Three Gorges Probe is serializing the translation of a fascinating, detailed account of the
years-long struggle for redress pursued by thousands of people who were plunged deeper into poverty by the construction of the Dahe dam. Many of the farmers uprooted for that dam, built 30 years ago on a Yangtze tributary in what is now Chongqing municipality, are being moved again for the Three Gorges project.

“To learn more about what goes on behind the scenes in China, this book about the ruinous consequences of one small dam is an excellent place to start,” Dai Qing writes in her introduction to the translation of this important work by sociologist Ying Xing.

The original Chinese version of the book, published under the title Dahe yimin shangfangde gushi (A Tale of Migrants Displaced by the Dahe Dam), was banned in China in 2002, but is available on our Chinese site. The on-line publication and translation of this book have been made possible by the Open Society Institute.

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The story so far:

In Chapter 1 of The Story of the Dahe Dam, Ying Xing described the mixed emotions of four people who watched the sluice-gate closing ceremony at the dam in July 1975.
One of these was engineer Zhu Yundun, who was worried that turbulent water discharged from the dam would scour the banks of the river downstream and wash away the area’s best farmland.

In Chapter 2, soon after the hydropower station went into operation, Zhu the engineer saw his worst fears materialize. One local leader recalled that after villagers lost their land to the raging river, ‘women in my production team were forced to go begging for sweet potatoes, and even potato leaves, to feed their families.’

In Chapter 3, after yet another calamity befell local people, a man who would play a pivotal role in their long struggle for compensation appeared on the scene. Articulate and savvy, Teacher Xu warned his ‘peasant brothers’: ‘Don’t you know that accusing officials of wrongdoing is like picking a fight with a tiger? Be careful not to wind up getting hurt yourselves!’

In Chapter 4, local officials went on the warpath against Teacher Xu after they realized he was the author of petitions that accused them of misusing and embezzling compensation
funds.

In this excerpt from Chapter 5, another feisty character who will play a lead role in the Dahe drama enters the fray, and senses danger in villagers’ plans to cause trouble at the hydropower station.

(Editor’s note: To protect his sources, the author uses pseudonyms for all people and places below the county level. We have retained these assumed names in the English edition.)

The Story of the Dahe Dam
by Ying Xing
Chapter 5 (excerpt):
Bending the rules

On June 13, 1984, a massive rainstorm hit Shanyang. Watching the reservoir water level rise rapidly, Dahe hydropower station head Liu Xingjian called the township government and said he was shocked at what he was seeing. The impending flood, he said, looked as  dangerous as the 1982 disaster. Without giving local people any advance warning, Liu
decided to lower the reservoir level by opening the dam’s sluice gates. This engulfed the river valley below the dam in a vast body of water, submerging more than 3,000 mu of cropland. Corn that was close to being harvested was completely ruined. Peasants, with tears in their eyes, raced to complain to village cadres, who in turn vented their anger at the township and district levels. But when Shanyang township officials reported the disaster to higher authorities, the prefecture government turned a deaf ear. Receiving no significant response from the various levels of government, local people had no choice but to take the traditional approach in coping with a desperate situation and head for the hydro
station to create a disturbance, as they had back in April 1980. An appeal submitted by station workers to the county government on June 26 described what happened next:

“From June 14 to 17, led by village heads and party
secretaries, more than 300 people from the downstream area below the dam came to the hydropower station and kept pestering the station leaders. Peasants from Baiyang and Liuping villages were persuaded to stop the disturbances, but about 50 peasants from Xinhua and Bolin villages dashed around wildly, behaving disgracefully. They caused disturbances for several days and nights, and station staff had great difficulty doing their jobs. At noon on June 17, a group of peasants ignored security staff and overran the staff canteen. They dragged the cooks away and ate up all the food that had been prepared for the more than 100 station employees. “From June 26 onward, several dozen peasants came to the station and caused trouble almost every day. They demanded that station leaders sign a document they had prepared and
threatened that if they refused to sign, they would mobilize more villagers and kidnap the station leaders. They put it this way in their document: ‘The Dahe hydropower station is 100 times more merciless than the devastating floods. The dam is more cruel and more violent than the devil, and it determines whether local people live or die. We will not retreat. We have made up our mind to perish along with the dam.'”

The villagers involved in the previous disturbance at the dam, in 1980, were from the erosion zone. This time, the protesters were from Xinhua and Bolin, villages far downstream of the dam, beyond the officially designated erosion zone. They were unhappy that villagers in the erosion zone were considered disaster victims eligible for government
compensation. By contrast, the peasants of Xinhua and Bolin had received nothing for their losses caused by the floods that had become more devastating in frequency and intensity since the construction of the Dahe dam. The hydro station believed that while it bore
responsibility for the erosion near the dam, villages as far away as Xinhua and Bolin were not in the affected zone and so were no concern of theirs. The Xinhua and Bolin villagers were upset about being treated differently, when they too were suffering terribly.
The two villages were trying to secure a greater share of the 100,000 yuan that was supposed to go to villages outside of the eight groups in the erosion zone. When the relationship between the local governments and the station had become strained, the district and township had signalled that villages that were most active in fighting the station would get the biggest slice of the pie. And so Xinhua and Bolin villages were out in front now, doing their best to cause mayhem at the station. …

Tailor Wang enters the fray

Wang Xueping, a tailor who had set up his stall outside the calcium-carbide factory, had managed to persuade the Baiyang and Liuping villagers to stop causing trouble at the Dahe station. Wang recalled how he convinced the villagers to call off their action:

“I said they had better report their problems to higher
authorities through the proper channels and in a disciplined manner. I said it was wrong and illegal for them to be creating a disturbance in this way. I was doing my sewing at that spot, so I had a lot of opportunity to talk with them about the hows and whys of what they were doing. And I said, ‘Just don’t do it the way you’re doing it.'”

Tailor Wang went on to recount how he had become involved in the villagers’ appeals:

“I had been sewing clothes near the factory since 1984. I
saw the peasants going back and forth across the bridge [leading to the Dahe station] almost every day. So I asked them why they were going there, and they said: ‘To fill our stomachs.’ The local cadres didn’t want to fix their problems and had advised them to go to the station for help. So the peasants were going off to make trouble at the station. But I said this wasn’t a good way to solve their problems. The peasants listened to me carefully. They trusted me because of my experience. They knew I had made a living since a young age, wandering from place to place. They believed I was more experienced and knowledgeable than they were, so they asked me to take part in the appeals. At first, I didn’t intend to become involved, but the
production team heads and many other people asked me to join them. They particularly liked the fact that I was good at making friends and negotiating with all sorts of different people. And it’s true that I’ve always been happy to help others. So they said, ‘We really hope you can give us a hand on this issue.'”

Chatting with Tailor Wang, I learned that he had been born into a noble
family in Yunyang. His grandfather was a well-known doctor and lawyer
in the county seat, and his family had moved to Shanyang to escape the
fighting during the war with the Japanese. Tailor Wang’s father was not
well educated but was gifted in many ways, and particularly good at
calligraphy. Tailor Wang was not permitted to attend junior high school
or join the army because of his family’s political background. At the
age of 11, he began roaming from place to place, picking up work as a
porter, busboy, tailor and so forth. He was a brilliant
conversationalist, adept at friendship, and also very loyal to his
friends. As a result of his family background and personal experiences,
Tailor Wang was a steady, reliable and courageous man. He displayed
these traits even before he became involved in the appeals. He sensed
danger in the villagers’ plan to cause trouble at the station, and felt
that the crux of their problems – and the solution to their plight –
lay with local governments rather than with the Dahe station. He
pointed out the possibility of landing local cadres in hot water by
forcing an official admission of the problems with the calcium-carbide
factory. Tailor Wang also recalled his experience of working as a
labourer at the factory for a short period of time:

“We young men from five production teams affected by the
dam were required to work on the construction of the factory. We did heavy, dirty work such as transporting stones and bricks. But after the factory was completed, none of us was employed there. They [district and township officials] arranged jobs for their own relatives and friends at the factory. Several years later, we went to the factory asking for jobs but the township cadres drove us away with their fists. We became frightened and ran away.”

Tailor Wang told me he was well aware of the risks involved in confronting officials:

“My grandmother told me that accusing officials of
wrongdoing was as dangerous as beating a tiger and that it would bring enormous trouble to the family. She advised me never to do this, and I always bore her words in mind. So when I heard the peasants talking about making a disturbance, I told them again and again that it was no joke and that I was really scared.”

Tailor Wang said that if you take on a tiger and it is not killed, you
can get seriously hurt. Wang also realized that only by being well
organized could the peasants bring corrupt officials to justice,
protect the rights and interests of the affected people, and guarantee
the personal safety of the protest leaders. Tailor Wang enjoyed several
advantages that propelled him to the forefront of the struggle. He was
among the peasants affected by the Dahe dam, but local cadres had a
hard time pinning anything on him because he had worked for such a long
time as an itinerant labourer outside of Shanyang. He had the energy
and also the time to become involved in the struggle. Moreover, Wang
was able to do what Teacher Xu could not do: to work as a conductor at
the front of the stage. Tailor Wang became a firm supporter of Teacher
Xu, and both men shared the goal of seeing corrupt officials punished
for their wrongdoing. Tailor Wang’s appearance on the scene created the
distinction between front and back stages: He would work at the front,
while Teacher Xu was busy in the background.<a href="#⁸“>⁸

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Notes to this excerpt from Chapter 5:

<a title="⁸” name=”⁸“>⁸ In other circumstances, Teacher Xu would have been a perfect person to be out at the front of the stage. But on several counts he was unsuitable for the role of public organizer of the collective actions. For one thing, although his family’s fields were threatened by the dam-induced erosion, his income was not dependent on them (he was a primary-school teacher with a stable salary) and so he was not, strictly speaking, a member of the
afflicted group. He also had to fulfill his duties as a teacher, and so his time was not all that flexible. Finally, and most importantly, Teacher Xu had been an activist in the Cultural Revolution and so his own “problems left over from history” could give local cadres who were eager to go after him an excuse to do so. For all these reasons, the best role for him to play was that of behind-the-scenes mastermind.

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Chinese units of measurement:

• mu = 0.067 hectare or 0.165 acre (i.e., about 15 mu to a hectare or six mu to an acre)
• jin = 500 grams or 1.1 pound

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Translation edited by Three Gorges Probe (English) editor Kelly Haggart. The on-line publication (in Chinese and English) and translation of this book have been made possible by the Open Society Institute.

Click to read:

Introduction by Dai Qing
Chapter 1: Leftover problems of the Dahe Dam
Chapter 2: Down to the grassroots in Shanyang
Chapter 3: A flood of troubles
Chapter 4: A crowing rooster and the lonely ghosts
Chapter 5: Bending the rules
Chapter 6: In search of an honest judge
Chapter 7: The conflict heats up
Chapter 8: Good guys and bad apples
Chapter 9: Let them eat bread!
Chapter 10: Baiyang 16 goes into battle
Chapter 11: ‘Time to lay down the law’
Conclusion: Peasant protests: action and reaction