China Dying??? (vgood 4part story on link)

(This is one sick read I read something similar at BBC but nowhere near the detail here)

"The accelerating speed of that environmental change is most evident in the Yellow River, the heart of Han Chinese civilization. The river has virtually disappeared."

"The first big dam-construction projects of the communist era, such as the Sanmen Xia Dam, concentrated partly on the Yellow River, where a cascade of 46 dams was started. Yet the more engineering took place, the worse the river became. It now exists only in name, except for a couple of months during the rainy season, causing a prolonged and permanent shortage crippling industry and agriculture. It usually runs dry about 1,000km from the sea."

***"The result is that two-thirds of China's cities are now short of water and the very existence of some, such as Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi, is threatened."***

"All but a handful of the 300 tributaries that feed into the Hai River are now dry, with dire consequences for a population of 120 million people in the Hai river basin. But agricultural runoff from chemical fertilizers, industrial effluent and urban waste have rendered the water in most of its reservoirs undrinkable. In desperation, Tianjin ordered hundreds of officials to patrol the river banks to prevent theft of the precious water."

***"China now holds the unenviable record of producing as much organic water pollution as the United States, Japan and India combined. Experts calculate that 700 million Chinese consume drinking water contaminated with levels of animal and human waste that do not meet minimum state drinking-water standards. No one is sure what this means."***

Parts 2-4
All along China's Yangtze River, the last residents have been cleared from the hundreds of towns and villages that will be submerged in perhaps the largest hydropower project ever attempted. All along the 600-kilometer stretch of the Yangtze up to Chongqing city, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, are refusing to leave.

They are being forced out in deference to China's plans to double its hydropower by 2010. China is preparing to build at least two other dams of equal size to Three Gorges on the Yangtze. Altogether, Beijing intends to invest 300 billion yuan (US$36.2 billion) in new dams, mostly in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces.

This is a staggering ambition for a country that is already home to most of the world's big dams. Of the 45,000 large dams in the world, 22,104 are in China; 6,390 are in the United States and just over 4,000 in India. In a dictatorship run by engineers, in particular hydropower engineers such as Communist Party leader Hu Jintao and the longtime No 2 in the Party, Li Peng, few critics dare to point out that this policy is causing irrevocable harm, not just to China but to the rest of the world.

China is planning a series of giant dam cascades across rivers such as the Mekong, the Salween and the Bramaputra that are vital to the prosperity of Southeast Asia. If as a result these rivers end up disappearing like the Yellow, the Huai or the Hai in China, the consequences will be incalculable. The mismanagement of northern China's water resources is already visible in the dust storms blowing out of China each year to arrive in Seoul or Tokyo in a dangerous choking and blinding miasma. Gobi dust from continuing desertification has even been deposited on the east coast of the United States.

Hydropower enthusiasts say that if China does not keep building dams at a furious rate, tripling capacity from 60 gigawatts to 171GW by 2020, it will be forced to burn more coal, with dire consequences for the world's atmosphere.

The consequences to China's people are dire enough. The towns along the Three Gorges look as if they have been carpet-bombed. More than 1.8 million people have been removed to make way for the Three Gorges Dam reservoir. As if in some scene from World War II, bands of scavengers now wander like homeless refugees amid the piles of gray bricks, stooping to pick up bits of wiring or wood.

Some scrap merchants specialize in iron and copper, but others have collected doors or window frames, so the traveler climbs up from the ferry boats through a strange market of bric-a-brac, past half-ruined houses where some inhabitants linger on like crazed outcasts in some post-apocalypse movie.

High above old towns such as Fengjie, blocks of new housing can be glimpsed, painted in breezy pastel colors. Those hanging on below are dubbed "nail households" because they refuse to be uprooted from land they have claimed for generations and, in a dangerous game of chicken, are hoping to force the government officials to offer better compensation before the Three Gorges reservoir starts to cover it.

In Fengjie I met Mr Hong, who brought his family back from Fujian province where they were relocated to a newly built Three Gorges migrants' village. He feels he can earn more money reopening his old restaurant. He complained of the plague of migrating rodents that sometimes follow people to their new homes.

"I don't mean mice - they are about this big," Mr Hong said, holding out his hands 45 centimeters apart. "Every night I see them. They get into the bedding tearing up the quilts and stealing all the food they can find."

Hong was a village leader in the first wave of migrants sent to Jinxing county, near Airmen in Fujian province. He led two inspection groups who went to examine the "migrant village" and came back to tell his 300 fellow villagers how good it was. "If I didn't say this the others would not go," he said.

The new settlement covered 30 mu (a mu is a traditional measurement of land equivalent to 667 square meters) and each peasant was allocated 0.2 mu (133 square meters) to farm. Altogether 2,000 were sent to Fujian province from Fengjie.

"When I went there the government promised us factory jobs, but when we got there we found there were no jobs, or only work with very low pay. We felt cheated," he said. Back in Fengjie he could earn 1,000 yuan ($120) a month, but there the most he could earn was 400 yuan.

Each was each given 9,000 yuan but Hong said they spent that very quickly. Some 20 percent of those who left returned to the walls of the Yangtze, complaining they could not understand the local dialect. "Without that, people felt that even the simplest thing was very hard," he said.

By March 2002, everyone had had enough and had prepared a petition. More than 300 took part in a march, holding aloft banners saying they wanted to go back home. They marched to the city bus station intending to take buses. A group of officials from the governments of Jinjiang, Quanzhou and Fujian province came to see them and they held a meeting at which the migrants put forward half a dozen demands including factory jobs, a monthly dole of 180 yuan and five mu of land to be used for workshops and a graveyard.

Near Hong's restaurant was the village of Yaowan, where terrified villagers described how their protest had provoked a violent response. On May 20, 2002, the frustrated villagers had blocked the road through the village. Elderly villagers sat on rocks placed in the middle of the road in a peaceful demonstration. But next day hundreds of police and paramilitary troops equipped with guns and riot gear arrived. The villagers said the police also bused in convicts to clear the road of the rocks.

Officials say some villagers violently resisted attempts to disperse them, and the police detained more than a dozen. In mid-September, three men labeled as the ringleaders were sentenced by a local court for "counter-revolutionary agitation". Most of the others were released, but Wu Guizhen, a peasant in his 30s, was given a five-year sentence. Chen Xuhua, a peasant in his 60s, received a two-year sentence, and Li Shangjie, in his 40s, was also sentenced to five years. The news of the sentences was aired on local television.

"Peasants cannot defy the state," one of the villagers said to me. "We dare not speak out now, or we'll be arrested."

Far away at Gangjing township in Zhongxian county, set next to a beautiful wooded river gorge, the villagers camping out amid the ruins of their houses were beside themselves with anger and frustration.

"They have not paid us the resettlement money. I think they don't have it anymore but spent it on other things like building the road," said one man who returned from being relocated in Henan province and was now living in a shack next to his original house. An old woman nearby was refusing to move because she said the government owed her 400 yuan in moving costs, and secondly because she said she could not afford the cost of housing in the new town.

Compensation was nine yuan per square meter but, she said, she had to pay 300 yuan per square meter in the new town that had been built. "Where can I get this kind of money?" she asked.

Another man, aged over 80, described himself as an old revolutionary and raged that he was now not a migrant but a refugee. He gathered a group of villagers who complained that no journalists had come to see them to hear their side of the story. They said they had sent a delegation to Chongqing but no official had come to investigate. Not only could they not afford to move to the new town without ruining themselves financially, they said, but they complained that they not received any of the shenghuo fei subsistence payments for as long as nine months. As result, they said, they were determined to stay as long as possible even though officials had warned them that they would taken away in handcuffs if they did not move.

Their irritation against the authorities knows no bounds. Go to any of the new towns built along the Yangtze and the biggest public building will belong to the police, who can be seen everywhere driving around in new imported luxury jeeps. One group of elderly peasants from the remote township of Gaoyang, Pyongyang county, where more than 100,000 peasants are losing their land, organized themselves into a pressure group and came to see me in Beijing in 2000.

They said that in July 1997, 10,000 peasants supported a petition and since then there has been a stream of protests, petitions and delegations sent from Gaoyang to Beijing. In September 1999, some 300 peasants attacked officials in charge of resettlement, injuring at least one. In another incident peasants hurled bricks and injured the deputy party secretary and others. The township authorities summoned riot police.

In 2000, more than 1,000 peasants staged protests in Gaoyang, demanding to meet with county leaders to press for more equitable compensation and access to official documents detailing terms and conditions of resettlement.

The peasant delegates produced detailed documents showing how they had been cheated out of their rightful compensation and gave me the petitions they had sent. These had pages of thumbprints affixed by illiterate fellow peasants who wanted to express their anger at the corruption and waste. Within six months, the men who had come to see me, Went Ding Hun and He Caching, and three others were in prison serving three-year jail sentences.

When I went back last September, the peasants were still angry but terrified to talk. Yet they were still organizing protests and had managed to send another delegation to Beijing to see the resettlement office of the Three Gorges Project Committee. In this new incident, more than 70 people left to go to Beijing but were arrested at Damien railway station in Sichuan. The police allegedly accused them of belonging to Falungong and sent them home.

Locals said 900 people, who had returned from being resettled, were living in tents and shacks near the ruins of the former township and refusing to leave. Many of them were elderly. Local police had allegedly descended on them three times, burning their shelters and beating them in order to force them to leave before the area is flooded.

The same sort of sad and pathetic stories could be heard at nearly every county or small town in the reservoir area. The peasants, among the poorest people in China, just could not accept that a state that could spend such gigantic sums on this wall of concrete was so determined to deprive each of them of the few hundred dollars that was their due.

As in the imperial past when emperors over-taxed their subjects and press-ganged millions to labor on astonishing public works such as the Great Wall and the Grand Canal, the Three Gorges project illustrates how little has changed in the way China is run.
3:China now ranks second globally to the United States in installed electricity capacity (338 gigawatts in 2000) but its use of electricity is just 38 percent of the world's average. If by 2050 its population peaks at 1.6 billion and per capita energy use reaches the world average, it will be adding the generating capacity of Canada every four years. China currently burns more than a billion tonnes of coal a year to produce 75 percent of its energy. Even the most optimistic assumptions foresee coal consumption growing by about 5 percent a year.

The country has unveiled ambitious plans to cut its reliance on coal to about 55 percent of its energy needs. By 2030 coal is expected to provide 62 percent, oil 18 percent, natural gas 8 percent, hydropower 9 percent, and nuclear power 3 percent of China's energy consumption. By 2050, Chinese planners believe coal consumption should be down to 35 percent of consumption, with oil and natural gas accounting for 40-50 percent and primary energy sources such as nuclear, hydro, solar and wind power accounting for 15-20 percent.

To attain that hydropower goal, and to deliver water to parts of China that are now suffering badly from the effects of centuries of mismanagement of the environment, the country has embarked on the biggest water-diversion plan in history. On August 14, Premier Wen Jiabao announced that work on the eastern and central canals of a south-north water-diversion project are to start this year. These canals would carry water from the Three Gorges Dam hundreds of kilometers away. One of the most important parts of the project is reducing water pollution in northern China, bringing water from the south to what is now a virtual desert. If the project fails, China might well have to move its capital from Beijing, which sits in the middle of a desert.

Wen was quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency as saying that plans are being made to protect the water from pollution along the diversion. Eight projects are soon to be initiated, including a canal from Shijiazhuang in Hebei province to Tuancheng Lake in Beijing, the reinforcement of the dam of Danjiangkou Reservoir, a tunnel under the Yellow River, which is now dry 1,000km from its mouth, and construction of sewage-treatment plants in cities along the eastern canal.

Wen said that by 2008, 295 water-pollution control projects will have been built along the east canal, one of three south-to-north water-diversion canals running about 1,300km across the eastern, middle and western parts of the country.

The State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) acknowledged that water pollution along the east canal is still worrisome. All seven spots that are monitored by SEPA were reported to be polluted in varying degrees. New rules to charge enterprises and residents for disposing of wastewater will also be adopted. On the east canal alone, 24 billion yuan (US$2.9 billion) will be invested in reducing pollution and protecting the environment, one-third of the budget for the canal.

The south-to-north water-diversion project formally started last December and aims to divert 44.8 billion cubic meters of water from the Yangtze to the north, Wen said. Emergency water supply to Beijing, Tianjin and north Hebei province will be a priority of the project, he said.

China is thus choosing between environmental hazard in its waters and environmental hazard in its air. The Worldwatch Institute, an international environmental watchdog, estimates that China is poised to overtake the United States as the world's largest source of air pollution within 10 years. Less than 20 percent of the 1.4 billion tonnes of coal that China mined in 1996 (when coal output peaked) was washed, so that 23.7 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide was discharged into the air that year.

In 1999, only a third of China's 338 monitored cities were in compliance with the nation's ambient-air-quality criteria - which are far lower than international standards. Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province, where a quarter of the country's coal is mined, has the worst air-pollution record of any city in the world, with particulate concentrations often seven times World Health Organization (WHO) standards.

A World Bank report estimates that air pollution costs the Chinese economy $25 billion a year in health expenditure and lost labor productivity alone. As many as 700,000 premature deaths per year are attributed just to indoor air pollution from burning coal for heating and cooking. Throughout China, respiratory diseases are blamed for a quarter of all early deaths, a figure that has increased by nearly 25 percent over the past decade. Then there are the 10,000 miners who lose their lives each year, largely from coal-face accidents.

Moreover, acid rain affects 40 percent of China. In Chongqing, which burns 15 million tonnes of coal each year, acid rain is so severe that bus signs have to be changed every few years. The municipal government says acid rain costs 1.6 billion yuan a year.

Given this story, anything that China does to cut its reliance on coal is to be welcomed. Beijing plans to ban production of coal containing more than 3 percent sulfur by the end of 2005. Moreover, two transcontinental gas pipelines and half a dozen smaller ones are being built that would supply the big cities with clean energy for heating and cooking. In many cities such as Beijing and Taiyuan, people are already installing new gas-fired boilers to replace coal-fired ones.

China is also promising to clean up its smokestacks and halve sulfur-dioxide emissions by 2010. The continuing reliance on old and inefficient industrial technology means that China must burn 50 million tonnes of coal more than a developed country for the same amount of energy. Much of the bill of $46 billion is being footed by Japan, which suffers from Shanxi air pollution. Hitachi is even providing smokestack scrubbers to Shanxi plants. But despite these attempts to clean it up and reduce dependence on it, coal will remain central to China's energy consumption. By 2030 oil is scheduled to supply 18 percent of China's needs - making it as important a consumer of Middle Eastern oil as Japan or the United States - yet coal consumption will remain the most pressing issue. By 2020, China's coal-fired generating plants will alone be emitting each 10.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, 152,000 tonnes of sulfur dioxide and nearly 500,000 tonnes of dust and fly ash.

So, on the face of it, the Three Gorges Dam and all the other hydropower schemes offer big benefits, which contribute 20 percent of China's electricity consumption from non-polluting energy that is vastly preferable to coal. Even so, the giant dams and reservoirs China is building at such a furious rate remain a poor investment and should be discouraged, because their construction entails big hidden human and environmental costs.

The past 50 years of water conservancy has been achieved at a gigantic cost in human suffering, which is little known even within China. By 1982 China had forcibly evicted 10.2 million people to make way for 70,000 dams and 80,000 reservoirs; even this may be an underestimate. In the past 20 years, an additional 3 million people have moved, bringing the total to 13 million.

Resettlement for dam building is, of course, only one part of a bigger story of forced movement. In the Mao Zedong era, 170 million people were shifted around the country. Soldiers, prisoners, Red Guards or miners were sent into hitherto remote areas such as the forests of Yunnan or the mountains and valleys of former Manchuria. More than 20 million "educated youth" were sent from the cities into the countryside. Another 16 million were sent into the interior to build Mao's "Third Line", a military-industrial complex scattered in remote locations to enable his regime to survive a Soviet nuclear attack and invasion.

Since 1949, 45 million people have been moved to make way for all kinds of infrastructure projects. One consequence of these population movements is a form of colonization. Areas that were once the domain of hunters and herdsmen have been transformed into densely occupied settlements. The Sanjiang Plain in Heilongjiang province, for instance, in the far north was drained to create farmland that now supports 8 million people

4:In 1998, China suffered flooding so extensive that the central government was finally - and rudely - awakened to the devastating effects of thousands of years of environmental degradation and the accelerating damage that occurred when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) erroneously thought it could bend nature to its will.

As the Yangtze and other rivers spilled over their banks, tens of millions of people were driven from their homes. More than 2 million soldiers, paramilitary police and reservists were called into service in what General Zhang Wannian said at the time was the largest military deployment since the 1945-49 civil war that put the communists in power.

While the rains were unseasonably heavy, however, the real concern was not the rain but the fact that there was no topsoil, there were no forests, and there was no ground cover to hold the waters in place in the mountains where the Yangtze originates. At least 4,000 people were drowned. Economic costs ran to more than US$36 billion. Wells were poisoned throughout the Yangtze River basin. Oilfields in Harbin were flooded.

Where before nature had to be harnessed to conform to the needs of the state, now there was a drastic change. The then premier, Zhu Rongji, suddenly announced an about-face. He set in motion a national ban on logging old forests and a huge reforestation program, and ordered restoration of some of the lakes. Under a 10-year scheme costing $12 billion and involving 300 million peasants, the state will empty its bulging state granaries to return fields into pasture and forest land.

The Ministry of Forestry envisages a 30-year plan to plant 26 million hectares of forest to reverse water and soil erosion that is described as perhaps the worst in the world. Under Mao Zedong, peasants had been encouraged to terrace steep slopes in the mountains and hills to create more fields to meet absurd grain targets. Now any terraces steeper than 25 degrees are to be replanted with grasses, bushes and trees.

Along the crowded floodplains of the Yangtze and the Huai, some 2.5 million peasants are being relocated under the slogan "return the field, restore the lake, build towns". Undaunted by the absence of any preparatory research, Zhu ordered them out and told them to abandon many of the thousands of kilometers of laboriously constructed dikes to restore Dongting Lake to its pre-1949 size.

The reality, though, is that it will take generations to restore enough forests to western China to curb the soil erosion and to stop the flash floods. It is not just the lamentable record of past mass afforestation projects - the "green great wall" announced in 1979 is just one of these plans - but the fact is that the tree plantations envisaged are nowhere near as useful at absorbing and filtering rainwater as natural forests with their thick undergrowth and leaf compost.

What is instead happening is a kind of public works in perpetual motion. The more problems the Party creates by altering China's plumbing system, the more dams it needs to solve the fresh problems created. In reality, China would have been better off controlling floods by preserving natural forests in the mountainous uplands, which absorb rainfall, and keeping the lakes and wetland in the lower reaches to absorb the summer floods. Trying to substitute nature's arrangements with man-made reservoirs has been a costly failure.

The CCP is now embarking on major dam projects whose purpose is simply to trap sediment. The Xiaolangdi Dam across the Yellow River, with a $1 billion World Bank loan, is one example. Another is the 220-meter-high Xiluodu Dam across the Golden Sands River. It is designed to cut by a third the silt that will otherwise accumulate in the Three Gorges Dam reservoir. Beyond the hidden cost of making these dams work - trapping the silt, resettling millions, cleaning the riverbeds, stopping the pollution - is the fact that many of these dams have a very short life in generating electricity.

Within 20 years, the Xiaolangdi Dam, for which nearly 400,000 people had to be moved, will probably be useless, as the reservoir behind it will have silted up entirely. None of the dams built in the Mao era along the Huai River have lasted more than 20 years before needing extensive and costly renovation. The Three Gorges Dam, which is supposed to have a 70-year life, is not likely to turn out to be any different.

Before construction started, the proponents of the Three Gorges deliberately misrepresented the true cost of building it, claiming it would cost just US$11 billion to build plus $5 billion for resettlement. Just what exactly the final tally will be is hard to say with certainty, but it will probably be about $70 billion instead of the $28 billion now talked about, thus making its electricity among the most expensive ever produced.

Certainly the dam-building serves other useful purposes. The vast infrastructure spending of the state - often on such boondoggles as a railway to Tibet, turning Beijing into an Olympic city, manned space travel, a maglev train to Shanghai, etc - are helping to keep the wheels of the economy spinning at the desired annual rate of 8 percent for a long time to come. Often the manpower used for these projects are convicts or soldiers whose labor costs next to nothing. Much of the Three Gorges construction work is carried out by units of the People's Liberation Army. Peasants say squads of prison labor are used to do the heavy work in constructing local roads and bridges.

The dams are also a form of subsidy to the underdeveloped regions in the west, where there is little foreign investment. And they serve to complete the colonization of the minority border lands of Tibet, Sichuan and Yunnan, by facilitating the migration of Han Chinese to these hitherto inaccessible mountainous regions.

Yet the human cost of these grandiose schemes is harder to put a price tag on. Although China has tried to learn from the mistakes made in resettling those displaced by such schemes, the Three Gorges project, like the others, is used to justify large-scale human-rights abuses.

When the project was put forward in 1991, the state claimed that only 750,000 people would have to be moved. In fact, by the time the project is finished in 2008, it will almost certainly be as many as 1.9 million, given the natural population increase.

There was no money for these people and the state probably never had any intention of compensating them. The original budget for resettlement was put at 17.5 billion yuan ($2.15 billion). By 2000, the resettlement budget was put at 28.7 billion yuan. But the true cost of rehousing them will probably be 100 billion yuan, most of which will have to come from the people themselves. The peasants in the reservoir area rank among the poorest in China, indeed in the world, with average annual cash incomes of about $120. Take Kaixian county, where 100,000 are being relocated out of a population of 1,468,000. During the famine of the 1958-62 Great Leap Forward, half the inhabitants of many villages perished.

After 1979, the locals were among the first to go out and seek work in the coastal provinces, and their remittances now amount to as much as a billion yuan a year, which support mosts of the rural population. Only the old and sick stay at home and tend the farms. The central government provides hundreds of millions of yuan in subsidies each year to the county and locals say all the government-owned enterprises are bankrupt or heavily indebted. There is little or no foreign investment.

A relatively large part of Kaxian's territory will be inundated - 464 square kilometers of cultivated land of a total land area of 3,969 square kilometers. In the first resettlement plan drawn up in 1995, only 10 percent of the migrants were supposed to be relocated outside of the district, so that 90 percent of them were supposed to be relocated on mountain slopes. After Zhu Rongji's decision to protect slopes steeper than 25 degrees, land had to be found for settlers elsewhere, and the majority are being relocated in Sichuan province or sent to Shandong province on the coast.

When the plans for the entire project were presented it was claimed that 20 million mu (1,334,000 hectares; a mu is a traditional measurement of land equivalent to 667 square meters) of undeveloped land - barren mountains and grassy slopes - were in the reservoir area, of which 4.2 million mu (280,140 hectares) was arable. Therefore, it was said that the displaced peasants could remain in the region. The industrial development of the towns was also supposed to create new jobs for landless villagers.

In fact, none of this turned out to be true. All the factories in the towns and cities in the reservoir area have been shut, leaving at least 100,000 workers without jobs. Then the ban on farming on steep slopes meant that 125,000 peasants had to be resettled in provinces far away on the coast.

The state repeatedly promised that those displaced would be given adequate compensation and guaranteed that they would enjoy higher living standards after moving. The state promised to budget 40,000 yuan per head in resettlement finding. None of this has happened either.

The resettlement funds were commandeered by local officials, who handed out 4,000-8,000 yuan in compensation. Many of those sent out of the reservoir area have demanded to return, complaining that they can find no work, are unwelcome, and in some cases attacked by the host communities. In general about 20 percent have returned on their own account. Others who settled in Qingdao or near Shanghai have organized protest marches. Those who stayed in their native counties have written numerous petitions, complaining that they have been squeezed by local officials who have used false figures when calculating their compensation entitlements.

The resettlement policies are drawn up by the central government in Beijing but are actually implemented by county-level governments according to their own regulations. Under a philosophy of "development resettlement", the state is free to avoid compensating people directly. Instead, state resettlement funds are often put directly into the hands of the local governments, which then spend it as they see fit on building new infrastructure or launching industrial projects.

The burden of the resettlement falls heaviest on the rural community and disproportionately heavily on the poorest of the rural poor. Many of these being moved earn about $120 a year. The system operates according to the principle that the poorer you are the less you get. According to one calculation, the poorest 40 percent of the relocatees will only get 20 percent of the allocated funds.

About 55 percent of those forced to move have been resettled in urban areas and, although they are treated better, they all complain of being cheated. The reason is simple. Compensation payments are based on a calculation of property values based on a government survey carried out in 1992, when China was still a planned economy, in recession and suffering from economic sanctions after 1989.

Ten years later, those displaced now have to buy housing sold 10 years ago at commercial prices, which as a rule of thumb cost three times what the government is giving them. Put another way, two-thirds of the resettlement cost of the dam is now being borne not by the state but by the people forced off their land or out of their homes who have no jobs.

The new housing is admittedly far superior to that which they left, with modern plumbing and more space than the cramped housing that no one had cared to invest in, in the knowledge that it would one day be abandoned. Even so, most of the urban population do not feel grateful but rather cheated and angry. The construction companies and the land are controlled by the Party elite, who are naturally getting extremely rich on the proceeds.

Even if all this attracts investment to a neglected area, those who come and invest in a region that is benefiting from impressive new roads, railways, airports and communication facilities are now free to employ whomever they want. This usually means younger people over 30, who are better educated and more adaptable, leaving the elder generation doomed to unemployment.

Although China has signed up to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other treaties designed to provide freedom of movement, opinion and association, anyone daring to organize a protest is soon arrested. The dam-building serves to buttress a political system that elevates the demands of the state over the rights of the individual.

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