Officials "have been forced to adopt coercive measures" to get residents to leave Nanling township, 120 kilometres upstream of the dam, the newspaper said in a Feb. 8 report.

Facing a tight resettlement timetable and reluctant migrants, more than 100 police officers and other officials were dispatched on Jan. 21 to carry out the demolition order on four houses. So far, about 30 houses in the township have been blown up, the newspaper said.

Work teams are going house-to-house, informing residents of the resettlement rules. They are concentrating their "ideological-education" efforts on households that have ignored orders to vacate and "are bargaining unreasonably for extra compensation," the newspaper said.

Residents who still refuse to move will be evicted and their old homes demolished, the report said. The people will then be taken – "even forcibly" – to the new locations to which they have been assigned, where they can start "their new and peaceful lives."

Meanwhile, the "efficient" removal of 14,500 people from one district alone in less than 3½ months has been hailed by China’s state-run media as "a miracle."

The resettlement of 3,800 households from Fuling district, 480 kilometres upstream of the dam, took place between Sept. 14 and Dec. 25. It was the biggest, fastest and most efficient relocation of people since the dam-related resettlement began, the Xinhua news agency reported.

More than 1,000 local officials were mobilized into 114 work teams to move an average of 150 people – about 40 households – a day. The operation took place over several square kilometres along the banks of the Yangtze and a tributary, the Wu River.

"Surprisingly, no major accidents related to the movement – or petitions to higher authorities caused by dissatisfaction with the resettlement – were reported," the news agency said, adding that resettlement officials have extolled the operation as "just a miracle."

As the pace of resettlement accelerates in advance of the filling next year of the dam reservoir, it appears public funds earmarked for the operation are increasingly being diverted and misused. Senior legal authorities in Wanzhou district, 280 kilometres upstream of the dam, have noted "a close correlation" between the speed of the resettlement operation and the number of corruption cases they must handle, Xinhua reports.

Over the past five years, the Wanzhou branch of the People’s Procuratorate of Chongqing municipality has investigated 120 criminal cases involving embezzlement of resettlement funds, retrieving US$2 million in the process, the news agency reported on Jan. 25.

Wanzhou faces the arduous task of resettling 800,000 people to make way for the reservoir, Xinhua said. The official news agency cited a few examples of the misuse of resettlement funds in the district:

 

• Wang Sumei, a 36-year-old cashier working at the Wanzhou resettlement bureau, was sentenced to life imprisonment for using US$170,000 for mahjong gambling.

 

• Huang Fusheng, director of the resettlement bureau of Wuqiao district, and three other officials accepted bribes of US$30,000 for resettlement-related construction projects. They received sentences ranging from five to 12 years.

 

• Yang Zhenglu, party boss of Jiangnan township, Fengjie county, was sentenced to two years for "dereliction of duty" leading to the loss of US$43,000. Under his leadership, 170 mu (11 hectares) of newly developed farmland prepared for migrants turned out to be substandard or even useless.

 

• Wang Jixuan, vice-director of the Wanzhou resettlement bureau, was sentenced to two years for accepting bribes of US$6,250 from contractors bidding for construction projects while he was director of the Yunyang county resettlement bureau.