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Reservoirs of repression

State love affair with big dams brings suffering to Chinese people

Despite the questions raised around the world about the human and ecological impact of big dams, China remains committed to building them. The cost in human rights abuses has been and continues to be high, according to Kelly Haggart and Yang Chongqing. Many of these abuses violate international human rights instruments to which China is a party, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which Beijing ratified in 2001.

China has been on a dam-building spree for the past 50 years and has close to half of the world’s 45,000 big dams (generally defined as higher than 15 meters). The country had 226 large dams before 1950; now it has 22,000 of them (and more than 80,000 dams in all). By contrast, the United States – the country with the next highest number – has 6,575 large dams.

The river valleys where dams are located often contain the best farmland in a region and thus have attracted large populations. In densely populated China, the human cost of flooding people off fertile land to make room for dams and their reservoirs has been staggering. Using Chinese government statistics, the World Bank estimated that 10.2 million people had been forcibly relocated for dam projects between 1950 and 1989. But journalist and environmentalist Dai Qing estimates the figure at between 40 million and 60 million people.

“I live in the ‘most dammed’ country in the world and am part of the silenced majority,” she told a recent conference in Australia, drawing the link between China’s dam-building and political repression. “We feel sorry for our rivers, as we don’t have the right to protect them, to express ourselves freely or to criticize the government openly – let alone the ability to monitor and curtail the government’s actions.”

The world’s biggest dam-building program was achieved by sidelining individual critics, silencing public debate and forcing tens of millions of ordinary citizens to make immense personal sacrifices for an often questionable “greater good.” Many of the dams, especially the tens of thousands built hastily in the Mao era, are uneconomic and dangerous. In February 1998 China Youth Daily reported that most of the dikes and dams built in the 1950s and 1960s “are worn out” and at risk of collapse. The newspaper warned of a repeat of the August 1975 disaster, when 230,000 people died after the Banqiao and Shimantan dams in Henan Province collapsed during a typhoon.

In Sichuan, the World Bank-funded Ertan hydroelectric plant is the first of 21 dams planned along the Yalong River, but has had trouble selling power since it came on stream in 1999. In Qinghai, 13 large and medium-sized hydropower stations are to be constructed on the upper reaches of the Yellow River before 2020. In Yunnan, China plans to build six more large dams along the Lancang River (known downstream as the Mekong). While China forges ahead with a massive dam-building program on many of its major rivers, the gargantuan Three Gorges project is coming under the most intense scrutiny, both domestically and abroad. The electricity produced by the Three Gorges dam will be expensive. It is located in a geologically fragile region prone to earthquakes and landslides, and will be useless in controlling the most common type of flood on the Yangtze, which is caused by heavy rainfall downstream of the dam.

When push comes to shove

China has moved at least a quarter of a million people for a single dam on at least six occasions: 410,000 were ousted in Henan and Shaanxi Provinces for Sanmenxia on the Yellow River (completed in 1960); 383,000 in Hubei and Henan for Danjiangkou on the Han River (1973); 293,000 for Xinfeng on the river of the same name in Guangdong (1969); 280,00 for Xinanjiang on the Xinan River in Zhejiang (1960); 278,000 for Dongpinghu on the Yellow River in Shandong (1958). And now, the biggest forced-resettlement operation in the history of dam-building is under way in the Yangtze River valley.

“How many people are being forcibly relocated for the Three Gorges dam?” Dai Qing asks. “Proponents of the project lowered the resettlement figure to 725,500 to make the dam appear more acceptable before the 1992 vote in the National People’s Congress [which approved the scheme]. Later, the official figure was changed to 1.13 million and now senior project officials sometimes use the figure of 1.2 million.”

While critics of the dam often cite 1.9 million to two million displaced individuals, the truth is that no one knows for sure. Dai Qing points out that the official figure fails to include a number of affected groups, including children born in excess of the population quotas during the many years of dam construction, or people resettled to make way, not for the dam itself, but for the new towns, bridges and roads in the reservoir area. The figure also fails to include those who may lose their farmland, but not their homes, to the dam and also fails to consider the impact on people in “host communities” whose livelihoods suffer when an influx of migrants puts a squeeze on available land and resources.

About two-thirds of the people who have been uprooted by China’s dams and reservoirs are still living below the official poverty line. An official report prepared by the Water Ministry in 1990 conceded that at least one-third of the people displaced by large dams had actually been plunged deeper into poverty as a result. In April 1992 a Ministry of Water Resources official told Beijing Review “only one-third of the resettlement effort in the past seems satisfactory.”

Even though China says it is doing things differently with the Three Gorges project and that resettlement will provide an opportunity to improve living standards in poor regions, reports trickling out tell a depressingly familiar story: the suppression of dam-related debate, coercion and repression in the resettlement operation, established communities torn apart and livelihoods lost. One respected Chinese academic predicts 50 years of social chaos as a result of the profound dislocation caused by a mass uprooting on the scale of the Three Gorges resettlement operation.

This mass movement of people is occurring as the issue of forced resettlement rises higher on the international development and human rights agendas. In the past decade, various UN bodies have declared forced evictions “gross violations of human rights,” with the UN Commission on Human Rights noting that they “intensify social conflict and inequality and invariably affect the poorest, most socially, economically, environmentally and politically disadvantaged and vulnerable sectors of society.”

A global consensus is emerging that recognizes what is described in a UN fact sheet as “the essential illegality of forced evictions under international human rights standards and regards the practice as a clear violation of a broad range of basic human rights.” The document cites a number of rights that are infringed by forced evictions, including the right to freedom of movement, the right to work, the right of children to education and the right to choose one’s residence.

No input, no information

Many of the problems that emerged from past dam-related resettlement in China are a result of political factors that remain unresolved. Any mention of the human cost of resettlement is taboo in the state media. Press coverage and reports of researchers within China have tended to put a positive spin on the Three Gorges project. The sociologist mentioned above who predicted the half-century of social chaos felt compelled to use a pseudonym (Wei Yi, meaning “for the migrants”) to publish his expos≈Ω of Three Gorges resettlement that appeared in the journal Strategy and Management in January 1999.

In 1989, Dai Qing edited and published Yangtze! Yangtze!, a collection of articles by Chinese scholars critical of the dam, under her own name. During the post-June Fourth crackdown on dissent, the book was banned and Dai Qing was jailed for 10 months. More recently, sociologist Ying Xing published (also under his own name) a critical account of the fate of migrants still suffering since they were moved in the 1970s to make way for a dam on the Xiao River. His book, entitled A Tale of Migrants Displaced by the Dahe Dam (Dahe yimin shangfangde gushi), published in China in December 2001, has also been banned.

The story of water engineer Huang Wanli illustrates the dangers for scientists who have dared to find fault with big-dam schemes that have high-level backing. They have been silenced and their views, regarded not as expert opinion but as evidence of anti-Party sentiment, have been ignored, often with tragic results. Huang was publicly attacked, isolated and even jailed and sentenced to hard labor, due to his opposition in the 1950s to the construction of the Sanmenxia dam on the Yellow River. After he argued that the dam was destined to fail, especially if it lacked silt-discharging tubes and sluice gates, he was labeled a “rightist.” By the time he was sent to do hard labor near Sanmenxia during the Cultural Revolution, all of his predictions about the dam had been realized. So much sediment had built up behind the dam that adjacent farmland was waterlogged and the dam itself was useless and had to be rebuilt at enormous cost.

In her obituary of Huang Wanli, who died at age 90 in 2001, Dai Qing wrote that when the Three Gorges dam was being debated in the 1980s, Huang drew on his long experience with big dams to urge policymakers “not to repeat mistakes of the past, where money was wasted, millions of people adversely affected and the environment destroyed.” But again, Huang’s expert opinion fell on deaf ears. When the National People’s Congress (NPC) voted on the Three Gorges on April 3, 1992, the construction of the biggest and most complicated dam ever attempted was debated not by experts such as Huang Wanli, but by congress delegates such as Huang Deying. The factory worker from Tianjin was incredulous that the government would ask people such as herself, who had no understanding of the complex issues surrounding large dams, to approve the project.

Skeptics at the NPC meeting were prohibited from circulating literature critical of the dam, and in the absence of information, no viable debate was possible. Even so, one-third of the 1,767 delegates voted against the project or abstained – a courageous display of opposition from a body that normally rubberstamps government proposals. But as delegate Yang Xinren from Jilin Province observed, “The majority of delegates are not fully informed of the technical aspects of the project. So no matter how we vote, we vote in blindness.”

Cont’d in Part Two