Visitors to Wang Baoying’s new house must tread softly or they will frighten her son. The four-year-old boy is not afraid of strangers. He is terrified his home will fall down. Wang’s concrete home, built this year to resettle migrants from China’s latest and greatest hydro-engineering project, wobbles when she walks. One neighbour’s floor has completely collapsed. Another’s bedroom is tilting. There are cracks in many walls.
Wang discovered the problem three days after moving in to Shuitianyang new village. “It’s terrible. The authorities told us this would be a perfect home,” she said.
The former farmer is one of 345 000 people being relocated in a desperate bid to ease Beijing’s drought crisis by transfusing water from the Yangtze basin, 1 277 kilometres to the south. Her old home and farmland will soon be flooded by the central leg of the three vast channels of the R500-billion South-North water diversion, a 50-year project to replenish China’s arid north.
Though Wang cried when she left her home in Xichuan, east central China, village leaders and propaganda slogans assured her the nation needed the sacrifice. Migrants were promised new homes, compensation and farmland. But the reality, many are discovering, is shoddily constructed housing, money skimmed by officials, no jobs and a cold welcome from locals.
For the middle leg of the project the origin of the diversion is Danjiangkou, where bathers plunge into the Han River beneath a vast dam and a giant slogan on the concrete embankment: “People and Water in Harmony, North and South Both Benefit.” Paramilitary police guard the entrance to the reservoir beyond the barrier.
When the diversion channels are completed water will flow north to Beijing and buildings along the banks will be submerged. Resettlement from these areas is due to be complete by October.
China is accustomed to such migration: countless millions of farmers have been moved to make way for city expansion and new airports, factories and roads.
Forced relocation
Hydro-engineering projects account for a major share of this human torrent. Between 1949 and 1999, 17.5-million people were relocated for dams. Since then, the pace has accelerated because of mega-projects such as the Three Gorges dam, which has forced the relocation of 1.5-million people, and the South-North diversion.
Many families have been resettled more than once. Zhang Guangren, an elderly woman who farms a small plot next to Danjiangkou reservoir, was forced by dam projects to move twice during her youth. Now her son must leave his nearby apartment, which will be flooded when the water levels are raised for the diversion.
She says the compensation — 40 000 yuan — is not enough to buy a new home, but there is no choice.
The government is building 85 schools, 71 clinics and 3.2-million square metres of new housing. Compensation is higher than before and there is a little more consultation. But it is also being pushed through more quickly. It has taken 18 years to move everyone from the Three Gorges area, but the diversion resettlement is taking place over just two years.
State media insists the relocation is moving smoothly, but when 30 relocated people were interviewed in three villages in Nanyang, Henan province, in east central China, only one was glad to have moved. Eight reluctantly accepted the sacrifice and the other 21 were furious.
Without exception, the longer they had been in their new homes, the less they liked them.
Zhang Jianchao was furious that local hospitals would not deliver his daughter-in-law’s baby. In a panic he hired a car and drove his son and wife 160 kilometres back to their old town for the birth. “It was very worrying and expensive,” said the former silkworm farmer, who is now landless and jobless and lives with his large family on a government allowance of 100 yuan per person per month. He says his new home is half the size of his old place because local officials cheated him of fair compensation.
The most common complaint is of official corruption. Villager after villager said their compensation was skimmed by cadres, usually by undervaluing the farmers’ land and over-estimating their own holdings.
No shared sacrifices
“I can accept that it will take time for us to make a living in our new homes, but it is not fair that the officials have profited. We were told that the sacrifice would be shared,” said Chen Xinfeng [name changed], who runs a small restaurant.
Propaganda slogans on walls and banners strung across the road urge residents to play a patriotic role in the key state-level project. Many urge local communities to welcome the newcomers. “The waters of Danjiangkou are fresh and sweet. My heart is linked to the new migrant’s heart,” proclaims one poetic exhortation.
But friction between the old and new communities seems to be worsening. At Liangzhuandong, village migrants who moved in a year ago gathered to express grievances, including inadequate compensation, unfulfilled land promises, poor water quality and fights with locals.
They are unhappy they have not received a share of local farmland, as promised. The old residents complain their new neighbours are uneducated people from the mountains.
Each accuses the other of theft. This summer the tension erupted into violence when a fight between two individuals reportedly escalated rapidly into a melee involving several hundred.
Last November police clashed with thousands of migrants in Qianjiang city protesting about shoddy housing and inadequate compensation, according to Radio Free Asia.
Liu Guixian, the director of the Nanyang Relocation Office, said these cases were exceptions. “Some new migrants get along with locals, some don’t. It will take time to mix cultures and habits,” he said. He insisted the damaged homes would be repaired and the villagers would receive land and compensation by November.
Drain on government funds
In a cable dated August 8 2008 released by WikiLeaks, the United States embassy said the diversion was poorly conceived and unlikely to be completed.
The eastern and central routes might ultimately serve their intended purpose, it said, but the western route could lead to an irreversible drain on government funds.
The US diplomats said the money would be much better spent on water conservation and improved irrigation. —