(December 27, 2005) The Economist asks: What happens to the villagers slated for resettlement who dare to protest? ‘We don’t dare to speak out,’ one villager says. ‘If we do, we’ll be arrested.’

In the village of Yaowan on the northern bank of the Yangtze River, some residents are dreading the imminent arrival of the demolition teams that will flatten their settlement and force its occupants to move elsewhere. Yaowan is one of hundreds of villages and dozens of towns that will be flooded after the world’s biggest hydroelectric dam blocks the Yangtze at the bottom of the scenic Three Gorges in June next year. Many in the reservoir area, 600km (375 miles) long, complain that the government’s resettlement programme is unfair and plagued by corruption. Yaowan’s citizens are particularly angry. In late May, hundreds of Yaowan’s inhabitants gathered to protest against what they say is the government’s failure to compensate them adequately for the loss of their land and houses. They blocked traffic attempting to pass through the village, which lies on a main road running through Fengjie County at the entrance to the gorges. Elderly villagers sat on rocks placed in the middle of the road, until the authorities lost patience. The government is fearful of unrest that could cast more doubt over the controversial project and complicate the task of relocating more than 1.2m people, or perhaps as many as 2m according to some Chinese experts. Criticism of the project is rarely allowed to appear in China’s state-controlled media. But in 1999 a Chinese academic wrote in a leading journal that the resettlement of reservoir-area inhabitants could become “an explosive social problem, a source of constant social instability in our country for the first half of the next century.” It already is a huge social problem. A scarcity of arable land means many of those resettled will have to move far from their homes.

The Economist, December 27, 2005