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DAM-L Sold down the river (fwd)
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From: Right to Water <right-to-water@iatp.org>
To: dianne@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca
Subject: Sold down the river
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 23:35:42 -0500
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Right to Water (right-to-water@iatp.org) Posted: 07/18/2001 By svarghese@iatp.org
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South China Morning Post
July 12, 2001
Sold down the river by CALUM MACLEOD
It was almost like a modern-day Noah's Ark - washed down the Yangtze River
from the heart of southwest China to the nation's eastern coast. Crowded
aboard the ferry last August were 800 peasant farmers, nursing children,
animals and seedlings on their three-day voyage to a New World, far from
the floods that will inundate their homes and ancestral lands.
But God was not up to his old tricks, flushing mankind of its sin. Rather,
the Chinese Communist Party is playing God, reshaping nature to match its
grandest vision, the Three Gorges Dam. Amid the mountain-moving scale of
the world's largest construction site, moving 1.3 million people might seem
comparatively simple. Yet resettlement is fast becoming the most
troublesome part of a thoroughly controversial project.
"We've been cheated," complains farmer She Qingshu, almost one year after
leaving Sichuan province for distant Jiangsu, more than 2,000 kilometres
downstream. "The Government treats us like vagrants, not migrants. There is
no way we would have left if we had known how poor conditions were going to
be."
Anger at their treatment spurs Mr She and other "Ark" passengers to risk
imprisonment in the fight for due compensation. As word filters back home
about the broken promises ahead, there is growing reluctance to leave among
the almost a million people still to be moved.
For the past decade, Mr She had seen the warning signs marching up the
riverbank but counting down his fate. Concrete markers pinpoint the
Yangtze's relentless rise towards his village in Guling township, Yunyang,
a poor county doomed by the dam. By 2003, the river will swallow the
135-metre mark. By 2009, its waters will climb to 175 metres and submerge
Mr She's home beneath a massive reservoir stretching back 590km from the
giant dam wall.
It might not be a pretty sight. Environmentalists predict waste water and
sewage from cities such as Chongqing will transform the lake into a massive
cesspool. Forty-year-old Mr She had little choice but to pack up his life
and family and climb aboard the Government's resettlement programme.
Abandoning the steep hills farmed by their ancestors, Mr She and his
neighbours sailed China's longest river to the broad plains of Dafeng
(Great Abundance) county in Jiangsu province.
Yet problems have been the only commodity in abundance in their new homes,
scattered across eight separate villages. With no hills to guide them, the
newcomers frequently lost their way. They were equally confused by the
local dialect. Their own Sichuan accents invite Dafeng natives to
overcharge them for everything from houses to beansprouts, as the Chinese
media reports that Yangtze dam migrants enjoy generous state subsidies. It
is a cruel misconception, but government graft is hardest to endure.
"Officials at every level take money from the resettlement funds," charges
farmer Qian Yang. The $38 billion relocation budget has proved a windfall
for corrupt officials on the mainland. Beijing acknowledges the loss of at
least $1.9 billion, while the intended recipients like Mr Qian and Mr She
are left shortchanged with payments under 10,000 yuan (about HK$9,400) -
one third of their expected compensation.
It had sounded such a good deal. Millions of migrants leave Sichuan every
year with little but the bags on their backs, and dreams of a better life
in more prosperous eastern and coastal China. Mr She was promised
compensation, a new house and farmland, free electricity and education for
his three children. But he actually received less than the local average of
2mu (0.13 hectares) per person, and local school bills are double the cost
back home.
Besides blinding yellow fields of oil-seed rape, Mr She showed a recent
visitor around the house he bought for 17,000 yuan in the village of Lefeng
(Happy Abundance). The local party secretary happily sold the property to
fund his own flight to urban China. The roof might leak, but the house
feels spacious - until 20 other Ark passengers, chosen as village
representatives, drop by to protest their plight and treatment by an
uncaring bureaucracy.
"If we had known more about the policy, we would have demanded full payment
before we left," claims Li Duanxiang, a 45-year-old farmer and timber
merchant. Until a sympathetic official last autumn leaked a copy of the
internal handbook used to brief Communist Party cadres in Sichuan, the
Dafeng migrants were ignorant of their full rights.
Mr Li, She Qingshu and other migrant representatives pay regular calls on
Dafeng county officials, who deny the migrants are owed anything, blame
their home county for any false promises, and refuse access to the
agreement on compensation signed between Dafeng and Yunyang. The lack of
communication undermines government arguments that more than half the
approximately 30,000-yuan compensation per person was slated for
infrastructural development in their new homes. The migrants are adamant
they have been tricked.
"This is not a government that truly serves the people," suggests a Chinese
sociologist and resettlement expert who uses the pseudonym Wei Yi and has
studied the Yunyang county case. "Officials serve their superiors and
themselves," he says. "They don't feel responsible for those below them, so
they don't solve the problems but only suppress them, and shut the mouths
of 'troublemakers'. Their attitude is: 'as long as it doesn't explode
during my term of office, then everything's fine'."
But the fuse is burning ever shorter. Although journalists and academics
are barred from the most restive townships, credible accounts still emerge
of protests involving thousands of people. The authorities react with
violence and intimidation to subdue residents who are unwilling to leave.
Local anger is galvanising the migrants into organised action. Dozens of
petitioners have travelled to Beijing to entreat the central Government's
help. In January this year, Mr Li was among 180 family representatives
chosen by the 800 Dafeng migrants to return home up the Yangtze and
confront Yunyang officials about the missing money.
During 36 hours of negotiations, they were given no food or water and slept
on the floor of Yunyang city hall. "You are not our responsibility
anymore," Mr Li was told. "Your hukou is no longer here," officials said in
reference to the all-important household registration requiring China's
citizens to live and work only in their permanent residence. After berating
the returnees for their "illegal" journey home, officials claimed that all
necessary compensation had been paid. Nearly 100 policemen forced the
migrants to leave.
Tan Tianguo, the Yunyang official responsible for Jiangsu-bound settlers,
remembers the incident differently. "When they came, I and other leaders
received them, and patiently explained the policy," he told the South China
Morning Post. "In the end, they all willingly went back to Dafeng. An
extreme minority deliberately caused trouble, and the others were cheated
and fooled by them. There is absolutely no corruption. I can promise you
not a single cent was deducted. Who dares to make money illegally from the
Three Gorges Dam?"
Yet, as Mr Tan knows full well, more the 100 officials who dared and lost
now reside in jail, although hundreds more escape punishment. The
temptations offered by the $195 billion project force Beijing into periodic
crackdowns against graft, but whistle-blowers are in equal danger. In March
this year, police arrested four elderly farmers from Gaoyang township who
dared to reveal the coercion and corruption endemic in the resettling
process. Seized while petitioning the central Government in Beijing, they
are charged with "disturbing public order", "leaking state secrets", and
"maintaining illicit relations with a foreign country" - in other words,
talking to the international press.
Their real crime was to stand up against officials who bullied migrants,
withheld compensation and lined their own pockets by exaggerating the
number of people to be moved and land to be submerged. Running a similar
risk of imprisonment, Li Duanxiang and She Qingshu followed their fruitless
return to Yunyang in January with an equally frustrating trip to Beijing.
The response to peaceful protests against any aspect of the Three Gorges
Dam has been predictably harsh. He Kechang, one of the four would-be
petitioners arrested in March, is reported to be ill after police beatings.
His wife, Xiong Dezhen, has been warned by Yunyang county officials to
expect a heavy sentence at his imminent trial. "They say his mistakes are
'very serious'. I'm scared to death," Ms Xiong says. "My husband smuggled
out a note saying his health was bad, and he is afraid he can't survive for
much longer. He asked our son to look after his grandmother."
Like relatives of the other three detainees, Ms Xiong has been denied all
access to her husband since his arrest. "This is illegal," notes the
sociologist, Wei Yi. "And so is preventing them from handing a petition to
higher authorities. The Government says this shangfang [method of
petitioning] is a legal channel for complaint." But silencing dissent is
simple for a party that operates far above the law.
Back in Dafeng, Mr She and Mr Li are downcast at news of Mr He's impending
sentence. "I trusted the Government would deliver what they promised," says
Mr Li. "Everybody cried when we had to leave the land where we lived for
generations. I had to sell our pigs and furniture so cheaply. We made such
a sacrifice, but we were treated so badly."
The migrants' determination to get their due threatens further clashes with
bureaucrats who believe their duties are fulfilled. "As far as I know, the
majority of them are happy," says Hong Weixin, a Dafeng official
responsible for resettlement.
"I have been to their homes, and they have settled very well. I don't know
who promised them free schooling; it's not included in the agreement," he
says of one of the migrants' fondest hopes, inflated by gushing state media
reports. "On average, their land is the same as the local people. Maybe
some received more than others, but we did our best to help them. Peasants
are peasants, after all."
She Qingshu is almost immune to such prejudice after months of hunting for
accountability in fancy government offices, often built with resettlement
funds. When only lip service is paid to press scrutiny or public oversight,
people in power can easily ignore the complaints of China's lowliest class.
Yet despite the odds, China's peasants are standing up to challenge the
elite. In countless incidents from east to west, they rage against greedy
officials, excessive taxation and misappropriation of resources. In growing
numbers, they could one day terrify Party Central.
Like most Chinese farmers, these are unlikely dissidents. She Qingshu and
He Kechang are not blocking progress as solidified in the monstrous Three
Gorges Dam.
They ask only for Beijing to keep its word and ensure fair implementation
at the rice-roots level. But under the present political system, that is
asking for the impossible.
"We don't oppose the Government," affirms tractor driver Shui Yuancun on a
visit to Mr She's home. "The policy is good. The Three Gorges Dam will
bring many benefits, such as cheaper power and better water control, with
no disadvantages at all."
Mr Shui and the rest of China have more-pressing concerns than the
disappearance of the world-renowned Three Gorges scenery. "I don't usually
say much," he adds, looking down at his frayed shoes. "If you allow us
enough to eat, peasants will never make trouble; but now, we can't go on
living. I am over 50, I've got nothing to lose," he says, his voice rising
with long-suppressed rage.
"I will go to Tiananmen Square and make the people of Beijing listen to the
angry peasants' voice. I will wear a white cloth, cut three holes for my
head and arms, and write on the front: 'central Government, solve our
problems correctly! The Yunyang county sky is dark. We want to see the sun
again'."
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