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Posted on 12/09/2007 5:32:56 AM PST by JACKRUSSELL
(GAOYANG, China)--Life was never easy for peasant farmer Fu Xiuqiong, but since China's Three Gorges Reservoir began to fill in 2003, she has barely kept her head above water.
In a story common for this small town in the Chongqing region, her family watched helplessly last year as local officials bulldozed their home to make way for the rising waters, only to deny them promised resettlement funds.
She and husband Jiang Yongchang now subsist off a shrinking vegetable plot, living in a makeshift hut they built on the shore with nowhere to go as the waters inch higher.
"It's very difficult to stay alive here but we have no money to leave," Fu said, tears welling in her eyes.
"Don't bring this up. It just makes me want to cry."
Citizens of Gaoyang and other areas above the Yangtze River dam -- the world's largest -- say thousands are being cut adrift as officials embezzle or misuse funds earmarked for migrants.
"That money goes down through seven different government levels, with everyone taking a cut, so by the time it gets to us there is nothing left," said one of several Gaoyang residents who completed harsh recent jail terms after speaking out.
He asked that his name not be used for fear of retribution by officials seeking to prevent bad publicity.
Critics of the dam have long alleged massive corruption in the resettlement program, but a senior Chinese government official denied any problems, reflecting official efforts to downplay abuses.
About 46.1 billion yuan ($6.1 billion) had been spent to move about 1.22 million people by late September, with many villagers receiving up to 50,000 yuan, Chongqing Vice Mayor Tan Xiwei said last week.
"I can say there is no such [embezzlement] in Chongqing," Tan told reporters on a reservoir tour, adding that the government had never received a single complaint.
But that contradicts reports by China's own state media.
A report in January said at least $37 million dollars had been embezzled in 2004 and 2005 alone, including in Chongqing. At least two Chongqing officials have been sentenced to death in such cases, state media has said.
Several Gaoyang residents also presented visiting reporters with formal complaints they had filed over the years, refuting Tan's assertion. Gaoyang government officials refused to comment when contacted by AFP.
Patricia Adams, executive director of Toronto-based Probe International, which documents the dam's problems, said theft of funds and mistreatment of upstream residents remained "pervasive."
"In most resettlement areas, however, the people have suffered it in silence," she told AFP.
Many who managed to move away had actually come back, complaining they were denied promised job training and funds for school fees and buying new homes or farmland.
About 4,000 have returned to Gaoyang alone, according to the resident who did not want to be named.
Broken promises caused Wang Wenju and her husband to move back. She now lives in a decrepit shack built of cast-off materials and Yangtze flotsam under a Gaoyang bridge.
Her husband has left town for menial work that pays about 300 yuan ($40) per month. Their three adolescent children will likely have to quit school and do the same.
Like many, Wang supports the dam for its power-generation and flood-control benefits, but decries the corruption, alleging government thugs beat her when she complained.
"Life was not bad before but now it's no better than an insect's. Insects at least have a hole to live in," said Wang, whose home was reached by AFP journalists via small boat to evade a heavy police presence in the tense town.
China insists the 15-year-old resettlement program has given people new, better lives.
In the bustling Yangtze River city of Wanzhou, where many displaced have moved, new apartment blocks rise up in a migrant relocation zone. But migrants sneer at the project, saying flats are being illegally sold off to speculators at prices the displaced can't afford.
"What good has come of this? Nothing. We have been kicked aside," said Zhu Wenling, a Wanzhou bookstore employee and migrant.
Back in Gaoyang, villagers said officials continued to destroy homes without compensation, beating and intimidating residents who resist. "They come, like devils, to knock down our homes," said villager Fu. "Why are they so hard on us?"
One is reminded of the citizens of Butler Tennessee and the movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou?
The Way Forward is never easy, Comrade Wang. Now why don't you be a good communist and die?
“That money goes down through seven different government levels, with everyone taking a cut, so by the time it gets to us there is nothing left,”
Sounds like ‘Hillary Care’, or any other socialist program here in America!
When that dam goes, they won’t need a one child policy in China anymore, between the millions swept away by the flood, and the millions more that die of starvation and disease when the government siphons off most of the aid that we send in. Somehow I think that the Chinese government won’t be too upset about it, though. They will just start another “great leap forward” type program, and kill off a few million more of their people.
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