China to move four million more from Three Gorges area
BEIJING (AFP) — Four million more people are to be relocated away from China's Three Gorges Dam area, state media reported Friday, weeks after officials warned of a potential environmental "catastrophe" there.
Already 1.4 million people have been forced to leave their homes to make way for the world's largest hydropower project, which started operations last year, but the new announcement has radically expanded the resettlement project.
The four million residents who will be "encouraged" to leave their homes live near the dam's reservoir, which extends for 600 kilometres (370 miles), the China Daily reported, citing local officials.
They will move to the nearby outskirts of the sprawling Chongqing municipality over the next 10 to 15 years, it said, adding the plan had been approved by China's cabinet last month.
Chongqing vice mayor Yu Yuanmu was quoted as saying the relocations were necessary to "protect the ecology of the reservoir area," which was becoming increasingly threatened by over-population and industrialisation.
"The reservoir area has a vulnerable environment," Yu said.
The announcement came after Chinese officials admitted last month that the dam, built at a cost of over 22 billion dollars, had caused huge environmental and other problems that were putting the lives of nearby residents in danger.
"If no preventive measures are taken, the project could lead to catastrophe," the official Xinhua news agency quoted the officials and experts as saying at a conference on the dam.
The head of the office in charge of constructing the dam, Wang Xiaofeng, warned at the conference: "We cannot relax our guard against ecological and environmental security problems brought on by the Three Gorges project."
The conference was told that the huge weight of the water behind the dam had started to erode the Yangtze River's banks in many places, which, together with frequent fluctuations in water levels, had triggered a series of landslides.
Landslides around the reservoir had then produced waves as high as 50 metres (165 feet), which crashed into the shoreline, causing further enormous damage.
Following those admissions, prominent Chinese writer Dai Wing, a long-time critic of the dam, lashed out at officials for repeatedly ignoring experts' warnings about geological disasters.
"I am ashamed of you all... all of a sudden, in autumn 2007, we have discovered that the great project may have negative impacts on the environment," she wrote on the Canada-based Three Gorges Probe website.
The resettlement of the 1.4 million people has also caused huge social problems, with corrupt officials prosecuted for stealing millions of dollars that were meant for the mostly peasant farmers who were forced to move.
Many of these resettled were also given little training for their new lives in cities, and Fan Xiao, a Chinese geologist and another critic of the dam, expressed concern that the expanded plan would bring many more problems.
"It is not possible (for Chongqing) to cater for the needs of the peasant migrants -- I don't think it's a very realistic solution," Fan told AFP.
"Chongqing is already over-populated."
He said it would be hard for Chongqing, which already has unemployment problems, to absorb a large influx of mostly unskilled migrants who need jobs.
"And since the migration policy is formulated solely by the government, the migrants have no say about their lives... they are the ones who get hurt and that will surely lead to conflicts," Fan said.
