Migrant leaders languish in jail, one year on

By Patricia Adams on March 12, 2002 • ( Leave a comment )

Kelly Haggart

March 12, 2002

Four men detained for attempting to petition authorities in Beijing about corruption in the Three Gorges resettlement operation remain in prison, one year after their arrest.

Early reports said they had been ill-treated in custody and held incommunicado. Details of their current situation are unknown.

He Kechang, Jiang Qingshan and Ran Congxin were arrested in Beijing on March 12 last year. Police seized Wen Dingchun a few days earlier in Gaoyang, a town in the heart of the Three Gorges reservoir area about 225 km from the dam.

In the most recent Chinese media report on the case, an official newspaper revealed in November that Mr. He has been sentenced to three years in prison and the three other petitioners have received two-year terms.

They were convicted of “disturbing public order,” in the first case related to “disrupting Three Gorges resettlement work,” the Legal Daily (Fazhi Ribao) reported. [Migrant leaders sentenced for resettlement appeals]

The men, in their 50s and 60s, had been chosen by residents of Gaoyang to bring the misuse of resettlement funds to the attention of top Chinese leaders. The town is in Yunyang, one of the counties most affected by the dam. More than 120,000 Yunyang residents are being forced to move, including 13,000 people from Gaoyang.

The migrants’ representatives tried to present evidence to Beijing authorities that state funds earmarked for compensation payments in Yunyang had been systematically embezzled by corrupt local officials.

In an interview more than a month after the arrests, Qi Lin, director of the government’s Three Gorges Resettlement Bureau, was quoted as saying no one had been detained for resisting resettlement or filing complaints. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “No government at any level would do something so stupid.” [China dams up dissent of Three Gorges project]

Officially, 1.2 million people are to be resettled because of the dam, though critics of the project predict the final figure will be closer to two million.

“This is the largest forced resettlement going on in the world today,” said Patricia Adams, executive director of Probe International. “These four migrant representatives organized themselves in a democratic fashion to collect evidence of corruption and submit it in good faith to the proper authorities, and they landed in jail. They ought to be released.

“A respected Chinese academic is predicting half a century of social chaos as a result of the resettlement operation,” Ms. Adams added. “What we’ve found from our work on other big dams is that people don’t forget what they’ve lost — decades later they will still be demanding compensation. This issue won’t go away and is certain to be extremely destabilizing for China.”