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Glossary

baojia	household registration system during the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China
chai	tear down / demolish
chuanmen	visiting friends or relatives casually
chumen	to leave home
chunjie	Spring Festival
cun	village(s)
fei nongye hukou	non-agricultural household registration (an urban hukou)
gaige kaifang	Reform and Opening (economic reformation under Deng Xiaoping)
geming	mandate of heaven, but revolution, too
guanxi	interhuman relationship
hukou system	household registration system
lanpi hukou	blue (temporary) household registration of a person
linshi hukou	a temporary permit to work and life in an area different from that of the birth place
liudong renkou	floating population
mangliu	blind flow (of people)
mingong	peasant workers
mu	land measurement, equal to 0.0667 hectares
nongmao shichang	peasant markets
nongmin	peasant, rural people, farmer
nongye hukou	agricultural household registration (a rural hukou)
renmin jiefangjun	People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
sanxia diba	Three Gorges Dam
shenghuo fei	kind of support to livelihood
shikumen	traditional kind of houses
xiang	township
ximin	migrating people
zhongguo	China
zhongoa minguo	Republic of China (now on Taiwan)
zhonghua renmin gongheguo	People’s Republic of China

1. Introduction

It is amazing to visit Shanghai. You board the Xinhu Pearl (the German transrapid) waiting at the white, science fiction airport station, and travel from the airport to downtown in 8 minutes for a distance of 31 kilometers at a speed of 430 kilometers per hour. The city’s endless streets are full of busy crowds, traffic jams and commercial advertisements; a real journey. A famous soccer player is watching you from every cola can. A golden M of an American fast food restaurant which competes with other neon signs is drawing his guests in. A few people are running around in their pyjamas all day long. Some elegantly suited people lay down their hard-top cases in the park green to do Tai Chi for a couple of minutes. There are old traditional houses (shikumen) in old traditional alleys, hemmed in by modern skyscrapers as in the Huaihai Zhonglu¹. The People’s Liberation Army marches in disciplined ranks along the promenade by the Huangpu River, while the skyscrapers are springing up around the Oriental Pearl Tower on the other riverbank. It is hard to believe that the borough of Pudong where skyscrapers are growing at breathtaking speed right now was cultivated land just a decade ago. China’s economic boom can be felt and experienced in this “glamorous” city with no doubt.

But where light is, there is also shadow. For instance, in front of the main station, thousands of people sit or lie down on the pavement day by day surrounded with small luggage: floaters. Floaters left their home provinces for the cities and industrial sectors where the economic boom is. By dreaming of an improved living standard, they offer their labour force for low-paid jobs such as unskilled work on construction and demolition sites as can be seen in Shanghai’s residential area of Hongkou.

It is known that there are two kinds of socio-economic gaps in China: the gap between rural and urban areas, and the gap between provinces on the Chinese coast, where the upswing is, and provinces in the hinterland. The government has recognized this problem and aims at development of the hinterland. The Three Gorges Dam should be a contribution to it. The dam was built between 1993 and 2006 on the Yangtze (changjiang). The Yangtze is, at 6300 kilometers, China’s biggest river and the third longest in the world.² The dam’s functions in the future are flood control, generation of energy, improvement in navigation, and water supply to farmland as well as to water-poor provinces and cities in the north such as Beijing.

But the dam also affects the environment of the Three Gorges and the Yangtze in a negative way. When the dam’s sluices were closed in 2003 the water level rose to 135 meters and the reservoir became 500 kilometers long.³ In 2009, the water level of the Yangtze will be 175 meters and the lake 600 kilometers long (from Sandouping to Chongqing). Everything below will be submerged.⁴ 19 counties are affected with their cities, towns and villages, with their houses, fields, temples (some of them have existed since 10, 000 B.C.), hospitals, and factories.

Unfortunately, it means a socio-economic change for people living in the Three Gorges of Qutang, Wu, and Xiling. Approximately 2 million people will have to be resettled in the end.⁵ Regarding feared negative effects of the dam and its reservoir in the long run such as climatic changes the real number of concerned people who will experience collateral damage could exceed 75 million.⁶

Will the resettlement be successful? Dai Qing, a Chinese engineer, environmentalist and journalist, stresses that there is no plan of resettlement, in general, that could be adaptable and useful for relocating so many people over such a short period as is happening in the Three Gorges region.⁷ Shiu-hung Luk and Joseph Whitney, Professors of Geography at the University of Toronto (Canada), doubt its success as well:

“China’s record on resettlement is tragic: according to China’s Ministry of Water Resources, 30 to 40 percent of the 10 million people who have been relocated to make way for hydroelectric dams since the 1950s are still impoverished and lacking adequate food and clothing. Although China has recently improved its guidelines for resettlement in accordance with the World Bank’s criteria for ‘successful resettlement,’ the people who would be displaced or affected by the Three Gorges have no guarantee they would be spared the hardship and suffering associated with such schemes.”⁸

So, I ask: what will happen, socio-economically, to the relocated peasants after resettlement? For that reason, in my book I investigate the socio-economic consequences for the rural people, who were engaged in agricultural activities before resettlement and who were forced to resettle to state-assigned areas which can be rural but also urban. For my part, I fear for socio-economic deterioration in daily life for most of them after resettlement for two reasons.

Firstly, when I was in Aswan, Egypt, visiting the Sadd-el-Ali twice, I drove along the reservoir, (the Nasser Sea), which had been the Golden Land of 100,000 Nubians before the dam was constructed. This minority group in Egypt’s society almost lost its cultural heritage. Furthermore, the dam did not fulfil its functions of flood control and energy generation as predicted (see chapter 2). Why should the Chinese dam do it?

Secondly, since the 1950s, the household registration system (short: hukou system) has divided the Chinese people into two categories depending on birthplace: rural (nongye hukou) and urban people (fei nongye hukou). Possessing an urban hukou brings additional rights and privileges that people with a rural hukou are excluded from.⁹ A Chinese can officially migrate only when the state’s bureaucracy agrees. Hence, the displaced people with a rural hukou, who lost their homes and land, depend on state-given compensations they receive to restart at the new state-assigned relocations (such as new houses, land, as well as money and a change in their hukou). So, how do I investigate the dam’s and the reservoir’s impact on the peasants’ livelihood?

Chapter 2: First of all I compare the Egyptian dam in Aswan with the Three Gorges Dam in China. What were the consequences for Egyptian society and how far downstream did the dam affect the environment? And how close are these experiences to the fears in connection of the dam in China? Are there any alternatives to this project on the Yangtze, which the government could have chosen?

Chapter 3: Then, I begin to focus on the protagonists who face forced resettlement, the rural people engaged in agricultural activities. How far have they been involved in decisions on (1) whether the dam should be constructed, (2) how they should be compensated for their lost homes, arable land and personal belongings which are submerged by the reservoir, and (3) in what way the resettlement process should happen? Is the resettlement process overshadowed by political corruption, embezzlement, and unrest on the side of the affected? At the end of the chapter, I look at Fengjie, which was submerged in 2002. How did the residents as well as the villagers of Jiaochang near the city experience the preparation and compensation processes before resettlement?

Chapter 4: How far do the dam and its reservoir affect the environment and influence the livelihood of the peasants? Do the latter find new cultivatable land and are they able to continue fishing as they had before the dam’s construction began? Therefore, I investigate the climatic and geographic conditions and changes of the reservoir but also the conditions of the newly assigned arable land for the relocatees to see whether the quantity and quality of harvests declines or not. If there is not only a decline, but also deterioration, peasants suffer from less agricultural products twice over. Firstly, they have less to consume and secondly less or no surplus to be sold at local markets for additional income beside their own consumption of the harvests’ produce.

Chapter 5: What are the socio-economic consequences for the relocated peasants if they experience a decline in their livelihood? What expenditures do they have to meet, such as taxes, leasing land, health care, or schooling? To understand the situation it is today, I take a historical look back to the household registration system, the hukou, and state-owned collectives the people were organized in and engaged to, which were created to realise the planned economy in the 1960s and 1970s. Although the planned economy was abolished and replaced by economic reforms in the 1980s, the hukou is still a functional instrument, even if altered. This primarily economical change means a change in the security of social insurances such as health care and retirement today. How far do this economic change and the probable deterioration in livelihood threaten the secure insurances, if peasants remain peasants and try to continue their agricultural activities as before resettlement?

Chapter 6: What alternatives do the peasants have if their income is too low and cannot cover daily costs and needs? Is moving to the city an alternative? Can they manage to find new employment in industrial and service sectors there; even migrate to daily life among the urban host population? To see a tendency whether the urban areas can become new homes for the rural relocatees, I look at urbanization and rural-urban migration in China. Regarding the hukou: is it possible to migrate from a village to a town or a city at all? Or do they face barriers? Are they threatened with isolation among urban society? What about access to goods or commodities such as accommodation, water, electricity, social security insurance or schooling?

At the end of the book, I want to come to a conclusion in chapter 7, according to the knowledge collated in the book’s investigation. It is certain that not all questions, unclear situations, or facts can be clarified. The book is mostly explorative. Furthermore, it has to be taken into account that the resettlement process is not yet finished and the long-term consequences for the peasants in the long run cannot be seen now. What can already be said is that where even China’s western provinces become slowly involved in economic development and upswings, and where there is a surplus of rural labour higher than the current 30 million people, many rural people have no choice but to seek a good qualification or / and to find employment in non-agricultural sectors. No doubt, the displaced peasants from the Three Gorges are definitely a core group that is heavily affected in the changing structures of society; from an agriculture-orientated to an industrial-orientated and service-orientated society. Unfortunately, this break in structures happens faster than in Europe where the Industrial Revolution started and countries slowly developed over centuries to communication, information, and service societies. For the people in the Three Gorges, however, their previous structure of daily life is submerged by the reservoir more quickly; of course it would have happened even without the dam but probably not so rapidly. I approach my initial position literarily. Unfortunately, there are not so many books directly working on the Three Gorges Dam and the resettlement process. The books I use are (1) “Yangtze! Yangtze!”, published 1989 by Dai Qing (ed.), (2) “Damming the Three Gorges. What Dam Builders Don’t Want You to Know”, 2^nd edition, published 1993 by Margaret Barber and Gráinne Ryder (eds.) from the Canadian Probe International, (3) “Der Drei-Schluchten Staudamm in China. Das größte Staudamm-Projekt der Welt”, published 1997 by Eckhard Freiwald, (4) “The River Dragon Has Come! The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze River and Its People”, published 1998 by Dai Qing, edited by John G. Thibodeau and Philip B. Williams, and (5) “Before the Deluge. The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges”, published 2002 by Deirdre Chetman.

For more current information I also have included online sources such as the homepage of Probe International Canada (www.threegorgesprobe.org), as well as several online articles such as those of BBC News Online, Washington Post and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Moreover I added two books in my investigation which address the floaters who enter urban areas and try to migrate and integrate there, try to live the daily lives of urbanites: "Contesting Citizenship in Urban China. Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market” by Dorothy J. Solinger (1999) and “Strangers in the City. Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China’s Floating Population” by Li Zhang (2001). For information in general, I used articles from “China aktuell – Journal of Current Chinese Affairs”, published by the Institute of Asian Affairs in Hamburg, Germany, to set the relocation of the displaced peasants in its current social, political and economic context.

Furthermore, I added the TV documentaries “Fengjie, Before the Flood”, directed by Yifan Li and Yu Yan (2004), which shows the way of resettlement that took place in Fengjie County in 2002, and “Die Wanderarbeiter von Shanghai” directed by Christoph Tubbenthal (2005) which shows the daily lives of some floaters in China’s “glamorous” city.

² See Hiblk (2003), p. 84; see Wilkinson (2005), p. 12; see www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drei-Schluchten-Staudamm

⁹ Meaning the right to live in a certain urban area and to have access to schooling, medical care, or a guarantee of employment there.

2. The Three Gorges Dam

There has always been discussion on damming rivers in China; as early 500 B.C., during the Chinese dynasties: let the rivers run autonomously or use dykes to “domesticate” them?¹⁰ In recent years, after the Gezhouba Dam, the government decided to construct a second, even bigger dam on the river: the Three Gorges Dam. But was the decision to construct the dam, a sound one? Besides the question of whether it can ever fulfil its purpose at all, at what costs has the dam has been constructed?

I have twice been to Aswan (Egypt) where the Sadd-el-Ali, the more recent of two dams there, created the famous reservoir, the Nasser Sea. It is true that the dam has contributed to Egypt’s welfare, but as we will see later in this chapter, at the expense of the Nubians and the environment. The aims, however, that Sadd-el-Ali were intended to achieve are similar to those of the Three Gorges. For that reason, the Chinese dam is compared with the Egyptian dam to gain insights of what will probably happen at the Three Gorges. This is preceded by a brief historical view of the Three Gorges Dam.

2.1 The Original Idea of the Dam

Sun Yatsen, co-founder of the Guomindang (GMD) and founder of the Republic of China on 1 January 1912, is the first person connected with the original idea to construct such a dam.¹¹ Already at that time, the aims were flood control, improvement in navigation, energy generation and also to create an industrial impulse. But because of a lack of financial means and because of decentralised political leadership by autonomous provincial warlords, the dam was far from realisation.

The subsequent decades of political instability also hindered the project: (1) the Long March of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), (2) the occupation of Chinese regions by European countries (among others France, Germany, England, Portugal) and Japan during the first half of the 20^th century, (3) the World War II, and (4) the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). This, however, did not mean that the plan of the dam was abandoned completely. On the contrary, because of the flood in 1954 where over 300,000 people were killed and over one million made homeless, Mao Zedong and his political associates started a new discussion on the dam during the 1950s.¹² Although its construction was approved in 1958 it failed to take shape - because of among other factors, the subsequent Three Bitter Years and the Cultural Revolution.¹³ Nonetheless, other dams were set on Chinese rivers, such as the Gezhouba Dam on the Yangtze.

Only when the National People’s Congress (NPC)¹⁴ voted for the Three Gorges Dam Project with 1,767 in favour, 177 against and 664 abstentions in 199215, did construction start.¹⁶ The Chinese government has been financially supported by such countries as Germany, Canada, the United States of America or Japan, by international companies¹⁷ like Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, China International Capital Cooperation, or Credit Suisse First Boston, but also by international non-governmental institutions such as the World Bank.¹⁸

The World Bank made China a loan to cover some of the dam’s construction costs, provided that the government accepted certain clauses in the agreement.¹⁹ The clauses were made by the bank and address, among other issues, environmental and resettlement conditions. As long as these were not violated the loan would be transferred; in case of violation the transfers would be interrupted. Is China only agreeing to the given conditions and implementing the clauses at a minimum level to secure the loans, as Philip M. Fearnside, Research Professor at Brazil’s National Institute for Research in the Amazon, considers?²⁰ According to him, it is to be feared that the Chinese government will discard the clauses when the contract with the World Bank expires. Does it mean that the Chinese government will abandon the relocated people of the Three Gorges region as soon as the loan is no longer transferred and no agreement clauses have to be fulfilled?

But be that as it may, between 1994 and 2006 the dam was constructed on schedule at Sandouping, 40 kilometers north of Yichang. The reservoir will raise to a water level of 175 meters by 2009. By then, it will be in operation and reach full power in 2013 when all 26 turbines start working (see table 1 below).²¹

2.2 Comparison: Aswan VS. Three Gorges

The Three Gorges Dam’s purpose is to contribute to an economic upswing in China’s hinterland. Its functions are listed below and compared with the functions of the Sadd-el-Ali, the more recent of two dams in Aswan, Egypt. ²²

Water Supply: Irrigation of the fields (about 310,000 hectares) and securing a constant water supply to the water-poor-north.

Generation of Energy: A constant supply of electrical power to industry and the population by the dam.

Navigation: Improved navigability of the Nile from the Mediterranean Sea to Aswan.

Flood Control: Control of and protection against floods and the reduction of probable dam age.

Generation of Energy: The dam generates energy in a cleaner way than the dominant coal power stations can ever do.

Navigation: Improved navigability of the Yangtze from the Yellow Sea to Chongqing / Sichuan province.

The wish to domesticate a river seems to be not exclusively Chinese. It is interesting that the Nile and the Yangtze are life givers, both bringing fertile mud and water to the people living on their shores. But at the same time they are a threat to the people as well as to the environment. Their regular floods harm the environment and human settlement and wreck human destinies (loss of personal belongings, harvest output, or even human life). The data below, however, show a difference in scale and power.

2.3 The Consequences of Sadd-el-Ali and the Three Gorges Dam’s Critics

It can be seen that the dimensions of the Three Gorges Dam are much greater than of Sadd-el-Ali. Hence, I ask what will happen in China when one considers the negative experiences in Aswan. These experiences, which are described in the following, are identical with the criticisms of the current project on the Yangtze. For instance, WEED, BUND, Greenpeace²⁵, Probe International²⁶, or the famous engineer Dai Qing do not expect a complete fulfilment of the functions of the Three Gorges Dam. To achieve flood control, the water level of the reservoir must be low (to be able to collect the additional flood water). To generate energy, the reservoir must be filled up with water.²⁷ The giant dam cannot meet both aims at the same time. Among other critical aspects are the danger of sedimentation and erosion which influence the water’s quality as well as harm the environment. All this has been happening at Aswan. For that reason, I extrapolate the future situation at Three Gorges from a brief description of the situation in the Egyptian city.