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Worn down by the source of life

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When a group of foreign journalists paid a rare visit to the impoverished mountains of northern Guangdong recently, local peasants tracked them down to smuggle out a petition bewailing their fate.

In 1958, Mao Zedong ordered the hasty construction of a dam that flooded the land where 100,000 peasants lived. Forty years later the displaced population has doubled and many are still living in dire poverty.

'What has the government done for us? During the past 10 years no one has cared for our lives. Only one person in 14 has found a job,' says the petition, written on behalf of 300 peasants who say that in 1988 their farmland was expropriated for the second time without compensation, and that an agreement with the authorities to assist them was dishonoured.

Two years ago, the Guangdong government began a renewed effort to end the poverty created by the damming of the Xinfeng river.

Thousands of peasants who were scratching out an existence in the wooded and steep mountains around the reservoir - an area bigger than Hong Kong - were brought into government-run settlement camps.

Many of those interviewed at the Le Yuan (Happiness Garden) camp, where several thousand families had been resettled, complained bitterly about their new conditions.

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