Alice Gu

July 9, 2007

China’s State Council has approved an additional 10 billion yuan (US$1.32 billion) in relocation money for the residents who move from the Three Gorges area, Xinhua news agency reported today.

This money will be added to the current 53.5 billion yuan of relocation fees, said the Three Gorges Project Construction Commission under the Cabinet. Up to 84 percent of the additional fees will be spent on residents in Chongqing Municipality, where most migrant residents are from.The remainder will be used for people in Hubei Province.

The commission held training courses today in Yichang City, Hubei, to standardize management and use of the money. The National Audit Office has said it uncovered project management problems amounting to nearly 500 million yuan, but they found no embezzlement of construction funds, according to Xinhua news agency.

"Overall quality control of the project was satisfactory and total investment was under control," it said.

The Chongqing government will move the last group of 100,000 residents from the Three Gorges dam by the end of 2008, as the final part of a plan launched in 1993 to resettle 1.35 million people. They will move from Kaixian County in Chongqing to make way for the gigantic Three Gorges reservoir when it is completed next year, said Wang Xian’gang, director of the Chongqing Municipal Relocation and Resettlement Bureau.

In central-southern Hubei Province, about 8,000 people will also be moved out of the reservoir area, local authorities said.

Altogether, 1.35 million people will say goodbye to their ancestral homes and settle elsewhere by the end of 2008, a year earlier than scheduled, officials said.

Chongqing authorities have relocated 1.03 million people, 1,392 businesses, two cities and 90 townships since the relocation project launched in 1993, Wang said. In Hubei Province, more than 250,000 people have been transferred from their homes in the planned reservoir area to other places since 1993.

By the end of last year, 54.4 billion yuan had been spent on the relocation project, Xinhua said. Another 45 billion yuan will help resettle residents. The huge hydroelectric station on the Yangtze River is expected to cost 78 billion yuan by the time it’s completed in 2009 – some 35 billion less than the original estimate more than 10 years ago.

Spending through the end of 2005 amounted to 64.2 billion yuan.