三峽大壩秏資３００億美元，全球至今浩資最多的工程，要供應上海附近百萬人之電力供給，並遏止長江氾濫成災百萬人喪生的歷史問題。但是，這個偉大工程卻是在一百二十萬人遷村、１３個城市上千村落沒入水中的代價中始得以完成的。數以百萬計的人因此喪失自己的家園、賴以為生的耕地，很多人因此生活陷入困境。但是，有趣的事，既使很多人遭到不公平的待遇，他們仍然對三峽大霸工程持著肯定的態度，中共政府把此工程視為國力的展現。地方媒體也有不少大霸可能不安全的報導，不過工程為許多包商帶來的鉅大的利益，只是付出代價的是窮苦無勢的人民。


In building of Chinese dams, poorest are paying a high price
By Jehangir S. Pocha
The Boston Globe
Tuesday, December 26, 2006CHONGQING, China

Officials here say that the mammoth Three Gorges Dam Project along the historic Yangtze River will control deadly flooding, provide electricity to millions of people and create vital inland navigation along a 640-kilometer-long reservoir.

But behind the project’s promise and grandeur — the $30 billion endeavor is widely billed as the world’s largest construction project — lie stories of corruption, land seizures and despair.

According to farmers displaced by the project, local officials routinely suppress stirrings of protest and violate the rights of the 1.2 million people being moved off their land to make room for the dam’s massive reservoir.

Fang Degui, 41, is a recently unemployed man in Guangtiangou commune in central Chongqing, just west of Hubei, where a large part of the Three Gorges Dam reservoir will stand. He said that the project might have been conceived to enrich and develop China, but has ended up costing his family and friends their land and livelihoods.

The dam’s winding reservoir will submerge 13 major cities and more than a thousand villages, and Fang said the small piece of terraced farmland on which his family grew eggplants for the past 22 years had recently been appropriated by local authorities to accommodate a new bridge across the Yangtze. But Fang said that his family had never received any compensation for their loss.

"No one knows what happened to the money we were to get for that," Fang said.

What angers Fang and his family even more is that the roughly built concrete apartments they erected with their own money in the mid-1990s will be taken from them for about $6,000 each, half of the cost of their replacement.

"It’s absurd, and we’ve gone from one official to the next, but no one is interested in helping us," said Fang’s wife, Chen Yajuan, 41.

Zeng Yanguang, 62, a neighbor and friend of Fang’s, nodded in agreement.

"For now I can get by eating what I grow," said Zeng, who illegally farms what was his land by the bank of the Yangtze. "Once my land is underwater I’ve no idea what I’ll do to survive."

Most of the other people in the commune have left their quaint old wooden homes, set along the area’s verdant hills, and moved into the drab urban apartment blocks in which Beijing resettles displaced families. But Zeng and a handful of others from Guangtiangou commune are fighting for better compensation and staying put in what is now a ghost town full of half-demolished houses and abandoned fields.

They admit that they have little chance of winning. But the manner in which many people adversely affected by the dam accept the upheaval in their lives is emblematic of the perceived social contract in today’s China.

While Fang and Zeng complain bitterly about the local officials who they say are responsible for their situation, they say that they find no fault with the Three Gorges Project overall. In fact, support for the dam is surprisingly common.

"The government took away 1 mu, about 7,000 square feet‚ of my land that was worth about $12,000 and gave me only $800 for it," said Mao Yuanxiu, 52, a farmer in Ling Du Village in Chongqing, whose land was appropriated to house some people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam. "But I don’t mind — this is my gift to the nation."

To some extent this apparent fraternalism, from people affected by the government’s hard-nosed development style, is genuine, said Wu Dengming, president of the Green Volunteer League of Chongqing, an environmental nonprofit organization.

Locals also support the project, which consists of several dams along a 200-kilometer, or 125-mile, stretch of the Yangtze River because planners say that it will control constant flooding, which has killed a million people in the past century alone. And when several of the smaller dams in the project are completed in 2009, 10,000-ton freighters will be able to travel up and down the reservoir, giving the remote region economic access to the rest of the country.

The genuine passion for nation building that has seized much of China, and a Confucian ethos that calls for individuals to sacrifice for the group, may explain why Mao and Fang said that they do not mind being poorly compensated by the government for the loss of their land and business and for the expenses incurred in relocating.

But Wu said part of the reason people shortchanged by the authorities put on a brave face in public is fear. The dam "is a very sensitive issue, especially its displacement of people," Wu said. "Those who talk about this can get some bad punishment."

The Three Gorges Dam was first conceived in 1918 by Sun Yat-sen, the leader during China’s republican period, and Mao Zedong revived the idea in the 1950s. But China lacked the capability to implement the plan at the time. When work on the dam finally commenced in 1993, the Communist Party held up the project as a symbol of its power and prestige. Now, anyone criticizing the gigantic endeavor is seen to be challenging the party.

In May, when Fu Xiancai, 47, a farmer in Chongqing, spoke to foreign journalists about the inadequate compensation given to people displaced by the dam, he was called in to visit the local police station. There, he was assaulted by thugs and beaten so badly that he is now paralyzed. A police investigation declared that Fu’s injuries were caused when he accidentally fell down a hillside.

Critics say that while the dam is presented as a means to develop China’s interior regions, more than 40 percent of its electricity goes to Shanghai and other coastal areas. Most significantly, if the main dam at Yichang, which is in a seismically unstable area, were to break, it would flood one of the most populated areas in the world.

Disturbingly, numerous reports in the local media have already been saying that cracks are developing in the main dam and that some of the materials used to construct it are substandard. But the government has denied this.

Zhang Xueqing, 62, a storekeeper near Fang’s commune whose family was also displaced by the dam, said that the project has deteriorated into a gigantic opportunity for contractors and officials to make money.

Many activists agree, and say that while the Chinese government has made shortchanging poorer residents displaced by the dam an essential way to save on costs, the profits being made by cement companies, engineering firms and other businesses working on the dam are skyrocketing.

"Is this fair? No, but this is China," said an activist in Beijing, who asked not to be identified because of fear of reprisal. "The cost of development is not paid by the richest but the poorest."