Chinese resettlement expert Wei Yi has warned that new regulations governing the relocation of more than one million people whose homes will be flooded by the Three Gorges dam are likely to fail.

The new regulations, drafted over the past two years, and approved by the State Council last month, were introduced in an attempt to rid the world’s largest civil works project of corruption and to quell civil strife over forced resettlement. Dr. Wei, who writes under a pseudonym for fear of government reprisals, argues that the new regulations inadequately deal with the serious problems afflicting the Three Gorges dam.

Dr. Wei first stunned the world in February 1999 when he published a critical review of the Three Gorges resettlement operation in a Beijing-based think-tank journal of state policies, called Strategy and Management. His article received world-wide press coverage. While the new regulations show that dam officials have learned some lessons from their past resettlement mistakes, serious problems remain unresolved, Dr. Wei says.

The new regulations, for example, fail to eliminate the problem of “fake migrants” — people who through corruption and cronyism, manage to claim limited resettlement funds even though their homes and businesses are not being flooded by the dam’s reservoir. In fact, the government has made matters worse, Dr. Wei argues, by adding new state employees and ex-convicts to the list of people who can claim resettlement funds if they are moving into, or back to respectively, the reservoir area.

The growing resentment by legitimate resettlers against fake migrants “will become an explosive problem in future,” warns Dr. Wei.

The new regulations also fail to address the coercive techniques being used by frantic local officials to clear their areas of occupants in time for the 2003 filling of the reservoir. Under the banner of “resettlement governed by the legal system” local officials are lying to their residents, saying circumstances are favorable in the “distant” resettlement areas. When these residents express skepticism — often based on the personal testimonies of their cheated predecessors — local officials bring in the police to force reluctant migrants to move.

If this situation is allowed to continue, Dr. Wei fears a “historic tragedy” will be repeated. Here Dr. Wei is referring to the sorry history of Chinese dam building in which millions of citizens were forcibly moved to distant areas. Unable to reestablish their livelihoods and communities there, they returned to their homeland region only to live landless and penniless in refugee-like conditions. More than six million dam-refugees are thought to live in impoverished conditions in China today.

As for ridding the Three Gorges project of corruption, which has become epidemic, Dr. Wei congratulates the government for trying to deal with the problem, but condemns the means. The new regulations rely on “traditional administrative measures” rather than by improving the legal system, and allowing press scrutiny and public oversight. “Without appropriate decentralization of power, and without transparency and democracy in resettlement policy decision-making and the use of relocation funds, more problems with the management of resettlement funds will be unavoidable,” he warns.

Dr. Wei also points out that the new rules, in an attempt to put a cap on runaway resettlement costs, deny funding to submerged areas to upgrade their industrial enterprises and infrastructure when they build anew. “This makes the state’s prior commitment to support the rebuilding of the reservoir area and the reorganization of industry an empty promise,” he says.

While the authorities were clearly alarmed by the huge floods along the Yangtze River in 1998, and have given protection of the environment more prominence in the new regulations as a result, says Dr. Wei, the new environmental regulations are too “vague and general” to have much effect.

The new regulations replace those of the former premier Li Peng which resulted in widespread corruption of resettlement funds and environmental problems — massive soil erosion, landslides and flooding caused by resettlers carving out new farms on steep hillsides in the reservoir area. The ensuing chaos led to the virtual suspension of all resettlement construction by early 1999. Since then the new regulations have been under revision, and were approved by the State Council on Feb. 15 of this year.

According to Dr. Wei’s analysis, however, the new regulations will do little to alleviate the chaos that now surrounds the world’s largest mass migration effort. Of the 1.2 million who will ultimately be displaced by the Three Gorges dam, 294,000 have already moved, and 265,000 must move by the year 2003 when the reservoir is scheduled to be filled to the 135 metre mark.

For related articles see:

A complete english translation of Dr. Wei’s “Comments on the revised “Resettlement rules and regulations of the Three Gorges dam.”

A reprint of Dr. Wei’s article in Strategy and Management, “Major problems and hidden troubles in the relocation of Three Gorges Project,” May 1999.

Three Gorges dam petitioners abducted, Three Gorges Probe: March 23, 2001.

Three Gorges petitioners ‘held by police’, South China Morning Post, March 21, 2001.