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SCMP Reporter

Even at night Wanxian is a hub of activity. On a bridge spanning the muddy waters of the Yangtze, welders work at night, swarming like ants over the gigantic structure. In the city centre, the excitement of a bustling boom town is quickly recognisable in the crowded streets.

  Even the girls from Chongqing are flocking here because there is so much money to be made, boasts a taxi driver exuberantly hurtling his vehicle down the steep roads while gesturing at the new restaurants and shops opening.

  For decades a sleepy neglected prefectural capital of 300,000, Wanxian now seems gripped by a sense of destiny.

  On the bridge workers hurry to finish in time to celebrate the Hong Kong handover. And on the heights above the old harbour, a mighty industrial city is being prepared for when the waters rise.

  New roads are being laid, land has been cleared for new housing complexes and the smoke from more and more factories is polluting the air.

  When the Three Gorges Dam is finished and the waters rise 100 metres up the congested banks, this will be a vast and calm lake.

  The biggest city between Chongqing and the dam at Sandouping will have a population double or triple its current size and, like Wuhan, will be a city divided in three parts.

  Much the same energy has been released in all the towns downstream from Chongqing. Hill tops are being flattened, gullies filled in, roads carved from the mountain sides and bridges opened. Many are pleased that the planning blight which hampered growth for generations is over.

  'We have had more investment in the last two or three years than in the previous 30 years,' one local official enthused.

  Indeed, sailing down the river, it is astonishing to see how much has been started in the past three years in Fuling, Zhongxian, Fengdu, Yunyang, Fengjie and Wushan. For many people, the dam is a golden opportunity to build a new and modern town after decades of neglect left a legacy of overcrowding and congestion.

  One town, Yunyang, is building an entirely new city on a site 16 kilometres away with modern apartment blocks equipped with modern facilities. Wushan, with 90,000 people, is simply moving up the hill. Trucks and bulldozers are busy levelling land and laying down water pipes high above the town where some of the first housing blocks have already been built.

  The new city will be much better, with new public facilities like cinemas and more space, perhaps 50 square metres per family, one local official said optimistically.

  Yet already there are ominous signs of mismanagement on a grand scale. At Wushan, a new road leading up the hillside leads nowhere. It was supposed to connect with a new bridge spanning a tributary until planners realised that it had to be abandoned because it would be too low when the reservoir waters rise.

  Above the town of Fengjie, population 50,000, a huge building site carved from the mountain shoulder to accommodate the new town has also been abandoned.

  It was discovered too late that they were building on sandy soil. 'After spending hundreds of millions of yuan, we had to start again somewhere else,' a resident said.

   And the new Fengjie is already falling short of expectations.

  People feel depressed because they realise the architects have chosen the cheapest possible design, an official explained. The Sichuan Architectural Technology College designed the city as a boulevard of ugly concrete tower blocks, ill-suited to the town's wish to prosper as an international tourism centre.

  Fengjie is the site of the beautiful White Emperor temple, much praised by Tang poets as it sits on a rocky promontory jutting over the river beside an even grander gorge.

  Yet what locals mostly associate with Fengjie is not poetry but dire and grinding poverty. The only decent road was finished last year. It takes visitors a few kilometres from the town to the temple. In the hills behind Fengjie are districts ranked among the very poorest in China, where peasants strive and often fail to eke a living from the steep limestone slopes. When the Yangtze valley is flooded, the waters will cover the four per cent of low-lying land rated as fertile.

  Inland from Zhongxian town, which by 2003 will be under water, local peasants farming such land say they fear for the future. Here the poorest households earn only US$60 (HK$464) a year and the richest only US$300 although they farm good land in a steep valley through which one of the Yangtze's tributaries flow. Regular floods ensure they can only harvest one crop a year.

  'I don't know when we will be moved, but we hope it won't be to a place where the land is poorer,' said a villager, Qian Xiaoyen.

  'Of course, what we want most of all is to move to the city. I hear two new cities are being built in the Three Gorges region, so they may need some new people to live there,' he added.

  Experts differ widely over how many peasants will have to be moved by the time the dam is completed. Estimates range from 350,000 - equal to the largest dam resettlement ever undertaken in China - to some 700,000. According to the dam's critics, it is this army of peasants which present insuperable resettlement problems.

  Where are they to go? Can they be absorbed by urban factories? Or sent to other provinces? Or can enough farming land be found for them in their home region?   The farming option looks poor, said Chen Guojie of the Chengdu Geographical Institute. Land in the area is already overfarmed, deforested and overpopulated. Eighty per cent of it is subject to soil erosion, forests cover only 10 per cent, mud slides are frequent and each year, when it rains, the many fields built on steep slopes are washed away.

  Another expert, Li Boning, deputy director of the Three Gorges Construction Committee, claims as much as 20 million mu (14 million hectares) of land is waiting to be claimed and turned into fields. Local officials talk much about planting the hillsides with fruit trees, especially tangerines, despite a glut of the fruit. The peasants themselves say they are resigned to future hardship.

  'We have already been allocated our land higher up the hillside but it will take years to make it fertile,' said Hung Bayan, a peasant selling trinkets at the entrance to Daning Gorge. 'Around here it can take 12 years.'   Previously, the central government explored the option of moving several hundred thousand people to another part of China. One report claims that two years ago President Jiang Zemin paid a secret visit to Jiujiang in Jiangxi province, hoping to persuade them to accept the refugees.

  Another scheme which was abandoned after an international outcry was to move them to Xinjiang. There is already much unrest among the Turkish population and the plan became even less attractive after China's hopes of discovering large oilfields beneath the sands of the Taklamakhan desert were dashed.

  The third option is to absorb the displaced peasants by creating new factory jobs. This has worked in coastal China where peasants pushed off highly productive farmland by development were eventually employed in export-orientated joint-venture factories. To this end Chongqing and the whole region with its 30 million people are to be designated a municipality next year, with special powers to attract investors.

  However, few really believe the region can replicate the Guangdong miracle which depends so much on its proximity to Hong Kong. Besides, there is little level land to spare for factories; education levels are low with a third of the peasants illiterate; and what jobs are created in factories would first go to the young, leaving most unemployable.

  In Wanxian and other towns, people speak hopefully of the chemical industry which could boom if underground salt deposits are exploited.

  One government chemical plant scheme, designed to create 39,000 jobs, remains unbuilt after funds ran out. Peasants whose homes were cleared to make way for the complex now live in tents, subsisting on 60 yuan (HK$56) a month.

  Without considerable foreign investment, China will need to divert massive amounts of scarce capital into job creation schemes, especially since creating a spectacular success out of the resettlement has now become a point of national honour.

  Four years ago, Premier Li Peng even told the National People's Congress that he could not only maintain living standards of the evacuees but raise them to match those in the richest parts of the country.

  In global terms, solving the resettlement problem for more than a million people was a big issue, he conceded, but insisted it could be done because China benefits from a superior socialist system.

  Inspecting the Three Gorges site earlier this month, Premier Li reiterated that success hinged on China's ability to solve the problem.

  Nearly half the project's budget will be spent on resettlement alone.

  The actual sums involved are constantly being revised upwards but less than half the pie will be given to the peasants. Of this, 30 per cent will be handed directly to the peasants in compensation for their houses and the rest will be invested by local party officials in ventures that should create jobs.

  Western governments and many international resettlement experts remain unconvinced that China can pull off this immense challenge.

  Reluctance to become involved has been strengthened by the victory of anti-dam lobbyists three years ago over India's Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river.

  The World Bank, Japan and other donor governments pulled out after an international panel cast doubt on, among other things, the viability of the Indian Government's resettlement plans for only 200,000 people.

  Even those, like Professor Thayer Scudder of the California Institute of Technology, who believe China runs one of the best national resettlement policies in the world are dubious. Scudder inspected the site in 1988 and came away filled with pessimism.

  'The task ahead is just too big. I am not convinced the government has the land, the jobs, the financial resources and the institutional structure to handle this number,' he said.

  Scudder also doubts that the Chinese Government will be able to create much new employment, saying that experience shows generally half the new businesses set up by governments fail.

  Pierre Senecal, one of the authors of the 1988 Canada Yangtze Joint Venture Study, which had vouched for the project's viability, was also reported to have retracted his earlier faith in the resettlement prospects. In May the US Export-Import Bank had not resolved to support US involvement because there was a lack of information on the environmental and socio-economic impact associated with the proposed resettlement of 1.3 million people.

  Other Western countries have taken the lead from the United States and are declining to offer soft loans despite the pressure from engineering companies anxious to participate in the project.

  China must now convince them, and lobbyists in their home countries, that it has a feasible resettlement programme.



Come hell and high water