In the last ten years or more, over one million people have made way for the Three Gorges dam. Of those that lost land to the Three Gorges reservoir, most were settled onto higher ground while some were moved far away. But the resettlement is not over. By 2020, Chongqing municipality now plans to move as many as 2.3 million people—double the total population already displaced by the big dam—to the cities of Chongqing and Wanzhou. This ambitious-sounding plan has raised the question: what is behind the plan to move so many people in the reservoir area?

Three Gorges resettlers face difficulties

In Kaixian county, the heart of the Three Gorges reservoir, Chen Tianze, party secretary of Chongfu village (in Qukou town), says that he and his fellow villagers are willing to move again. As early as 1998, they moved uphill from the riverbank of Xiaojiang, a Yangtze tributary, earning the honour of  “first resettled village in Kaixian county.”
When asked why he and his fellows are so keen to move again, Chen put it simply: they have no jobs, no land, and no income except a monthly living allowance from the government of 50 yuan RMB (US$6.2) per person.

“You see, all our village’s rice paddy was there but now it is gone forever,” Chen said, standing in front of his new home and pointing to a large area below, where a myriad of ripples appear on the reservoir under the sunlight.

According to the government’s resettlement policy, people resettled onto higher ground were guaranteed at least 0.5 mu (1 mu=1/15 hectare) of farmland per person. “But in our village, only half the resettlers got land and what they did get amounted to less than 0.2 mu because some of the farmland was used to build houses and roads.” said Chen.

And what about the other half of the villagers? Chen explained that they were forced to change their household registration to “non-agricultural population.” In Chen’s case, he is still registered as a farmer but the status of his wife and children was changed to non-agricultural.

With a population of 2,496 people, the village once bustling and full of life is now very quiet except for the sound of old men and women playing mahjong. The young people and adult men have all gone to make a living in faraway coastal cities in Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces.

For Chen, the prospect of moving again has renewed hopes of building a new life among others displaced by the Three Gorges dam. He recalls a survey by Three Gorges Project Construction Committee officials last year which showed that, “at least 90 percent of resettlers surveyed are willing to move again.”

For Zhao Jiaqiang, a farmer in the same village, there’s a bigger problem. According to the government’s resettlement policy, only those people with houses below the submersion line qualified for compensation. Unfortunately, Zhao did not qualify because his house was just above the line. Without a penny of compensation from the government, he decided to build a new house himself because he didn’t want to be isolated living next to the rising waters. To pay for his new house,  he had no choice but to travel to Guangdong, where he worked on one construction site after another. His wife couldn’t help crying when talking about her husband, who has not returned home for more than two years now. More than 90 households were in the same situation as Zhao, and almost all of them say they want to be moved again. “Moving again would solve my house problem and it would be better if we can get a piece of farmland,” said Zhao’s wife.
But Zhao’s wife, Chen Tianze, and others who are so eager to move again will be really disappointed because, according to the government of Chongqing, neither compensation nor subsidy will be budgeted for the reservoir area’s twice-resettled people.

Other villagers, such as Yu Cailiu and Jiang Youcheng, don’t want to move. Unlike Chen and his fellow villagers, who are cherishing hope of better lives elsewhere, Yu Cailiu, a disabled man, says no to the idea of moving again. Jiang Youcheng, 76 years old, says it would be a better choice for the young people who can build a new life in the cities but no good for the old.

“I am too old to do that. I am a farmer anyway,” said Jiang, sitting in his yard, looking at the abandoned land below.

Three Gorges resettlers live in danger

Since the Chongfu villagers moved uphill from the riverbank they live in danger of geological disasters. Landslides have become one of the biggest concerns for the newly-settled villagers. In 2004, six years after the villager’s resettlement, dozens of metre-long cracks appeared in the slope behind the villagers’ houses. Party secretary Chen Tianze organized villagers to fill the gaps with earth carried up from the banks below, and he reported the situation to higher-level authorities.

Shortly after that, the county government sent a team of workers to build a huge concrete wall on the cracked slope from top to bottom, in an effort to prevent landslides or mud-rock-flow from damaging the villagers’ houses. On the top of the concrete wall, the workers wrote “Danger! High and steep slopes, keep away!”

According to a staff worker at the Kaixian county agency responsible for landslide and mud-rock-flow warnings, “In recent years, landslides and mud-rock-flows have occurred every year in the resettlement sites. We get anxious when it’s raining.”

Despite the new concrete wall in Chongfu village, a mud-rock-flow reached Yu’s backyard earlier this year. “Nobody got hurt,” said Yu, “but the cured meat and bean curd prepared for the Chinese New Year was washed away. What a pity!”
In 2004, a much bigger landslide occurred nearby in Qukou town. According to the county’s statistics, the Juping landslide, as it is known, had a volume of 32 million cubic metres and as it slid down the riverbank it left an enormous hole, 110 metres wide, 380 metres long and 20 metres deep. The local media reported that the huge landslide put Marshal Liu Bocheng’s former residence and grave in danger.

[TGP Editor’s note: Liu Bocheng (1892-1986) was a native of Kaixian county and one of ten men awarded the title of Marshal by Chairman Mao after the community party came to power in 1949.  Widely reported by the Chinese media, the Juping slide occurred on September 5, 2004, coinciding with big floods in Kaixian county. Sichuan Online reported that 126 people were successfully evacuated thanks to a warning from a nearby landslide monitoring station. The monitoring station was set up in 1991, before Three Gorges project construction got underway.]

Pollution a bigger threat than landslides

Commenting on the Juping landslide, Li Xuelian, a member of Kaixian county’s People’s Political Consultative Conference and head of the county’s fishery agency, said landslides are far from the biggest threat to Kaixian. “A series of pollution problems up and down the reservoir is the greatest hidden trouble for the county,” he said.

Li explains: According to the dam’s operating mode, the reservoir’s so-called ‘normal pool level’ is to be lowered to 145 metres every summer to make room in the reservoir for floodwater. The plan for raising the reservoir level to 175 metres is a big cause for concern particularly along the shore of the Three Gorges reservoir and the banks of upstream tributaries [in Kaixian county, for example]. This massive belt of land will be covered with water in winter and exposed in summer. When the reservoir level is lowered before the flood season, the receding waters will leave a variety of problems garbage and other waste will be left behind. Small pools of dirty, stagnant water will form a breeding ground for parasites and disease in the extreme summer heat. The newly-built Kaixian county seat will be surrounded by a 45-square kilometre stretch of ‘troubled belt.’

In his report to Chongqing municipality, Li says: “If this problem is not solved, it will affect the environment in the Three Gorges reservoir area and Kaixian county in particular. It poses a direct threat to the safety of people who live there and may even trigger an outbreak of disease.”

Not only Kaixian county but the entire Three Gorges reservoir is challenged either by geological disasters such as landslides and mud-rock-flows or by the ‘troubled belt’ of pollution. Also making the environment of the reservoir area worse are various economic activities associated with resettlement.

Two-time resettlers face uncertainties

The big question to be answered is how will Chongqing’s ambitious plan be carried out? When this South Weekend reporter asked government departments in Chongqing that had anything to do with the plan, they all gave more or less the same response: the framework has only been announced while the detailed plan is still in the making.

One thing seems certain: unlike resettlement to make way for the Three Gorges dam, the people affected by the latest plan will be able to decide whether or not they want to move again. Local residents will have a final say.

Another important difference this time is that people who want to move will receive neither compensation nor a living allowance from the government. According to Chongqing’s new policy, “The key to encouraging and attracting people from rural areas into urban areas lies in creating job opportunities.” New migrants will be settled in an ‘economic zone’ within one hour’s drive from downtown Chongqing and Wanzhou.

Knowing these differences, will villagers like Chen Tianze and Zhao Jiaqiang’s wife still want to move? It appears Chen will have no hope of farming again and Zhao’s wife will get no funding from the government to build a new home. They and many others may be driven away from everything they know, their farmland, their backyards, their livestock, all for this grand undertaking of industrialization and urbanization.

The cost of rural-urban migration

What is the cost of providing a job for resettlers in the cities? Huang Qifan, deputy mayor of Chongqing, made a calculation: “Without taking the cost of building infrastructure into account, providing a person with a job in the industrial or service sectors would require a budget of 300,000 yuan RMB (US$37,500).” Using his calculation, transferring as many as 2.3 million people from the reservoir area to the cities would require a budget of 690 billion yuan RMB (US$86 billion).

Providing employment is only the very beginning. With millions of people pouring into the cities, more programs and funds would be needed to transform farmers into urban citizens, such as housing, healthcare, education, social security and so forth. This would require at least 200,000 yuan RMB (US$25,000) per person. For 2.3 million people, a budget of 460 billion yuan RMB (US$57 billion) would be needed.

But what happens after the farmers “wash their feet and march to the cities” if the plan doesn’t go so well, and the big cities are unable to absorb them?

Liu Quanzhong, another Chongfu village leader, and in his sixties, said he’d rather stay than go anywhere. While having a family discussion on the issue, Liu insisted he would stay in the village even if his kids preferred to move again. “They can come back if they don’t feel good in the cities because I will be here with the house,” he said.

People like Liu  and Chen, and the entire population of 2.3 million people in the Three Gorges area, face an uncertain future, once again.