China's most ambitious projects of the last two decades, the Three Gorges Dam and the South-North Water Diversion, have required hundreds of thousands of villagers to move to new homes far from where they were born.
We examine this upheaval in three stories: the first looks at a community that was forced to move to Guangdong ten years ago, before their village was submerged behind the Three Gorges Dam. The second story, taken from the Beijing News, looks at the logistics of the water diversion moving 345,000 people in two years. The author of the final story describes the mood of a handful of these people on the day that their community disintegrated.
A Village Transplanted: Ten Years on for the Three Gorge migrants
By Xu Weiming（許偉明）
Nation, page 11
Issue No. 533, Aug 22, 2011
Original article: [Chinese]
The residents of Xingang village (新崗村), in Guangdong province held a feast on Aug 15 – it’s ten years since the government moved them from the birthplace upstream of the Three Gorges Dam, an area that has now been submerged by water.
The Xingang residents now live 1,500 kilometers from their original homes in Wushan (巫山) county close to Chongqing Municipality’s border with and Hubei Province.
Integration into their new hometown is a long process and will take a lot longer than ten years.
At first, lots of migrants couldn’t get used to life in Guangdong and wanted to return to Chongqing. By 2011, 100 of them had done so, but they were mostly the elderly who couldn’t adapt or children whose parents couldn’t afford the local school fees.
Most of the migrants didn’t have that option – they had nothing left in their home region; relatives and friends had also been relocated.
The central government gave each family replacement houses in Xingang, with an allocation of 20-square-meters per person. Migrants in this village mainly live by working at local factories and renting out part of their houses.
Migrants have encountered many difficulties in the life in Sanshui. One of the biggest barriers is language-- it’s hard for them to learn Cantonese, the Guangdong dialect. Local people can always tell that they are migrants by their accent.
After buying a cow in Guangdong, one migrant says that he couldn’t get the animal to obey him. It was used to Cantonese, and didn’t understand the Chongqing dialect of its new master.
Misunderstandings between locals and migrants are the most important factor for migrants unable to integrate into local society.
The locals and the migrants hardly mix with each other socially. They spend most of the time isolated from the rest of the Xingang; speaking their Chongqing dialect, eating Chongqing food, and marrying within their community.
A native Xinganger said that the Wushan migrants cause trouble, and complained that they have already received lots of compensation from the state, but still aren’t satisfied.
According to the policy for these migrants, each migrant received 0.6 mu, or around 0.1 acres, of farmland. Those that were unhappy with the land complained to the authorities and earned a bad reputation with the locals.
Yang Xiaojun, the chairman of the Xingang village committee, feels that the biggest obstacle to relations between the migrants and locals is that the newcomers were always perceived as overly sensitive.
In fact, the decision to resettle migrants from each village in groups of 100 people was based on social stability concerns. Smaller groups were bullied by the local people; larger groups tended to make trouble.
Ten years later, the government still treats migrants as “sensitive”. An official in the local government told the EO, that official attitudes towards their ten year celebration were “neither for nor against”. However, the chairman of a migrant village committee told the EO that four migrant communities applied for permission to organize a celebration, but were all rejected.
Some migrants pin their hope on the next generation and try to guarantee that their children attend the best good schools.
One of the migrants said the mission of this generation of migrants is a “sacrifice” paving the way for the next generation’s development.
"If one day our children speak the same language as locals and follow the same customs, and nobody feels that they are migrants, then this is real integration," one of the migrants said.
From The Beijing News August 22, 2011
Logistics of the South-North Diversion
Original article: [Chinese]
The South-North Water Diversion Project consists of three routes, with the central one stretching 1,277 kilometers to Tuancheng Lake (團城湖) in Beijing by 2013.
In the process, the water level in the Danjiangkou Reservoir (丹江口水庫) will be lifted from 157 meters to 170 meters, submerging land covering 144 square kilometers.
“This is unprecedented in the history of water conservation,” said Wang Shushan, who is responsible for the project in Henan province. He notes that 400,000 villagers were relocated during the 18-year construction of the Three Gorges Dam, whereas the diversion project has moved 345,000 in the space of just two years.
So far, 141 new villages have been built to house the migrants.
Newly-resettled migrants are provided with a week’s supply of rice, flour, cooking oil, meat and other life’s necessities for one week’s basic living needs. After that, each one receives a monthly stipend of 100 yuan per month during the transition period.
One of the relocated villagers Huang Jiancheng, describes his new dwelling as “very spacious,” adding that it has two floors and six rooms for his family of seven.
“Now we are only waiting for the allocation of farmland,” he says, referring to the 1.4 mu - equivalent to around 0.2 acres - that migrants are entitled to as part of the relocation.
Before The Deluge
By Zhou Liang
EO Online
May 6, 2011
Original article: [Chinese]
The residents of Xiling Village(西嶺村) in Henan province will always remember the morning of May 5. The villagers’ homes were in the way of China’s South-North Water Diversion Project. They had been split into four groups for the relocation – moving to different places on different days.
Today it was the turn of 15-year old Xu Shesu（徐攝蘇）a girl. She sat among the ruins of her house playing erhu, the Chinese violin, and repeating the tunes A Flower, Song of Wander and Horse Race. “My teacher said these are sad tunes, I want to play one for my hometown,” she said.
“The water here tastes very sweet!” For Shesu, her fondest memories were of the Danjiang River.
Some were busy packing and loading belongings. Others took photos with friends and families to remember the occasion.
Nearby stood 61-year-old Li Jingcai (李敬才), bidding farewell to an old friend with food and alcohol.
Li Aihua (李愛華), 54, had just returned from her father’s grave. She said she wanted to share her reminiscences and hopes with him. “It’s hard to leave him. I went to his grave to tell him.”
Shesu, Jingcai and Aihua share their fate with 162,000 villagers, who also live around Danjiangkou Reservoir (丹江口庫區), at the southern end of the route along which China plans to channel Yangtze River water up to Beijing.
Translated by Zhu Na
Links and sources
Reuters Facts on China\'s South-to-North Water Transfer Project
The Los Angeles Times China Moving heaven and Earth to bring water to Beijing
The Financial Times China: A blast from the past
The New York Times Video: Sending Water North
Plan for China\'s Water Crisis Spurs Concern
Caixin Online On Diversion Project\'s Eve, Han River on Edge
http://english.caing.com/2010-07-19/100162131_1.html
