(May 3, 2009)

“Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the state has allocated a great deal of money to build more than 10 hydropower dams in Sichuan province, and the number of affected people has now reached 224,000. For a long time, problems have lingered as a consequence of dam construction, largely due to a low standard of compensation and shortage of available land in the resettlement zones. For example, in the case of Gongzhui hydro station on the Dadu River, a tributary of the Yangtze, 40 per cent of the peasants affected by dam construction have an average of less than 0.4 mu of farmland per head. In some villages the average is much lower – less than 0.1 mu per capita. In addition, a lack of other natural resources, and poor conditions related to agriculture, infrastructure and social services have all contributed to a miserable and difficult situation in the reservoir area. One-third of the people who have been displaced by dams are still living below the official poverty line, and these rural households are classified as ‘extremely poor.’ With problems such as the shortage of grain still unresolved, the affected people have undertaken collective actions, appealing to higher authorities for help. The poverty experienced by these people has become a critical political and social issue with significant ramifications for social stability and economic development in the reservoir area.”

– Head of the resettlement office of Sichuan province, excerpted from an article, “The situation and tasks related to population resettlement resulting from the construction of large hydro dams in Sichuan province,” published in the Ministry of Water Resources journal, Progress in Poverty Reduction in Water Conservancy Projects and Development of Reservoir Areas, 1997, 3: 1-2.

***

On April 3, 1992, the fifth plenary session of the seventh National People’s Congress approved a resolution to build the Three Gorges project, with 1,767 deputies voting for, 177 against and 664 abstaining. After more than half a century of debate, the big dam was going ahead. On August 19, 1993, the State Council proclaimed a set of regulations governing the Three Gorges resettlement operation, marking its transition from trial stage to formal start.

A few years later, in May 1997, I learned that the graduate school of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was recruiting PhD students to go to the Three Gorges area to work temporarily as local officials. I was excited, because I had been looking for a way to go to the grassroots level to gain a deeper understanding of rural China and local communities, and so I put myself forward as a candidate. On June 20, I was told that I would be sent to Yunyang, a poverty-stricken county in Chongqing municipality that is the most affected by the Three Gorges dam, and that I would work there as a vice-governor for a year. This chance opportunity not only took me to the Three Gorges area, but also inspired my research interest in population resettlement resulting from the construction of dams and reservoirs

On July 19, after travelling by boat for several hours, I arrived in Yunyang county in the heart of the Three Gorges reservoir region. After a brief greeting, Hu Xiang, party secretary of Yunyang, asked me what job I’d like to do. As temporary officials arriving from outside with no knowledge of local issues, we were called “vice-governors” but in fact were not supposed to be directly in charge of anything. Rather, we were assigned to work as aides to county leaders. I was given three choices, to work as an aide to the vice-governors in charge of Three Gorges resettlement, agriculture, or culture and education. Secretary Hu appeared to want me to work in the field of Three Gorges resettlement, and I readily agreed to his suggestion because that was what really interested me.

Secretary Hu brought me two books, Conditions in Yunyang County and Yunyang County Yearbook, so that I could begin to familiarize myself with the area. Yunyang was designated a county as early as the late period of the Warring States (475-221 BC). A 68-kilometre-long shipping section of the Yangtze and two tributaries on both banks of the big river provide Yunyang with water transport. With its rugged topography, the county (area: 3,649 square kilometres) can be described as qi shan, liang shui, yi fen tian – or 70 per cent mountain, 20 per cent water and 10 per cent farmland. In 1997, the county had a population of 1.23 million, with most of the people concentrated in river gorges and mountain valleys.

Yunyang is rich in natural resources but lags behind in economic development: 350,000 of its inhabitants have difficulty obtaining enough food to eat and clothes to wear. Yunyang is one of the Three Gorges region’s most poverty-stricken counties, and one reason for this stems from the years of uncertainty surrounding construction of the Three Gorges dam. For a long time, the state hesitated to invest in an area that would be flooded if the dam went ahead. Statistics show that only 98 yuan (US$12) per head of state funding was put into Yunyang in the entire 1950-85 period, less than 10 per cent of the national average during that time.

Despite their poverty, the people of Yunyang are renowned for their upright and unyielding personal qualities. As Conditions in Yunyang County puts it: “The inhabitants of Yunyang are descendants of the Ba people, who are honest, loyal, agile and brave, fond of forming associations, particularly with their kin, and evincing no fear of power and authority. They take their commitments very seriously, and value loyalty above wealth. They are ready to go through fire and water for a just cause, and to die the cruellest death for truth. They are generous with their money if someone is in need. They fight back fiercely if repressed, and seek to exact revenge by all means if cheated or swindled. Loyal citizens, dutiful sons, honest officials and righteous men are all respected and worshipped by people in the county. Dozens of temples in the region honour the memory of Guan Yu, Zhang Fei and Yue Fei. During the Cultural Revolution, Yunyang was one of the parts of the Three Gorges area that was most affected by chaos and vandalism, with more than 1,000 local people killed.”

The above passage echoes another description of the people of Yunyang, who are considered “intelligent and cunning, incorrigibly obstinate, and unafraid of authority.” I read that in an old book, Annals of Yunyang County, before leaving Beijing – and it made me wonder whether Yunyang wasn’t really a rather unruly place!

The politics of presentation

Toward the end of July, the People’s Congress of Yunyang county formally appointed me a vice-governor. I was confirmed as an assistant to Wu Jiangqing, vice-governor of Yunyang, who was in charge of rural resettlement and construction of the new county seat. My appointment occurred just as the county was furiously preparing for a state inspection of the first stage (1993-97) of the Three Gorges resettlement operation. The inspection, which would judge whether the work was proceeding as planned, was expected in October, and preparation for it would be a top priority for the county government over the next two months.

On August 1, vice-governor Wu and I went with officials from the Wanxian resettlement office to Shanyang township. Our task was to check how the resettlement work was going and to ensure that the township was well prepared for an inspection from Wanxian officials later that week. After driving for two hours, we saw a river in the mountains off in the distance. The driver said it was called the Dahe River, a tributary of the Yangtze. “That means Shanyang is not far,” he said.

I knew a little about Shanyang from the books that Party Secretary Hu had given me. Shanyang is one of the townships that has been most affected by the Three Gorges dam, with as many as 15,000 people requiring resettlement. After we arrived, Peng Tinghui, the party boss of Shanyang, gave us an introduction to the township. He said Shanyang encompassed 14 villages, with a total population of 25,000. Of its 16,000 mu [1,070 hectares] of cultivated farmland, 9,000 mu [600 hectares] would be flooded by the Three Gorges reservoir. After a brief review of the work already accomplished, Peng focused on three major problems in the resettlement operation. These issues were obviously enormous, because the atmosphere in the meeting room grew a little tense.

First, Peng said that due to a lack of available land, it would be impossible for the township to resettle all its migrants on higher ground, despite the fact that government policy decreed that displaced people must be resettled in nearby areas. Second, the township was having great difficulty dealing with the huge discrepancy between the losses that were estimated in the 1992 survey carried out by the Changjiang Water Resources Commission, and the actual losses that were going to occur. And, finally, resettlement officials in Shanyang were finding that ambiguities in the state’s resettlement policy were making their job very difficult. Peng said that, as a result, they had had a hard time classifying 60 residents as migrants.

Vice-Governor Wu was growing irritated at Peng’s litany of complaints, and interrupted him testily: “So do these 60 people want to rebel against the government because of that?” Peng ignored his superior’s irritated comment, and continued to argue that the migrant-identification process was extremely difficult, and that his health had suffered because he had worked so hard at it. Wu stopped him again, saying he was well aware of how hard it was to work at the grassroots level, as he himself had been a local official for more than 20 years. Wu said that sometimes he had wanted to cry like a woman in the face of all the problems surrounding the resettlement operation. But, Wu asked, does having a cry make any sense? He tried to motivate the local officials by asking them to “stand on a high vantage point and look far ahead.”

The head of the county resettlement bureau then answered several questions about the resettlement policy and promised to bend the rules (kai kou zi) in favour of Shanyang if necessary, to help the township deal with the problems it was encountering.1 Wu stressed that however difficult the resettlement tasks, officials in Shanyang had to do their best to get the job done, that this was a priority for the township and also an order from the county government.

After supper, Wu met briefly with the head of the county resettlement bureau. I was invited to attend, along with members of the Shanyang township party committee. At the meeting, Wu gave township officials tips on how to impress inspectors from higher echelons. When making a presentation about their resettlement work, Wu said, township officials should be careful to highlight positive aspects and also to convey a strong commitment to getting the job done. The head of the county resettlement bureau was even more direct: Don’t even mention any problems! From his experience, he said, the apparent success of a job depends on how an official presents his work, not on how well the tasks have actually been carried out.

Peng appeared to learn a lot from this advice. He conceded that earlier he had known nothing about how to make such a presentation, and had thought he should talk to these higher-level officials as if they were family members. I said nothing the whole day, but came to realize how difficult the resettlement operation was, especially at the grassroots level, and I too learned something about the politics of presentation. I was intrigued by Peng, the township secretary who dared to speak his mind in these circumstances, and decided that at some point I would like to spend more time in Shanyang.

On August 6, I went to Shanyang for a second time, along with the inspection team from Wanxian prefecture. The head of the prefecture, known as the prefecture commissioner, appeared to be satisfied with Shanyang’s resettlement work, partly because of the well-prepared report presented by Peng. The commissioner said he was happy to learn that local officials were doing a good job on resettlement and also that there had been no mention in Peng’s presentation of any households refusing to move (ding zi hu). He said he had heard of many such resisters when he was head of a county near Yunyang while people affected by the Dahe dam were being resettled.

The inspection tour would have transpired without incident, were it not for a man who suddenly showed up just as the team was leaving. As the commissioner was walking to his car, the man accosted him, and shouted: “Dozens of people over there want to talk to you. They don’t trust local officials, who always just tell them positive things. We ordinary people only trust officials from higher levels. Please come with me and see the people over there.” It took a while for the township officials to realize what was happening, but when they did, they helped the commissioner into his car, and the rest of us piled into our cars too, and we all drove away at high speeds.

The next day, we went with the commissioner and his entourage to visit the new county seat. While looking around the new town that was being built, I chatted with Zhang Liandao, director of the Wanxian resettlement office. Having heard about my interest in studying the resettlement issue, Zhang spoke to me about a fundamental difference between resettlement in China and in the West. In China, resettlement is involuntary and by government fiat, while in the West, he contended, nobody can be forced to move and so the need to deal coercively (ba ding zi) with households resisting resettlement does not arise.2

He said problems had emerged with resettlement related to virtually all water projects in China, mainly because the compensation tended to be so low. Compared with past resettlement schemes, the Three Gorges project was offering the affected people much better terms. In addition, government policy now included providing financial support to people after resettlement. About 10 per cent of the income generated by the Three Gorges project was to be used to help people rebuild their lives after resettlement, in an effort to improve their standard of living.

However, a higher rate of compensation cannot address a fundamental contradiction between the state’s long-term goals and the local government’s short-term behaviour. From a long-term development point of view, the state does what it can to ensure that displaced people live and work in peace and contentment after resettlement. But governments at grassroots levels don’t have the same vision as the top leaders, and have attempted to use a great deal of the funding earmarked for resettlement. Zhang said he did not mean to imply that local officials had misused the money or even that they had pocketed some of the public funds – just that the money would still be lost from the resettlement budget if local officials decided to divert some of it to build a new road or to provide the new communities with electricity. In that case, migrants would receive less direct compensation than promised, and numerous problems would arise as a result. Zhang also talked to me briefly about some of the lessons that local governments had learned from the resettlement related to the building of the Dahe dam in Shanyang. This was my first tutorial on the history of resettlement in China, imparted not by a professor but by a knowledgeable local official.

Toward the end of August, officials from the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee (TGPCC) came to Yunyang on an inspection trip. The officials seemed satisfied with what they heard and saw, which made Vice-Governor Wu happy, and he asked us to do yet more preparatory work in the run-up to an inspection by central government officials.

One day, Wu and I were invited to a meeting called by the county resettlement office. The head of the bureau came straight to the point at the start of the meeting: “There are no outsiders here today so let me speak frankly. As we all know, our resettlement projects are not up to the standards set by the TGPCC. I don’t think we could reach those targets even if everyone in the county were to be mobilized for the work. And all of us here would lose our positions if high-ranking officials knew the truth.”

Vice-Governor Wu was clearly unhappy about these remarks. He argued that the county government did not submit false reports to the higher authorities, but that it did take “a flexible approach” in recognition of the fact that the county was pressed for time in meeting the resettlement goals. This “flexibility” included filling out various forms recording the county’s “excellent” progress in every single category, without any consultation whatsoever with villages and groups at the grassroots level. These glittering reports won high praise from the TGPCC inspection team, who had no doubt about local officials’ success in the resettlement effort.

On November 8, while the Yangtze River was being dammed for the Three Gorges project, People’s Daily declared: “Before damming the Yangtze River, with strong support from all the Chinese people and hard work by local officials in the Three Gorges reservoir area, great successes have been achieved in resettling the affected groups. About 100,000 people have been moved into new homes, and their livelihoods restored, and so the damming of the river will go ahead as scheduled. The task of cleaning up the future bed of the reservoir below 99 metres above sea level has been successfully completed. And the resettlement work in the same region has passed a series of inspections and checks by the relevant departments of the State Council. “The wonderful ‘resettlement with development’ operation is a tribute to the Chinese people’s magnificent support and also a resounding response to foreign countries that have questioned the big dam. This outstanding achievement can be seen as the start of the successful resettlement of more than one million people.”

My ‘discovery’ of the Dahe dam

I became interested in Shanyang, the township most affected by the Three Gorges dam, during my visit there in early August. I learned that a team from the provincial commission of science and technology had just returned to Yunyang after completing an investigation into the resettlement issue in Shanyang, and I was eager to meet them.

The head of the team told me that Shanyang had past experience with dam-related resettlement. Years ago, a dam, located in Shanyang township, was built on the Dahe River by the prefecture government. Because of problems with the resettlement operation, people displaced by the Dahe dam had kicked up a fuss for many years with numerous appeals to higher authorities. He said people in Shanyang tend to be brave and bold, intelligent and very adept at negotiating with officials at all levels. Their protests were well organized. For example, when the prefecture commissioner arrived to deal with the resettlement issues, he was besieged first by old women, then by weeping women and children. No village leaders or any of the young men of the village were around at the time. They had all gone into hiding. The organizer of the demonstration was a primary-school teacher who had arranged the whole drama, and then left a few days earlier on a trip so the government could not pin anything on him.

I recalled that Zhang Liandao, director of the Wanxian resettlement office, had mentioned disturbances related to the Dahe dam. These protests reached a peak in the 1980s. One of the main organizers was a teacher who had graduated from Yunyang High School in 1966 and then led a Red Guard unit during the Cultural Revolution. People who had been displaced by the dam, but had received no compensation, appealed to higher authorities to punish officials they accused of corruption. The government was forced to respond to a situation that threatened to get out of hand. Organizers of the disturbances were usually punished to varying degrees, though the affected group as a whole would derive some benefit as a result of the protests. In 1990, for example, several “ringleaders” were arrested and some were sentenced after water pipes at the Dahe dam were damaged.

Zhang, who was personally involved from the start in dealing with the “leftover problems” of the Dahe dam, said he had learned valuable lessons from the experience, and many of those insights had been incorporated into Three Gorges resettlement policies. It struck me that studying the impacts of the Dahe dam would indeed provide useful lessons for Three Gorges, where a resettlement operation was under way. In fact, this was part of the reason I had come here, to study grassroots society in rural China by focusing on reservoir-related resettlement.3 I felt that studying the protests mounted by people affected by dams and reservoirs would serve as a window onto the relationship between the state and the peasants.4 My conversation with Zhang made me more confident than ever of the value of this research. The first step was to consult the files in the county archives. I found a great deal of material that was very useful; in fact, I was overwhelmed by a wide variety of official documents from higher authorities, investigation reports from lower levels, and peasants’ petition letters and appeals. About 30 files full of documents were marked “leftover problems,” with dates ranging from 1977 to 1994. The expression “leftover problems” has become a household term in the reservoir area, but when and where did these “leftover problems” begin? 5

Closing of the Dahe dam sluice gate

One day in July of 1975, local people gathered at the site of the Dahe dam to celebrate the closing of the sluice gate. They had been looking forward to this moment with great excitement and anticipation. The rumour that a dam would be built on the Dahe River had been circulating in the area for some time, but nobody took it seriously. This was because survey teams had repeatedly come and gone, but nothing ever happened as a result. Not until 1970, that is, when two wooden boats arrived from upstream, and a man on one of the boats pointed a bamboo pole toward an area of flat land near Baiyang village, and said: “That is a perfect spot for a dam.”

The locals were surprised when a construction headquarters for the dam was suddenly established the very next day. And on the third day, a huge number of workers arrived, signalling the formal start of the project. From then on, local people were told that the Dahe power station would soon be generating electricity. But it took several years for the project authority to finish the work, and now the people were overjoyed to see the dam gate closing and the dream of power from the dam moving a step closer.

The peasants of Shanyang knew little about how difficult it had been for the dam authority to complete the project, due to a severe shortage of funds. And they could not have foreseen how their own lives would change dramatically soon after the closing of the sluice gate. But alongside the joyful masses at the ceremony, several leading players in the project were experiencing quite different emotions.

Liu Xingjian, the worried project leader

As the first head of the Dahe dam campaign headquarters, Liu Xingjian forced a smile as he watched the sluice gate closing, but in fact he had mixed feelings about the event. The idea of building the dam had been fuelled by a power shortage in Wanxian prefecture, but what turned a dream into reality was a generator that otherwise would have been scrapped. In the early 1960s, the province had proposed building a medium-size dam somewhere and had imported three generators from Hungary for the purpose. But something was wrong with the foundations of the proposed dam, and the plan was abandoned. The province managed to sell two of the generators, and then sealed up the third one for safekeeping.

By 1969, somebody realized that this expensive generator was getting so old it might have to be discarded, and so the province began anxiously looking for an appropriate use for it. Hearing of this, Wanxian prefecture immediately submitted a request to provincial authorities, arguing that their power-starved area could really use the generator. The province approved the request and asked the prefecture to build a hydro dam as soon as possible.6 It was under these circumstances that Liu Xingjian was chosen to take charge of the preparatory work for the dam. With its solid foundation, the area known as Baiyangba near Shanyang was regarded as an ideal location to build the dam, where the generator could be put to good use, and the backwater would have no direct impact on the county seat of Bailong.7

At first what worried Liu most was the race against time. At a planning meeting in May of 1970, the province listed the Dahe dam as a key project and asked the prefecture to build the dam and begin generating electricity within a year. Responding to Chairman Mao’s call, “Ten thousand years is too long; seize the day, seize the hour!” the prefecture asked the dam construction team to start building even as survey and design work and other preparatory stages were still under way. In July of that year, more than 10,000 workers were mobilized to take part in the construction of the dam. Taking advantage of the people’s commune system, which allowed the easy mobilization of labourers and materials, a grand campaign was formally launched in a very short period of time.

Having witnessed such a spectacular mass movement, Liu became more relaxed about the tight schedule. What made him more anxious now was the shortage of funding. With a normal pool level of 150.1 metres, the dam would have an annual installed capacity of 12 MW and a power output of 6,400 kWh. The total budget was around 19.2 million yuan but the province and prefecture together were providing just 7.2 million yuan, much less than expected. Liu knew the dam authority had done everything possible to lower the budget by offering very low compensation terms for people displaced by the dam. In all, 100,000 yuan would be set aside as compensation for lost farmland, and 300,000 yuan would be shared among the 615 affected households, amounting to a total compensation budget of just 400,000 yuan.

The requests made by two affected communes, Xunlu and Guanqu, added to Liu’s frustration. Officials from Xunlu grabbed the chance to ask for 510,000 yuan to rebuild their town, while those from Guanqu requested 130,000 yuan to construct a bigger shopping mall. Their requests made Liu, who was already worried about the money issue, even angrier. “You’ll have to appeal to higher authorities for this money. We can’t give you a cent.”

After Liu sent them packing, officials from the two communes took their grievances to the county government. County officials in turn sought help from the prefecture, but ran into unexpected indifference at that level. The prefecture officials didn’t want to become involved, let alone take any further responsibility for the resettlement issue. Part of the reason for this was that the province was reluctant to pour more money into the Dahe dam even though the prefecture government had already put a lot of work into the project.

Burdened by the funding issue, Liu also became extremely annoyed about problems with the expensive but aging generator that emerged during its installation. A total of 21 million yuan finally arrived from the province and the prefecture, but meanwhile the budget had risen to 26 million yuan. The project still faced a deficit, including a debt of 1.3 million yuan to a generator manufacturer in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, which had been contracted to provide a second generator for the dam.

In March of 1975, after handing over a late-payment fine of 70,000 yuan to a bank, the Dahe project authorities were still unable to repay a bank loan of 1.2 million yuan. To complete the installation of the first generating unit and other related engineering work, additional funding of about 2 million yuan was needed – and this figure did not even include a downstream riverbank-stabilization project and construction of a flood-prevention wall upstream. This was the uncomfortable situation Liu Xingjian found himself in as the sluice-gate closing ceremony got under way.

Zhu Yundun, the engineer with a heavy heart

Zhu Yundun, the engineer responsible for the dam’s safety and quality control, also found it difficult to enjoy the ceremony. He had been transferred from the prefecture’s construction commission to work on the dam at the start of the project five years earlier. He was touched by the workers’ unflagging efforts as they worked day and night to build the dam. But as time went on, he became increasingly concerned about a number of problems with the project.

One of the issues Zhu became extremely worried about was that water discharged from the dam was going to scour both banks of the river downstream, including a sandbar adjoining the riverbank that was being farmed by local people. Zhu seems to have been the only one aware of the problem, which had been completely ignored in the dam’s design report. Zhu suggested to project leader Liu Xingjian, “Why don’t we just requisition the sandbar? It’s not that big, so compensating the people who are farming it won’t cost that much. The discharged water will have a major impact on the riverbanks downstream after the dam goes into operation, and the sandbar is liable to be badly eroded.” Liu replied flippantly, “No, no. I can take care of the upstream flood zone, but where the hell can I get the money to take over that sandbar as well? This is not my problem!” Zhu was speechless at Liu’s dismissive remark, and muttered to himself, “Let’s just see what happens then.”

The closing of the dam’s sluice gate meant the project was ready to begin generating electricity, which made Zhu even more nervous. Although he was in charge of quality control and safety, the engineer knew he had no real decision-making authority. But he also didn’t want to see anything disastrous occur after the dam began producing power. What he could not foresee was that the closing of the dam’s sluice gate heralded not only the beginning of the dam’s troubles, but also the start of his own.

Jiang Xiangying, the official who played hide and seek

Jiang Xiangying, who was in charge of land requisition and compensation, wasn’t quite as worried as engineer Zhu Yundun at the sluice-gate ceremony. But he had become extremely annoyed by one of the people displaced by the dam. Zhou Changfa was pestering him endlessly with a request to be compensated for bamboo groves he had lost to the reservoir. Zhou was told that the compensation money had gone to the local credit co-operative, but he insisted on receiving the funds himself. Now whenever Jiang saw Zhou approaching his office, he hid so as not to have to deal with the man.

But right now, Jiang Xiangying was feeling a bit more relaxed, knowing that he had gone to great lengths to keep the resettlement budget under control. He knew how difficult it had been for his team to achieve this goal, doing all they could to lower the compensation standards. They had employed at least three strategies to reduce the resettlement portion of the project budget as much as possible.

First, they set a low compensation standard overall: only nine yuan for each square metre of residential space being requisitioned, six yuan for each square metre of livestock shed, and 240 yuan for each mu [0.07 hectare] of farmland. Second, they set an even lower compensation standard for “bad elements” such as landlords and rich peasants. People in these categories were sometimes forced to move after receiving very meagre compensation. For example, compensation for residential space owned by “bad elements” was set below six yuan a square metre, even lower than for livestock sheds. But if members of this group dared to resist or protest, they were accused of “disrupting national construction” and severely punished. Few people labelled as bad elements voiced any complaint, because they had already suffered so much in the Cultural Revolution, which was still under way.

Finally, Jiang’s land-requisition team persuaded or bribed local officials in charge of resettlement affairs to underreport the area of affected farmland. For example, while Chen Yexue, head of the Baiyang brigade’s No. 16 production team (or Baiyang 16 for short), and others were measuring very meticulously the plots of land that would be requisitioned to build the powerhouse, Jiang became anxious and shouted: “Chen Yexue, why are you measuring the plots so carefully? Doing this won’t benefit you a bit. So don’t do it that way, and I’ll make sure you’re taken care of later.” Chen replied that he was just doing his job. An argument ensued, and Chen said he didn’t want to do the measuring work any more. Jiang visited Chen many times in an effort to persuade him to finish the work. In the end, Chen did sign his name to a survey that showed the area in question to be much smaller than it actually was. No third party knew anything about this secret deal between Jiang and Chen.8

Jiang felt fortunate to have been able to bring the resettlement budget under control. He also knew how difficult it had been to achieve this goal, and that it would not have been possible without employing the above strategies. He had every reason now to relax and not to worry about anybody questioning the survey results, because they had all been signed. And he felt even better as he watched the dam’s sluice gate closing. “All those compensation headaches should be over with when the dam begins producing electricity,” he said to himself.

Zhou Changfa, the tireless ‘pest’

Zhou Changfa was one of those most affected by the Dahe dam in Shanyang, and he had a terrible feeling about the project. Zhou was from a rich-peasant family, and had experienced a great deal of misery as a result. He was devastated when all his family’s farmland was distributed to poor peasants and his father was humiliated during the land-reform period after the revolution. He suffered years of privation during the terrible famine caused by the Great Leap Forward. And now his life was being turned upside down again by the construction of this dam.

In July of 1970, his house was requisitioned for use as the dam project headquarters because of its ideal location. But because his father had been a rich peasant before 1949, Zhou was given not a single cent for his home. He was forced to build a shabby thatched cottage on a slope on higher ground for his pregnant wife and himself. Living conditions there were so awful that his wife became ill, paralyzed with hemiplegia, and was confined to bed. Zhou’s eyes filled with tears whenever he talked about his crippled wife. Publicly, he still expressed support for the dam and said he was happy to see the project headquarters occupying his old home, though in fact his eviction had caused him immense personal suffering.

In April 1972, the work team in charge of compensation affairs headed by Jiang Xiangying arrived to assess Zhou’s losses. Although Zhou was very unhappy with the amount of compensation offered, he said nothing at the time. Later, he asked Jiang whether the project authorities should also provide compensation for the loss of cash crops such as bamboo and fruit. Jiang promised to look into the matter, but took more than half a year to do so. Zhou’s compensation was calculated at 414 yuan, of which 324 yuan was for 18 fruit trees and 90 yuan for 10 bamboo stands. When Zhou asked when he would be paid, Jiang replied, “Just wait a while, it’ll be very soon.”

More than a year later, Chen Yexue, the head of the production team, told Zhou to collect part of his compensation, 180 yuan. Zhou was happy to receive another 60 yuan on the eve of the Chinese New Year, but after that there was no further word on his compensation. Zhou visited Chen many times but Chen always said: “Look, this is what we have received from the project authorities. You can go and ask them yourself if you have questions.” Zhou did go to see the officials at project headquarters, including Jiang, who told him the money had been given to the local credit co-operative of Shanyang. Zhou went to the co-operative and was told that the funds were to be disbursed to collective units such as brigades or production teams, and not to individuals.

For the next couple of years, Zhou repeatedly approached leaders at the project headquarters, the people’s commune, the production brigade and the production team, and was kicked around like a football between the four parties. Everybody with whom he talked agreed that he deserved to receive the rest of the compensation money, but nobody took his case seriously. Then, on the morning of the day of the sluice-gate closing ceremony, Zhou Changfa got up early as usual to prepare the traditional medicine needed by his wife, who was still confined to bed. Then he got himself ready to go down the hill to lodge yet another appeal for his rightful share of the Dahe dam compensation funds.

***

Notes:

1 Kai kou zi: Literally, to break a dyke in order to channel irrigation water onto fields, but here it means higher authorities bending the rules in favour of the masses.

2 Ba ding zi: Literally, to pull out a nail. Here it refers to the government taking tough, even coercive measures to deal with people who refuse to obey orders or to co-operate with official policies.

3 Resettlement related to dams and reservoirs has become a widely studied topic around the world. In China, however, few studies have been undertaken, for a variety of reasons, but particularly due to the difficulty of obtaining data. Mu Mou and Cai Wenmei (“A Review of the History of Population Resettlement at Xin’anjiang” in Dai Qing and Xue Weijia (eds), Whose Yangtze is it Anyway?, 1996) and Leng Meng (The Massive Population Resettlement on the Yellow River, 1998) have written about resettlement that was related, respectively, to the Xinanjiang reservoir and Sanmenxia dam, while Jing Jun (The Temple of Memories: History, Power and Morality in a Chinese Village, Stanford University Press, 1996) has looked at “social memory” surrounding the Liujiaxia dam on the Yellow River. The four researchers had difficulty obtaining adequate data for their studies because of their status as outsiders. By contrast, I was able to gain access to a wealth of firsthand data and official documents while I was an “insider,” working as an official in Yunyang on the Three Gorges resettlement operation.

4 For centuries, the management of water resources and construction of huge projects has been key to governing China. Karl Wittfogel (Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, 1957) postulated strong links between water control and centralized, despotic regimes in Asia. He wrote that China was a “hydraulic society” in which management of water resources was key, and also an “oriental despotism,” where control of water became the central factor in determining political and institutional forms. Patrick McCully (Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams, 1996) has identified two main types of dam-building bureaucracies: national agencies such as Moscow’s Hydroproject Institute, and river basin development agencies such as the well-known Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). It seemed inappropriate to classify these two types of bureaucracies as socialist or capitalist, because they shared the similar goals of developing local resources at the grassroots level and avoiding the problems inherent in capitalist bureaucracy. Established in the 1930s and engaged in the integrated development of water resources, the TVA failed to achieve its initial goals of developing regional economies and protecting the environment, but itself became a vested-interests or so-called grassroots bureaucracy. It’s interesting to note that the TVA-like utopia was developed in the socialist Soviet Union, and carried forward in socialist China under the influence of the Soviet Union.

After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, top Chinese leaders saw the development of water resources as the first priority of socialist construction. The leaders saw building water projects not only as a solution to grain and energy shortages, but also as a means to introduce state power into grassroots, rural China through a series of mass campaigns and mass mobilizations. Harnessing rivers and watercourses was not just a technical, water-conservancy issue but, more importantly, a critical social and political task as well. The infrastructure of such a “hydraulic society” serves continually to legitimize a political regime, and to create “common cause” between the centre and the provinces, between regions, and between the government and the people.

In February 1950, the Changjiang [Yangtze] Water Resources Commission was set up, followed in April of 1954 by the establishment of the Yellow River Water Resources Commission. In the late 1950s, the Sanmenxia dam on the Yellow River was completed as one of the grand water projects of the Great Leap Forward. From 1949 to 1959, a total of 80 billion cubic metres of earth and rock were moved to build dams and reservoirs nationwide, and 58 billion cubic metres of that was achieved in 1958 alone. From 1949 to 1990, more than 86,000 reservoirs were built across the country, with a total water storage capacity of 46.6 billion cubic metres. China had become the world’s most dammed county.

The construction of all these dams and reservoirs has been accompanied by population resettlement problems. An estimated 12 million people were moved to make way for these 86,000 dams and reservoirs. Most of the affected people were poor peasants who were thrown even deeper into absolute poverty because of a dramatic drop in standard of living after displacement. The net annual per-capita income of people displaced by dams that were funded and operated by the central government was only 572 in 1994 and 782 yuan in 1996, about 47 per cent and 40 per cent respectively of the national average in the same period.

To deal with the worst of the “leftover problems” associated with resettlement nationwide, a reservoir reconstruction fund was established in 1986, and an annual budget of 300 million yuan disbursed thereafter to displaced people in need. After a decade of attempts to address the problems, the government had made some progress, but the situation was still severe in reservoir areas and resettlement sites.

5 Dam-related resettlement in China has been involuntary. The state has been responsible for deciding to build the dams and reservoirs, and also for the consequences of those undertakings. In China’s particular context, affected groups seeking resolution of “leftover problems” have had no choice but to appeal to higher levels through collective actions. Of all the various appeals brought by peasants in China since 1949, protests by people affected by dams and reservoirs have predominated in scale, frequency, duration and degree of intensity. The introduction of the household responsibility system and the dissolution of the people’s communes led to a weakening of the central government’s control over grassroots communities, resulting in yet more protests. Collective actions in China are clearly very different from social movements and protests in the West, to the extent that it can be difficult to explain them within the existing theory of social movements in the West. Nevertheless, it is the interaction between collective actions taken by the people affected by dams and reservoirs and the state’s reactions to those that reflect how power works in Chinese society.

6 It was not unreasonable to look for a site to install a turbine that could not be used elsewhere and would otherwise have to be scrapped. On the one hand, the province wanted to do a favour at little cost to the prefecture that had borne a disproportionate share of the cost of the long-term uncertainty over whether the Three Gorges dam would be built. Even the provision of an aging turbine would be seen as a compensatory gesture on the province’s part to that region. On the other hand, the prefecture was also aware that the province didn’t really intend to give the region all that much, and was also trying to address the problem of what to do with an aging generator. In fact, the prefecture wanted to get much more than the old generator, and embraced the proposed dam as a “fishing expedition” – an opportunity to fish for more and more money, which would pour forth in a reliable stream, because the province would hardly be able to walk away from the dam project once it was started.

So the Dahe dam got its start for both careless and elaborately planned reasons. The project was carelessly designed, with insufficient consideration given to a variety of potential technical problems and to the resettlement issue. The elaborate planning occurred as a subordinate administration struggled to extract the maximum financial resources for itself within a highly centralized planning system.

7 Until the mid 1980s, dam-related population resettlement was seen as an insignificant issue in China. Displaced people in general and rural migrants in particular were called on to make immense personal sacrifices for a greater common good. In pushing a dam project ahead, the governments concerned tried to do everything in their power to keep the resettlement budget to a minimum due to an overall shortage of financial resources for national construction. In the design report of the Dahe dam, the resettlement budget was not listed as one of the major expenditures, but merely included in the “other fees” category along with various miscellaneous items. When selecting locations for dams, the authorities paid scant attention to the resettlement issue but focused on three main factors: 1) whether the location would allow the full exploitation of hydropower; 2) whether the foundation was sufficiently solid; and 3) whether building the dam would have an impact on the county seat. The government and project authorities did not view the peasants who would be displaced and the farmland that would be inundated as major issues.

8 At that time, the authorities at the commune, county and prefecture levels were able to requisition any piece of land in their jurisdiction in the name of development. No formal procedure was required. Land that was taken over did not even have to be registered or listed in any way. In theory, the requisition of land needed the approval of the production brigade or production team involved, but in practice, nobody dared to raise any objections since the undertaking was deemed essential for national construction. Nobody at the grassroots level would want to invite personal trouble by intervening in the serious political issue of the uses of public property.

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.