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 PART 4
China
awakens to its
devastated environment
By Jasper Becker
Part 1: The death of China's rivers
Part 2: Peasants bear the brunt of energy
plans
Part 3: China in an energy quandary
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.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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