Letter submitted by Gaoyang migrants to top authorities in Beijing

 

We migrants displaced by the Three Gorges dam from Gaoyang town,
Yunyang county, Chongqing municipality, are writing to ask for your
help. We wish to report offences and wrongdoing committed by officials
of Yunyang county and Gaoyang town.

 

Some local officials have failed to properly fulfill their duty in
carrying out the resettlement policies issued by the central
government. They have tried every means possible to pocket money
earmarked for resettlement projects, leading to a major shortfall in
funding. In the name of "resettlement by legal means," they have used
police to force us from our homes. If we migrants voice any complaints,
we are arrested and even sentenced. We feel strongly that our basic
civil rights have been ignored and our interests not protected.

 

With the distortion of the central government’s resettlement policy
and the misuse or theft of relocation funds, we migrants are having
real difficulty peacefully relocating and successfully resettling – not
to mention getting rich, as government and project authorities
promised. Unless urgent and effective measures are taken, we are going
to suffer more hardship and misery, which will shake our faith in the
party and the government, tarnish the image of the state and jeopardize
the progress of the entire resettlement program.

 

One of the most disappointing aspects of our relocation is that
local governments, along with the resettlement bureau, changed the
original policy that had encouraged migrants to move on their own,
choosing their own destinations or finding relatives and friends to
live with. We rural migrants welcomed this policy and co-operated with
the resettlement bureaus in looking for places and people willing to
receive us.

 

In accordance with this policy, more than 6,000 people from Gaoyang
moved to Zhongxiang, Dangyang, Songzi and Jiangling counties in Hubei
province, Wanzhou and Kaixian counties in Chongqing, Xinye county in
Henan, and as far away as Hainan in the south, and Shaanxi and even
Xinjiang in the north. Unfortunately, these distant migrants became
unhappy with the corruption they encountered, whereby money earmarked
for their resettlement was misused or pocketed by local officials in
charge of the schemes. When these migrants sought help from higher
authorities in Wanzhou and Chongqing, they received no response.

And so our representatives, He Kechang, Jiang Qingshan and Ran Congxin, travelled to Beijing to report on the migrants’ situation and on official wrongdoing. They were arrested in Beijing and jailed in Yunyang [another petitioner, Wen Dingchun, had been detained earlier in Yunyang].

Ran Congxin’s house: Demolished while he was in jail.

 

In defiance of higher authorities, who asked Yunyang to let the four
men go, Yunyang party boss Huang Bo ordered that they be imprisoned for
terms of two and three years. He Kechang is still in jail.

 

The case of Zouma village in Gaoyang provides a good example of our
problems. Responding to a request from local rural migrants, the
village heads, Yu Qimou and Yang Biqing, travelled to Shadaoguan town
in Songzi county, Hubei province, where they investigated conditions
and discussed with local officials the possibility of settling Zouma
migrants there.

 

Shadaoguan officials responded positively to the idea. They decided
that in order to settle the Three Gorges rural migrants properly, they
would hand over a large piece of good-quality farmland and allow the
newcomers to establish a special community in which they could have
their own grassroots administration. The migrants in Zouma were excited
to learn of the promised conditions at the Shadaoguan resettlement
site, and many expressed a desire to move there.

 

The Zouma village leaders came to an agreement with the local
officials in Hubei. But when Mr. Yu and Mr. Yang reported this to
Gaoyang town officials, the latter refused to sign the agreement
because no Gaoyang officials had been involved in the negotiations. It
is widely believed that the real reason the Gaoyang officials rejected
the proposal is because the Hubei officials know the resettlement
policy and compensation standards so well [because many Hubei residents
are also affected by the Three Gorges dam] that the Gaoyang officials
would have no way of siphoning off any of the resettlement money, as is
their usual practice.

 

In accordance with the official resettlement policy, several hundred
migrants from Gaoyang bought homes in Wanzhou [the largest city between
Chongqing and Yichang], where they believed they would have the best
chance of re-establishing their livelihoods and supporting their
families. Many of the migrants used all their savings to buy these
houses. Another group of migrants found relatives and friends in other
parts of the country with whom they could live. The two forms of
resettlement were totally in line with the official policy issued by
the State Council.

 

However, the Gaoyang government refused to hand over the money that
was due to them in compensation for their displacement. Instead, and
despite strong opposition from local rural migrants, the government of
Yunyang county forced all rural migrants to move in groups to Jiangjing
city and Tongliang county.

 

Workers in various Gaoyang government departments, including
primary-school teachers, were organized into special work teams to
conduct these forced evictions. Gaoyang party boss Ding Shengming told
the relocation teams: "Each worker is responsible for two or three
migrant households. Our purpose is simple: You just drive them away as
soon as you can, by all means and at any cost. You will get a reward of
200 yuan RMB each time you are successful in driving away one migrant.
But you will be punished if you are unsuccessful, and a fine of 20 yuan
will be deducted from your salary for each migrant who doesn’t move."

 

Under great political pressure, the relocation workers worked hard
at their task. In the face of this unprecedented campaign, combined
with threats and intimidation, many migrants had no choice but to move
to Tongliang or Jiangjing in Chongqing municipality, 500 or 600
kilometres away from their place of origin. Those who bought homes in
Wanzhou, or who had found relatives and friends to live with, had to go
into hiding to avoid the relocation workers. …

 

Another major problem with the resettlement from Gaoyang is that
many migrants have become homeless, including those who bought homes in
Wanzhou or who found relatives with whom to live and who are scheduled
to relocate in the third phase of the resettlement operation [2004-05].
With their houses now demolished and having received no resettlement
compensation money, they are living like refugees, but nobody in
authority cares about them. Anyone who tries to seek help from higher
authorities is likely to be detained.

 

The migrants who remain in Gaoyang have no basic civil rights. The
relationship between the affected groups and local officials has become
much more strained since the relocation campaign began in Gaoyang. If
the problems are unresolved, past resettlement-related tragedies – such
as occurred with the Sanmenxia and Liujiaxia dams on the Yellow River and the Xinanjiang reservoir in Zhejiang province in the 1960s and 1970s – will be repeated with Three Gorges.

 

We don’t like to see such trouble occurring with the Three Gorges
project, but we have received no response to our repeated appeals to
the Resettlement Bureau of the Three Gorges Project Construction
Committee in Beijing. We are asking for your help.

 

All we want is for the policies of the central government to be
enforced, so that we can be resettled properly and start rebuilding our
lives. We sincerely hope that you will address our situation and send a
work team here to conduct a thorough investigation. You will discover
that everything we have reported is absolutely true. We look forward to
seeing you soon.

 

– Migrants from Gaoyang, Yunyang county, Chongqing municipality
(April 12, 2003)

Notes: Sanmenxia: Begun in
1957 and completed in 1962, the big dam on the Yellow River displaced
320,000 people in Henan and Shaanxi provinces. The project proved a
disaster because of rapid silt accumulation that threatened China’s
ancient capital of Xian with flooding. Many Sanmenxia migrants had
great difficulty building new lives in remote resettlement sites in
China’s far northwest, and they waged a long struggle to be allowed to
return to the reservoir area.

Liujiaxia: About 35,000
people were relocated for the dam, completed in 1969 on the Yellow
River in Gansu, one of China’s most impoverished provinces. Many of the
displaced were plunged deeper into poverty because of the difficulties
of ekeing out a living on the steep slopes of higher ground.

Xinanjiang: More than
300,000 people were moved to make way for this dam in Zhejiang
province, begun in 1957 and completed in 1960. Migrants were relocated
with very little compensation or land, and no housing provided, and
many lobbied for years to move back to their old region.

 

Translated by Three Gorges Probe (Chinese) editor Mu Lan.