Life behind the Three Gorges Dam
CHINA - With limited access to arable land and transportation, opportunities are scarce in the shadow of the great project, Hu Yinan reports from Zigui in Hubei province.
For years, Wang Xiaoyun, 42, has not felt like venturing outside her hometown in central Hubei province. There is nowhere to go.
As she sits all day on a low stool in a roadside grocery store, she hopes for an occasional passer-by on her side of the deep Xiangxi River.
Wang fondly remembers when the river was so shallow that she could walk across it as an 11-year-old. But the landscape that gave rise to those memories is gone.
Guizhou town, the seat of Zigui county until 1998, was submerged in 2003 when the area behind the Three Gorges Dam became a lake. Zigui's new county seat, Maoping, is nearby, just west of the dam. About 100,000 people were relocated here (40,000 from Guizhou alone), and the Xiangxi River now runs about 15 meters deep.
Very few among those who moved to higher ground north of the river bother to take one of the 10 daily ferries south to Maoping, about a 10-minute ride. For them, Zigui, which boasts 3,200 years of history and is the site of Qu Yuan's (one of China's greatest poets) suicide, the event behind Monday's Dragon Boat Festival, is no longer the same.
The Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project, covers 20 districts and counties along the Yangtze River and affects a population of 29.4 million.
This is a vulnerable crowd. Eleven of the localities were recognized by the State as "particularly poor" in 2002. The reservoir area's per capita GDP was only 40 per cent of the national average, according to the Chongqing Migration Bureau.
On May 18, the State Council, China's cabinet, announced for the first time that "problems that demand prompt solutions exist" in the project's resettlement of residents, ecological protection, and prevention and control of geological disasters. The project's follow-up plan says that by 2020, those resettled as a result of the dam should expect to live the average life of residents in Hubei province and Chongqing municipality, which the reservoir spans.
About 1.3 million people have been resettled since 1993, fewer than 20 per cent of them outside the reservoir area. The rest had to move to higher ground. The plots there are smaller and, because the slopes are unstable, most are ill suited to farming.
With limited access to arable land, compensation, preferential policies, education and transportation, many are still struggling in sheer poverty.
Idea dates to 1918
Debates about possible impacts of the dam on nature and the conditions of those who had lived in its footprint have been intense. But for a river that flooded in almost every decade in the 2,000 years of China's feudal history, most scientists agreed that something had to be done.
First proposed by Dr Sun Yat-sen in 1918, the idea of the Three Gorges Dam inspired generations of youths in the following decades. Designing the dam was once a career goal for Ma Ho-ling, father of Taiwan's current leader, Ma Ying-jeou. (The elder Ma instead became a senior cadre of the Kuomintang.)
The dam was to be jointly designed by Chinese and US experts as part of an agreement in 1946; US dam expert John Lucian Savage had already conducted field research. But the project was halted in May 1947 by the civil war and the dam's planning did not resume until 1955.
