ecological and economic peril in the countryside with a massive urbanization plan, promising jobs for those who relocate -- a move that also meets economic development goals.
The plan could be complicated by simmering resentment over the fate of the people already displaced by the dam, may of whom were left without jobs or government subsidies that were promised. "They had so many problems with moving one million people. How are they going to move four times that many?" asks Wu Dengming, head of the Green Volunteer League of Chongqing, a local environmental group.
The government has not called the project, which does provide electricity and has stemmed floods, a mistake. But in September, five days after approving the relocation plan, Beijing's State Council acknowledged the dam's problems for the first time after a meeting called by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Officials of the cabinet-level Three Gorges Commission warned that the dam was having an "adverse impact" and could cause an environmental "catastrophe" unless drastic measures are taken, according to state news agency Xinhua.
For nearly a century, China's leaders dreamed of building a dam to harness the 4,000-mile Yangtze River's power. Mao Zedong, who believed man could control nature, wrote a poem extolling the plans. Dissent was suppressed, and in 1992, construction was approved by the government despite an unprecedented "no" vote by one-third of China's legislature. Environmentalists at the time predicted many of today's problems.
Begun in 2003, the dam created a 400-mile reservoir stretching through the narrow valleys of the Three Gorges, named for a series of canyons once known for their fast currents. On the other end from the dam sits Chongqing, one of China's biggest cities, capital of a municipality with 30 million people in the urban area and surrounding countryside.
Problems started soon after the dam first cut off the Yangtze River's flow in June 2003. Slopes along the riverbanks started to warp, and within weeks on July 14, two dozen farmers and fisherman were killed in a massive landslide. At first, officials blamed heavy rains but Chinese and foreign researchers later showed the rising waters were to blame.
Today, the water has risen about 514 feet and is set to rise 60 more by 2009. Regional officials have declared 60% of the new shoreline too steep to farm, and are moving 141 million cubic feet of fertile earth inland. Critics warn that the riverside port of the region's huge main city here, Chongqing, will be silted shut within a decade because of the slower-moving current.
Already, belts of polluted water surround the shores of cities upstream from the dam along the reservoir, including Chongqing on its far western edge. The dam is preventing the upstream waste from being flushed out to sea, says a study last spring by the World Wildlife Fund. Sewage and other pollution collecting in the stagnant reservoir also have backed up into tributaries, causing blooms of algae. Fish harvests in the Yangtze River basin have fallen sharply because of disrupted river flows. The dam even has increased local rainfall and fog and lowered temperatures because of condensation forming over the huge reservoir, according to a study by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Beijing is providing more than $5 billion to build hundreds of sewage-treatment plants and garbage-disposal centers in the area, and officials plan to clear a riverside greenbelt more than half a mile wide to keep fertilizer runoff or other pollutants from the water. Meanwhile, more hydroelectric dams are planned for the upper reaches of the Yangtze and its tributaries. They might help reduce silting upstream, but the missteps at Three Gorges are spurring criticism of more dams in state-owned media, and Beijing has started to rethink those plans.
"The best way to protect the water quality in the Three Gorges region is to reduce the population," along with strengthening environmental protection, says Chongqing Vice Mayor Tan Qiwei, who oversees economic development in the area.
The initial round of relocations, spurred by rising water levels, was fraught with difficulties and ended up more widespread than first planned. In August 2005, Mr. Fan's family and 600 other villagers signed contracts with the government agreeing to abandon their old homes in the hamlet of Tonglin and move several hours' travel away, closer to Chongqing city. The reservoir was soon going to cover the flat valley bottom where they had farmed for decades. The government offered roughly $1,500 to each family, more than their annual income, and promised it would demolish the homes.
At the last minute, documents show, officials said farmers must do their own demolition or forfeit $250. In May 2006, Mr. Fan's elderly parents hired a few workers to help them knock down their home. Mr. Fan and his wife also helped. It was a hot clear day, after weeks without rain. Mr. Fan saw dust hanging in the air as the workers used hammers and picks to tear down the mud bricks.
Then a wall collapsed, burying the whole family under a pile of bricks and shattered timber. Neighbors rushed to help painstakingly pull off the rubble from the trapped bodies. Mr. Fan's mother's skull was crushed. His father's arms and legs were broken. Mr. Fan, 41 years old, remembers little from the hours he lay under the pile with a punctured liver. Then for 45 days, he lay in the hospital while his injured wife shuttled between his and his father's rooms to care for them.
The family, like most farmers, was uninsured and had to borrow from friends and relatives to pay the mounting bills. When they could no longer afford to care for both father and son, the family decided to send Mr. Fan's father to the new home they had built up the hill in the larger village of Yanglu. There, without access to modern medicine, his wounds became infected and within a dozen days, he too was dead.
Officials held lavish ceremonies that May to mark completion of the 1.4-mile concrete structure of the dam. At the same time, Fan Xiao, a geologist for a government-affiliated institute based in Chengdu, published an article questioning Beijing's assurances about the dam's impact on sedimentation, earthquakes, and pollution. "They shouldn't have built the dam, the price paid was too high," the geologist says in an interview.
This spring another series of landslides forced more villagers to evacuate their homes. Scientists working with the World Wildlife Fund and some Chinese universities began reporting mounting pollution and silt problems. Researchers from government-funded institutes warned officials in the past year that as many as 4.8 million of the 11 million residents on the reservoir shores cannot survive there because of the combination of pollution and limited farmland and infrastructure, though they have since cut that estimate in half. Chongqing officials said 91 incidents had caved in more than 22 miles of shoreline, though they later retracted the statistics.
The concerns finally began filtering up to the central leadership. On June 27, China's cabinet, the State Council, met to discuss the future of Chongqing and the dam. Premier Jiabao said addressing the worsening ecological and environmental problems at the Three Gorges was a primary concern, according to a later account of the meeting by the state-run Xinhua News Agency. A day later, four villagers were killed in another landslide.
With Beijing worried, Chongqing's leaders put together the new relocation plans, calling for 2 million people to be moved from near the reservoir shores and a similar number from the surrounding mountainsides. The State Council approved them on Sept. 20, though they were only announced weeks later. Meanwhile on Sept. 25, Beijing's Three Gorges Commission acknowledged the problems at the dam publicly for the first time.
Mr. Tan, the vice mayor, says the migration will be voluntary over the next 10 to 15 years and will rely on job creation in 40 industrial zones, free health care and education and housing subsidies to entice villagers from the homes. Some critics are skeptical, given the stakes and complaints of abuses in previous relocations.
The city also is offering farmers a coveted hukou, or official permission to settle permanently -- not available in the far-off coastal industrial centers of Shanghai and Guangdong, where many Chongqing-area farmers have gone for city jobs because the opportunities and pay are much greater. Nationwide, urban residents earn more than three times what farmers do, and the gap is growing. In the Chongqing city center, shopping malls filled with high-end shops such as Brooks Brothers and Versace line the city's glittering central square.
Chongqing elders say Beijing's funding will help the city absorb the planned influx of labor -- the equivalent of adding the population of Oklahoma City each year -- without creating slums. "This migration is already starting to happen as a result of economic development," Mr. Tan says. "The government should lead it." All told, private and public investment will reach about $100 billion, he says.
In Yanglu, where most of Mr. Fan's 600 neighbors have resettled instead of where the government directed them, anger runs high. Yu Qingfa, Mr. Fan's cousin, 30 years old, complains that he hasn't received the money the government promised, unlike others with political connections. The far-off community the government designated had no jobs, he says. Of trying to hold the government to its promises, he says, "The mountain is tall and the emperor is far away."
An hour's drive upstream, in a Chongqing satellite city, lawyer Zhou Litai is putting the finishing touches on a new office he believes will soon be busy with claims from a new, even bigger wave of migrants in the Three Gorges region. This summer, Mr. Zhou received about 1,000 claims related to relocations connected with another dam, convincing him there was more work coming. "The law and policies are good, but there are problems with how the local government implements them," says the lawyer, who has become well known in China for representing migrant workers from the Chongqing region in disputes with factory employers.
Mr. Fan, now managing a local pharmacy, is among those suing over his farming family's losses from the first relocation. He says he was given about $2,000 by the local government. Local officials say they donated to the family about twice as much and deny any responsibility for the accident.
Local courts refused to hear Mr. Fan's case at first, and when they did, sided with the local officials. A few weeks ago, he traveled several hours from his village to the Second People's Court of Chongqing to file an appeal. He climbed up the marble steps of the new courthouse, overlooking the swollen Yangtze, to file the papers, and returned home where he is caring for his daughters while running the small pharmacy. To help make enough money, his wife is working in a jewelry factory in Guangdong, about 1,500 miles away.
Mr. Fan says he is pressing the legal case because he wants the government to acknowledge responsibility for his parents' deaths and pay more. "They died for the Three Georges Dam," Mr. Fan says. "They died for the state. The state owes this to them."
Kersten Zhang in Beijing and Bai Lin in Shanghai contributed to this article
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