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China's Three Gorges Dam project destroyed whole villages and displaced about 1.9-million people. Those who speak out face beatings and jail.
By KRIS HUNDLEY
Published September 20, 2005
[Times photo: Bob Croslin]
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After more than a decade of construction, the Three Gorges Dam spreads like an enormous concrete wedge across the Yangtze River here, nearly two-thirds complete.
China's biggest public works project since the Great Wall already has begun generating hydroelectric power to feed the world's fastest-growing economy. It has brought a flood of construction money to the nearby city of Yichang, where marble-laden hotels, upscale residential towers and high-priced Audis now proliferate.
But for Fu Xiancai and Chen Zhiyan, two of the estimated 1.9-million peasants whose homes were obliterated to make room for the project, the dam represents a bitter legacy.
Fu and Chen say they were among the hundreds of thousands of people shortchanged on their relocation allowance by corrupt local officials. Against all odds, the two men continue their fight. Fu has traveled the 700 miles to Beijing more than a dozen times in an effort to bring the peasants' plight to the attention of Communist Party officials.
He has been ignored by the country's leaders, who maintain that relocated peasants have been appropriately compensated.
"I want to tell the central government that it has been embezzled by city, county and township governments," said Fu, who said he has documents showing fraudulent bookkeeping by local officials.
But China, in its headlong rush to economic eminence, has little patience for such complaints. Both men have been threatened and detained by local officials because of their activism. Foreign journalists who visit Fu are held and questioned by local police. And Chen's wife was sentenced to five years in jail after demanding fair compensation for her family's land. She is to be released in 2009.
As much as the Three Gorges Dam represents the nation's ingenuity and technical prowess, it also illustrates how the authoritarianism of its Communist government hasn't softened. China's booming energy needs, which will be accommodated in part by the Three Gorges' 26 generators, are a byproduct of the nation's recent embrace of capitalistic business practices. But the dam itself exists because of an old, iron-fisted Communist regime.
In China, a government decree - ordering construction of a dam, a factory, even high-priced housing - cannot be challenged. Party-appointed officials decide who must be relocated and determine how much they will be compensated. Then the bulldozers start moving.
China's courts refuse to hear complaints when the money is siphoned away by local officials. Higher-level officials turn a deaf ear. Only a handful of Chinese newspapers dare to investigate these stories, and demonstrators, like Chen's wife, are beaten and thrown in jail.
Protesters like Fu and Chen are a clear embarrassment to authorities in the Three Gorges area who are eager to celebrate their engineering accomplishments. With water in the reservoir rising, workers are building a park where visitors can gaze at the 600-foot-high dam that will stretch 11/2 miles across the world's third longest river. Tour buses packed with Chinese and foreign visitors zip around the dam site, stopping for maximum impact at a gift shop and viewing tower high above the sprawling dam and lock complex.
English-speaking tour guides describe the Three Gorges Dam as "truly gorgeous," a 17-year project to be completed in 2009 at an officially reported cost of $21.7-billion. "Well below the estimate of 239-billion RMB ($29.5-billion)," the guide says with pride.
Fu and Chen hardly consider it a bargain. The dam has disrupted their lives and cast landless farmers like themselves in the unlikely role of rabble-rousers.
"We thought at first that we should support the country and the dam," Fu remembered of his initial reaction to plans for the Three Gorges project, which had been discussed for decades before beginning in 1992. "The Chinese government would give us compensation and promised to find us jobs, but the promises were just empty talk. They never happened."
Fu and Chen hardly appear threatening. Each man barely tops 5 feet. Their wiry bodies are cinched at the waist with belts that need to be tucked in to accommodate excess length. Fu, with a neatly trimmed moustache and stubborn cowlick, wears khaki slacks and a long-sleeved white dress shirt so new it still bears creases from the packaging. Chen, with a moustache and goatee, is dressed in a tan nylon polo shirt and slacks with battered plastic sandals on his feet.
Fu, 46, has three years of education and can read, but not write. Chen, 45, said two years of school left him barely able to read.
But the two men can count and they are sure they were cheated. Chen, whose family farmed eight-tenths of an acre for seven generations, said the government promised he would receive about $22,000 for land taken to make way for the dam. He got only about $6,000.
Fu was supposed to receive more than $10,000 for his one-half acre of land, which had been in his family for three generations. He received just over $1,300.
Chen and Fu are not alone. Asked if they could name anyone from their township of more than 300,000 who received full compensation for relocating, the two immediately said "Meiyou" - No. Fu said 8,000 people signed one of his early petitions, pressing the government to pay up. Another 6,000 initially joined the action, but backed out under pressure from local officials, Fu said.
It's been 12 years since Chen, his wife and three children were relocated to Yichang, about an hour east of the family's ancestral land above the dam site. Their new home is a crudely built ground-floor apartment near a train depot; every two hours a decorative piece of blue glass on the living room wall shakes with the roar of a train going by. A family portrait taken in 2002 rattles, the missing Mrs. Chen looking anxious and unsettled.
For the first four years after their move, the family lived on savings and promises. But in 1997 Chen and his wife, Wang Xidong, began protesting, joining the growing numbers of peasants who had received little, if any, of their relocation allowance.
Chen said his wife, now 43, was particularly vocal. Her activities resulted in four detentions and finally her arrest in 2004. Chen, who said his wife was beaten badly during a seven-month detention, became animated as he described the government's case against his wife of 22 years.
"It's ridiculous because she's illiterate, but in her sentence they said she was a middle school graduate who had organized protests," said Chen, whose wife is now in Wuhan Women's Prison. "Basically if the government wants to put you in jail, they can do it."
Fu, his wife and two sons were forced to leave their farm in 1995; the terraced mountainside where he once grew rice and oranges was dynamited to create an overflow tunnel for the dam. His former home, a two-room mud house with electricity and a dirt floor, is now under water.
Fu's new home in Zigui is a three-story, white-tiled structure jammed along a dirt road next to similar homes. Each has an outhouse perched above a stream across the street.
Fu said his new home was so poorly built he had to rebuild it three years ago, going thousands of dollars into debt. Other than some new wooden furniture, an indoor kitchen and a bigger television (24 inches), Fu was hard pressed to identify any benefits to his new life.
"Our living standard was higher when we had the land because things were guaranteed," he said. "We used the streams for water and bushes for fuel. Now we have to buy water and coal. Now if you can't find work today, you starve tomorrow."
Fu's wife works in a beverage factory. Fu used to earn cash by picking through garbage for salvageable items, but he said stomach problems now make that work impossible. "I can't stand the smell of trash," he said.
Local government officials recently gave Fu a job in a small hydroelectric plant, many miles from his home. He now sees his family and Chen, his partner in dissent, only on weekends.
Fu and Chen said they are under near-constant observation by local law enforcement. Chen said if he dresses formally, as if he may be headed to a provincial court for instance, he is followed. Fu said the police tapped his home phone, so he bought a cell phone that chirps out a snippet of Old Susannah when it rings. Even his wireless service is often disrupted by officials, he said.
Fu's neighbor regularly informs police of his activities, and Fu said local authorities have threatened him with jail if he ever speaks to foreign journalists.
"But any risk is worth it because I can't imagine that my life could be any worse than it is now," Fu said. "No matter what they do, I'll keep fighting."
Chen continues to petition for his wife's release, begging someone to consider the absurdity of her sentence.
"I just hope something happens to bring her back," he said, standing beneath a single light bulb illuminating his barren living room. "But there's an old Chinese saying, "The sky is high and the emperor is too far away.' We're too remote and nobody cares."
--Kris Hundley can be reached at hundley@sptimes.com or 727 892-2996.
[Last modified September 20, 2005, 04:29:31]
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